People are complaining about “ew bad onboarding” while it’s the best barrier holding up the flood of very, very irritating people.
People figured harder things before, we do not have to make everything easiest thing in the world - it makes fediverse a quality place actually. A lot of people who join, really want to be there and it’s great.
This isn’t a new problem. We’ve seen centralized cellular service get shut down during protests and populist political actions before, such as during the Arab Spring.
A similar issue is centralized media, owned or captured by plutocratic interests. It was a problem during the Pulitzer/Hearst era through the cold war when General Electric used its advertising footprint on the three major television networks to leverage against the broadcast of news stories it didn’t like.
Decentralization would be great if we could, say, get every thousandth household to host a Fediverse instance.
It does raise a question of whether it would be able to handle all the moderation problems that emerge at scale, especially when hostile actors backed by state or business interests can bankroll contributors with antagonistic input. This is going to get worse with agentic LLMs.
It also raises the question if the Fediverse will segregate itself into ideology silos. We already don’t like tankies and tend to defederate from instances that harbor them. Can we do that if we’re trying to create a unified social media network for the global public? We might have to error to the side of hosting content we don’t like (and focus moderation, instead, on content that causes harm).
If we can make it work, it will serve as a great example of anarchist/ libertarian social models working. If we can make it work.
Yeah, this is actually why the Fediverse will shine, there is no central node, and in the time it takes for the government to shut down a node, many more can be set up.
If governments start shutting down instances, phew… I suspect that will be a pretty bleak time to be alive. Or just bleaker, haha. 😑
Sneakernets, where people trade data on USB sticks and MicroSD cards (I remember back in the day reading about people smuggling data in and out of countries in fake coins with a MicroSD inside). Air-gapped LANs (not internet connected) that cover neighborhoods with people managing local web servers and services for the community. I have probably over 20 services running on a handful of physical servers, most of them old, most of them underpowered, but they could serve a small community on a local network easily.
I honestly think that’s where people will end up to escape the corporate internet.
How do air-gapped LANs that span neighborhoods work?
A lot of managed switches, a lot of ethernet cable, maybe some point-to-point WiFi connections for longer distances, and local DNS and DHCP servers that have failovers for redundancy. You technically don’t need a router because routers are for connecting different networks, and if it’s not connected to the internet, as long as you have local DHCP and DNS, you’re kind of golden for local services. You can even have internal TLS for local security. I do that with Caddy, it’s dead simple, and the certificates are locally generated for a 10 year period. I’m connected to the internet but I don’t expose any of these services to the internet, just my local network.
With a little more work, you could set up a VoIP server too so people could connect their phones that don’t have cellular service and use a VoIP app to be able to call anyone in the neighborhood by their VoIP number.
Would this not be incredibly prone to getting infected by a few incompetent actors who let on botnets, bad actors, etc? On that note, fuck it who gives a shit we can restore from backups. It will be worth it because I would love to play hacker wars like it’s neighborhood gang warfare 🤣🤣🤣…. fuckkkk i need this now i will run the lines immediately
if it’s an airgapped LAN, how the fuck is a botnet going to work?
I mean the weakest link is gonna be the uneducated humans who are on the LAN… no?
Hmm. What’s your scenario for the “corporate internet” killing off the Fediverse? Deliberate botnet attacks and/or overwhelming the instances with spam / junk bot accts?
Oh I forgot to include this:
https://loriemerson.net/2024/08/31/a-brief-history-of-barbed-wire-fence-telephone-networks/
This is piece on the history of Barbed Wire Phone networks which were an early way to roll out local phone access in remote areas without rolling out much infrastructure. It essentially would be an “always on” community line. No ringer, you just pick up your local receiver, and see if anyone’s on any of the other receivers to talk. So if you had 3+ receivers connected to the barbed wire network, all of those would be able to be part of a big community phone call.
This was actually was initially got me thinking about these ideas and in particular how especially dissenting protest groups must stop trying to communicate using the tools of their oppressors. Secured messaging isn’t enough, we need to have messaging entirely removed from the wider, corporate and government controlled internet. Build parallel communications systems and begin to use those instead.
Oh, I also forgot to include LoRa texting for remote areas as well:
The point being that all these rely on building out our own networks instead of relying on all the privately owned fiber, cable, dsl, and ethernet that exists between us and our destination on the internet. We can’t avoid passing through someone else’s property on the wider internet, which makes it more at risk of interception and possible decryption. Removing it from the wider internet and closing the loop tighter resolves this.
Every “hop” to a new server online between you and your destination is a place where your data has been replicated to be able to pass through. Parallel networks avoids this entirely.
The problem is America, and many of the privileged in the western world, are effectively the most selfish people ever and will literally protest to keep poor people from moving near them. I propose we just keep annoying them into getting a new backyard in the middle of fuckin’ nowhere since they want to be so antisocial
We are headed there, sadly.
I don’t know… as long as you have corporate social media, I’m thinking most people will remain there out of convenience, precedent, and buy-in. Which would leave places like the Fediverse small fry that probably wouldn’t be going after statistically. Also, the decentralised aspect means that you’d have to get much closer to a 1984 situation for this to be a serious concern, with instances currently spread out all over the world.
But yeah, I agree that “1984” is certainly on the near-horizon of strong possibileries.
