#deleteFacebook and social media effects on me
leonardofaria.net
leonardofaria.net
Need evidence? The centralized nature of websites is structural evidence -- any service can offer you a "delete" button and let you think you're causing that item to be deleted. In reality, service admins control what happens to the data. Hacker News post revisions, for instance, could be kept at HN admin's discretion.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16724962 is a discussion about "Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted".
Any time you rely on someone else's computer ("the cloud") to store your data, you rely on them to act in accordance with your choices. This is basic 'how information flows' stuff and it's still valid and still true.
Centralization is popular with admins because of the power it grants them. The issues are much the same for "deleting" an account on some service as they are for censorship power on web-based discussion sites because the same underlying centralized structure is at work.
Website discussion forums are single points of censorship (including this one); the same site deployment choices are made in order to allow the elite few (site admins and those they choose to grant some morsel of censorious power -- moderation point holders) to decide which posts are hidden (moderated down so they're silently obscured) or promoted (moderated up so the thread shows in default settings). And all of this is designed to be done in a mostly unaccountable way by people whom you'll never identify. The differences from one discussion site to another tend to be relatively minor, the running theme of "don't you dare deviate from the narrative!" persists across implementations.
So be careful; your past edits and ability to be heard are more in the hands of people you don't know (and therefore can't trust) when you use sites like these.
Can someone start selling an open-source/end to end encrypted/feature rich/etc server called a "hub" or something that replaces all the closed gardens we have today?
"Facebook" "Chat" "Reddit" etc but encrypted, local, and federated.
Signal is centralized.
Are they better than Facebook and Facebook Messenger? Yes, of course.
(I use Mastodon though, the community is basically all Linux users/sysadmins/developers/etc which is great.)
I see some major forces for counterpressure to centralization-gravity on Mastodon:
(1) Mastodon starts with a homogeneous software base (ironically enough) giving “standard” back and front ends—which is then AGPL, meaning that instance owners can and do produce forks, but the forks cannot be held as Secret SaaS for lock-in since anyone who can access the instance can copy the source code from them. (It's probably possible to produce proprietary products that interop through ActivityPub, but this is harder—and importantly, you'll be the odd node out.)
(2) The idea of a “local culture” is prevalent and visible, with differences in content policy, theming, and contents of local/federated timelines. The forks from (1) can amplify this by acting like per-instance customizations with “partial stickiness”. Being on casual-contact terms with your instance administrator is also not uncommon and sometimes encouraged, whereas email is much more impersonal.
(3) The pervasive visibility of (2), mostly from instances doing their own CSS/text tweaks, provides a bridge to the “me but in a different social context” cues that are often missing in centralized social networks, which a number of people are starting to pay more attention to the need for. This while the interfaces remain basically isomorphic enough that there isn't a major UI/model-learning cost to jumping between instances.
(4) Conversely to (3), for users that want efficient access, third-party clients that support multiple accounts at once are very common. But a Web browser also counts as an intermediate form of multi-account client—so long as your accounts are on different instances, which is thus encouraged for convenience!