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Comment by analyst74 | Hacker News Reader

This is not news for anyone paying attention to the media space. The big question is ... is there a way out? Or are we destined to have a small number of powerful organizations controlling world's information and in extension, our thought?

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Probably not without government intervention. Antitrust or antimonopoly (or anti-oligopoly) enforcement would probably help. Perhaps copyright reform would help, although that is less obvious.

That would help but there seems to be no incentive to push anti-trust efforts. Otherwise these mega corporations wouldn't exist in their current behemoth forms. I think public outcry would need to be strong enough to pressure antitrust action, but people tend to be fine with it since less companies makes access to their media more simple and streamlined

I also think a lot of people aren't aware of the situation, since each company has a multiple of different brands under their umbrella. And it doesn't hurt that since these companies control so much of the media they can, at least in theory, suppress any press that might result in such public outry.

I guess we have the OP's article as something available in public media. The infographics are useful for giving a basic idea of how many media companies are under each corporate umbrella. There needs to be more of an understanding about why trusts and near monopolies like these are going to just get worse as they continue to merge to compete against each other's super Chimera. The fact that these companies own intellectual properties that the public wants to consume may make them more willing to turn a blind eye though. There would need to be an event that causes significant anger in the public to inspire outcry. Not just knowledge.

I’m sure there’s a way out, considering that I already consume the minority of my media from those sources. The internet is still a lot bigger than what’s listed here, and with cord-cutting, that has extended to my TV as well.

The turn of the century was probably the rock-bottom as far as choice in media is concerned. It has been getting better over the past 20 years.

It's always news for someone, though. Good to remind people about this now and then.

It's like the depressing version the "Lucky 10,000" XKCD.

Open source platforms provide an alternative to corporate social media. These platforms are developed on a non-profit basis and are hosted by volunteers across the globe. A growing number of such platforms are available today and millions of people are using them already.

Mastodon is an alternative to Twitter, and it’s currently home to over two million users. This was the first open platform to get serious traction, and has been growing steadily since its debut.

While Mastodon retains a similar user experience to Twitter, there is one major difference — it is a federated platform. Instead of all users having accounts on the same server, there are many Mastodon servers that all talk to each other to create the Mastodon network. If you have the technical expertise, it’s even possible to run your own.

Mastodon is built around an open standard allowing other platforms to integrate with it. This led to a number of open platforms being created and joining the network. Collectively these platforms are referred to as the Fediverse. One important aspect of the Fediverse is that it’s much harder to censor and manipulate content than it is with centralized networks such as Facebook. There is no single company deciding what content can go on the network, and servers are hosted by regular people across many different countries and jurisdictions. Some of the other platforms of interest are Pixelfed, PeerTube, Plume, and Lemmy.

Pixelfed is an alternative to Instagram that caters to artists and photographers. PeerTube is a YouTube alternative, Plume is a blogging platform akin to Medium, and Lemmy is a news aggregator forum inspired by Reddit.

All these platforms are developed in the open, and the developers themselves are often left-wing activists (as is the case with Mastodon and Lemmy). These platforms explicitly avoid tracking users and collecting their data. Not only are these platforms better at respecting user privacy, they also tend to provide a better user experience without annoying ads and popups.

Another interesting aspect of the Fediverse is that it promotes collaboration. Traditional commercial platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube have no incentive to allow users to move data between them. They directly compete for users in a zero sum game and go out of their way to make it difficult to share content across them. This is the reason we often see screenshots from one site being posted on another.

On the other hand, a federated network that’s developed in the open and largely hosted non-profit results in a positive-sum game environment. Users joining any of the platforms on the network help grow the entire network.

Having many different sites hosted by individuals was the way the internet was intended to work in the first place, it’s actually quite impressive how corporations took the open network of the internet and managed to turn it into a series of walled gardens. Marxist theory states that in order to be free, the workers must own the means of production. This idea is directly applicable in the context of social media. Only when we own the platforms that we use will we be free to post our thoughts and ideas without having to worry about them being censored by corporate interests.

No matter how great a commercial platform might be, sooner or later it’s going to either disappear or change in a way that doesn’t suit you because companies must constantly chase profit in order to survive. This is a bad situation to be in as a user since you have little control over the evolution of a platform.

On the other hand, open source has a very different dynamic. Projects can survive with little or no commercial incentive because they’re developed by people who themselves benefit from their work. Projects can also be easily forked and taken in different directions by different groups of users if there is a disagreement regarding the direction of the platform. Even when projects become abandoned, they can be picked up again by new teams as long as there is an interested community of users around them.

There's a bootstrapping problem to all these decentralized communities though. Because you need to be slightly technically adept to create, run, or even hear about such instances, all these platforms are innundated with psychotic nerds. I like free software, I think Marx was right about most things, but I can't think of a bigger waste of time than hanging out with a bunch of mentally ill furries and groomers.

> a bunch of mentally ill furries and groomers

That's an inaccurate and disgusting characterization of fediverse users. Many of these users are members of the free software community who do not fit your description:

https://mastodon.online/@FediFollows/106647703394010040

I’m just saying, I have adhd, I’m not gonna read this whole manifesto, can you just give me a summary at the top? Jeez, people are so trigger happy with the flagging these days.

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