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Comment by oblique | Hacker News Reader

> We dreamed of decentralised social networks as "email 2.0." They truly are "television 2.0."

> They are entertainment platforms that delegate media creation to the users themselves the same way Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car.

Either this is written poorly or way off. Social networks are already television 2.0. Decentralized social networks circumvents having the algorithm controlled by some central authority. Media creation has already been delegated to users over a decade ago, think content creators.

Personally I'm a fediverse evangelist. Having decentralized entertainment platforms makes corporate/state influence much more difficult.

The methods of influence in modern centralized social networks are much more sinister than television ever was.

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I think federation is interesting as a concept, but my time with Mastodon has revealed that even decentralized networks are just as full of outrage-centric entertainment and ragebait as the main networks.

I think “the algorithm” gets a lot of blame for mirroring the choices that people are making for themselves. Even when you remove any semblance of an algorithm people have no problem creating their own little worlds of outrage entertainment and rage bait.

I'm old enough to have been on the internet before social networks, back in the days of forums / bulletin boards. Even then there was always a new drama in the community. I feel it's human nature.

I agree with you, and with GP for that matter, I think this is both human nature AND we've been conditioned by algorithms to seek and produce this style of communication. I'm really hopeful we can eventually grow out of this.

I feel terrible for the kids currently growing up with tiktok, Instagram & al., I only hope we will build the social and legal framework to safeguard the next generations from this, until they reach a certain age at least.

Of course it is human nature. The question is what parts of human nature get catered to and amplified, and by how much.

Yeah, I think the article conflated a few points: I think the issue the author was having was that he thought that decentralized social networks were meant to be decentralized communication platforms, when they were meant to be decentralized content delivery platforms.

The problem isn't the decentralization, it's the choice of a goal. However, email, IRC, Matrix, etc all already exist, and are what the author wants, so I do see tbe article as a bit misguided.

I think what the author meant to say was "I thought ActivityPub was meant to be more like Matrix, but it's not, and I'm sad about that".

I don't think the article disagrees here? The issue is not control or decentralization, but consumption v. back and forth (communication).

>Having decentralized entertainment platforms

How? I don't even think decentralized is the appropriate term. They're distributed entertainment platforms in that they're protocol based, but regarding the distribution of content there's nothing in it that decentralizes reach. The social graph of Twitter and Mastodon could in principle be identical.

Malicious actors don't need to control algorithms. States running influence campaigns on say, Youtube or Facebook don't actually control any algorithm, they adapt their content to what does well on the platform. And they could equally do this, one could argue even more effectively, on the fediverse.

Saying the Fediverse solves top down influence is like thinking that Bitcoin solves wealth inequality. The distribution of the network is completely agnostic to the centralization of the content.

Each server on a federated platform has control over how content retrieved through ActivityPub is delivered to its users. A healthy federated network allows competitions between "algorithms" for the same content. The social graph can be identical, but how it's traversed differs.

Think about how platforms have algorithmic comment ranking now, where two users who open the same comment section can see different top comments. This is a corporation or state (think tiktok) directly influencing how someone sees what their community thinks.

I don't see the bitcoin comparison.

You seem to be agreeing with the article?

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