This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
She was a great guest - and it was really cool to hear the "mastadonverse" shoutout haha.
While not 100% her final point, one of the greatest disappointments of the Internet has been watching rot and crumble into just 5 websites, each just posting screenshots/videos from the other four.
I’m doing my part!
I never used Twitter in the first place, so I guess I'm not in the "addicted" category, but I did have an account, in November of 2024 I did actively cancel that X account. Google pushes me X links in my "news feed" I consistently tell Google "No more stories from ____ on X" (they won't let you block all of X, I wonder why....)
Seriously, folks, how hard is it to just walk away? I was on BlueSky for about 3-4 months, got a little invested/addicted to the platform and took a hard look at what value I was getting from it - on balance: negative. Cold turkey, do I miss it? No.
Facebook holds a (solitary) users group I occasionally want to talk with captive, they acknowledge it's a terrible platform but they're too lazy to leave, so I log in when I need to talk with them and that's it. Anybody "in there" I care about? Long distance phone calls are free these days, e-mail works, why should I be sharing stuff with people I don't know just to communicate with people I do know?
The average American feels an unmet need for connection. Social media immediately fills that need, exactly like a drug. For a few minutes anyway. You don't get the benefits of a real connection, just the dopamine. Pretty soon you feel worse, and the best way to stop feeling bad is to hit refresh or keep scrolling. I'm glad we're finally looking at the consequences of social media for kids, then we can look at what it does to adults.
in other news, water is wet.
I've been telling people this for over 15 years.
I hope one day people finally do it, but I won't waste my breath anymore on insufferable people who are willing to sell out their freedom for convenience.
They've both been irrelevant to me for years now.
Since this is Lemmy, I can't tell if you're talking Meta/X or EFF and Jon...
All of them lol, i used to watch jon stewart every night during the bush years but now under trump it's just i dont need to hear it anymore been the same story since i was a little kid and now it's less funny than ever how much worse trump is than even bush was
There was a similar post recently about Cambridge leaving twitter, and it got me thinking that universities are really the ideal organizations to host lemmy servers. They have a vested interest in truth and community building. They have a decent enough sense of free speech to stay federated with most other instances. They have pre-existing communities on topic ranging from clubs to technical subjects. Users can confirm their identities by association with the universities, which will keep things civil. Obviously I don't think they should be the only instances - anonymity has it's place and value - but I really think universities should be hosting instances.
Im surprised there aren't student clubs or something hosting instances now that you mention it. That would be a great student project for any CS or even journalism schools.
Right! Plus, it'd be an ideal route to solicit donations to the university - people are more attached to their social media than sports ball teams. Not hosting lemmy and mastadon instances is practically throwing away money!
Depends on the university. Some of them are still like that, some of them are totally ideologically captured such that they have encoded being anti-free speech into their conduct codes, and/or they simple would not want to deal with the fallout of bad actors would/could do to their servers.
A lot of university's slide towards authoritarian centralizing of power post COVID along with internalizing their student bodies. Sadly. They themselves aren't the bastions of freedom and truth they once were, because those things don't make the bottom line go up. Many also closed off spaces and programs that were previous open to the public to further isolate themselves from the rest of the world. MIT had libraries and other facilities anyone could use, and now they shut them all off from public access post COVID.
Too little too late. They're right tho
Then she says Bluesky doesn't have an algorithm while he defends the openness of Reddit.
These are the experts...
Yeah it's just follow the money, if a giant corporate entity owns it, it's going to fuck you and leave you for dead without flinching. It's really that simple, whether its mcdonalds verizon google geico paramount or any of the other large companies, youre a number on a spreadsheet and if you die they don't even notice and they will sell you dogshit and leave a smiley face on the receipt. If you owe anything they send your account to collections and minimum wage workers will tell your family they have to pay the debts you left behind.
Fuck reddit Fuck spez
Turns out getting your news from entities that financially support fascism is a bad idea.
Give them a few more years and every site except big social media will be flagged as dangerous in your browser, like those without valid SSL certs are now.
Wouldn't be surprised in the least.
We're well on our way to being something in between North Korea and Russia. Maybe Hungary would be a good comparison.
Pushing SSL was probably the last big tech effort/push that actually benefited users. Sure it made self hosting a little harder, and probably consolidated some tracking behind bigger players, but overall end users did benefit.
Most of what I see now is purely for their benefit and users don't benefit.
Yeah, rallying against SSL is a weird way to go about it. SSL is one of the biggest and most meaningful changes to come about as a result of the Snowden leaks. The leaks were literally what prompted http to shift towards https instead, because it shined a bright spotlight on how insecure http truly is.
In the short term, it made self-hosting more difficult. But nowadays, with things like nginx and Let’s Encrypt, enabling SSL on your self-hosted site is as simple as selecting a few drop-down boxes, pasting an API key, and automating a cert refresh.
The true “has the potential to gatekeep the entire internet” existential threat is when a company like Meta or Google becomes the authority for things like ID verification or SSO.
“has the potential to gatekeep the entire internet”
Add Cloudflare hosting everything to that list.
Cloudflare hosting everything
But it's so cheeeeeep! My website (continuously hosted since 1996) used to cost me $15 per month, since I migrated it to Cloudfare they're charging $0.01 ro $0.02 per month for the same hosting services - it's been about 18 months now, I think - I just got last months "bill" - I now owe them $0.25, but they won't charge me until it hits $1.00.
Free service? YOU are the product.
A big man in the middle attack service, operating in a hostile nation? What could go wrong?
I'm not rallying against SSL. Just an example of browser warnings.
People still use them? Why?
Marketplace killed Craigslist because they're actually halfway decent at detecting and removing scams. Basically the only redeeming feature
Craigslist is still limping along, it's a smaller group of buyers but still has traction in some markets.
Gee, wonder Fediverse users, how is that even possible? /s
