this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
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Social media is not a public square though. It's literally a series of privately held companies, in privately run servers. Just because it has the appearance of a public square does not make it so. It is these kinds of misconceptions that are really harming us.
This is like saying communists should have published more in the Wall Street Journal. What we need to be attempting to do is create our own parallel infrastructure, of which thing like lemmy is a start, but we need our own social media, and ideally, our own internet infrastructure. It's not enough to publish the newspaper you want to own the printing press.
Very hard to do when you dont own capital
Yet that’s generally what needs to be done. You couldn’t borrow one of William Randolph Hurst’s printing presses to print your commie newspaper back in 1902. Perhaps we shouldn’t expect a commie chat show to ‘win’ the YouTube algorithm and beat all of the fascist and reactionary chat shows that have dominated political discourses on the platform.
Correct. And yet it is what needs to be done to even get and maintain a real foothold of effective radical leftist politics. It's all very hard, but becoming a revolutionary is the hardest thing for any individual to ever do.
Shame we don't have some sort of historical guidance of what to do in that sort of situation.
There is some precedent for this sort of thing. Being some in ham radio, I've worked with and learned about a few different emergency communications systems. And some that are unrelated to ham radio. An interesting project is I2P, but it mostly just piggy backs onto the main internet. Mesh networks are closer to your "our own internet" idea, but they would need to he fairly widespread to be effective. There's Meshtastic which is an existing mesh network using LoRa tech. Each channel has its own encryption key, and for peer to peer, comms are end-to-end encrypted. There are public channels (which just uses a null encryption key like AA== or something) but if you specify a key, only users subscribed to the same channel with the same key can use that channel. You could technically set up a TCP/IP network over Meshtastic, but it'd be ridiculously slow. But an upside is that there's already a lot of people and infrastructure using Meshtastic, so you already have a difficult part of building a mesh network done. Unfortunately to guarantee full coverage, you'd have to use an internet gateway to link distant users. There are other mesh networks, but most of the ones I know about use ham radio bands which, legally, need to be unencrypted. (at least in the US) And if you were to try to encrypt comes, nosey hams will be able to track you down and report you. And that's not a vague threat, a lot of hams are just chomping at the bit to track down violators.