I am so happy I have an account on here, even if some people can be quite abrasive
this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
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We tend to have strong opinions here that's for sure. Most people are good about giving space for honest discussion, which is nice.
Your mother - she's older than you!
When I saw this article I was like oh damn if I post it here I’ll get loads of upvotes lmao.
You were apparently correct haha
I have a feeling this place and other decentralized social medias will be banned in the near future. Look at what's happening to TIktok. You either bend the knee or you get axed. It's why the other social media giants bent the knee. They understand the writing on the wall. There's more going on behind the scenes that they don't share with us. I think we're sort of watching a quiet coup.
Isn’t decentralization a thing that makes that much harder? There isn’t the same “national security” concern. I’m not saying it won’t happen just that the mechanism is much more difficult to make work.
You're mixing multiple subjects here, one being the logistics of blocking a federated system like Lemmy, the other being whether the wrong person finds the content of such a system objectionable and labels it a "national security issue."
I'm being a tad pedantic here, but my reason for pointing this out is that I think #2 is not far fetched at all, but I'm unsure of how feasible #1 might be and would love if somebody who knows more than I do would chime in.
EDIT: Looks like some have already discussed #2 in the other comment thread started by Teknikal.
Not saying you are wrong if anything though I think Reddit is probably the next obvious victim after TikTok they'll simply point to the Chinese Tencent who own shares and the next thing you know Musk will be part owner.
Fediverse I think will probably be the last hit simply because it's small and because of the design can't be hit easily, wouldn't surprise me if they just targeted the biggest servers though.
Realistically if it is hit it'll be through some sweeping "social media safety" bill that makes the cost of administrating a social media site as a hobby prohibitively expensive and/or time consuming, maybe even as on the nose as requiring the software to receive a specific certification before it's allowed to open registration.
We've already seen the UK's online safety bill cause many admins of small forums and communities to shutter their communities as a result, and who knows how Australia's recent social media bill will affect Australian Fediverse servers & users
A decent amount of the larger servers are hosted outside the US, which might complicates matters. However, many also use Cloudflare (US based) as a proxy, which might make targeting the Fediverse easier.
Isn't it possible to just move the site under a different domain name, or have mirrored secondary servers in an entirely different location in case the primary one gets taken down?
I'm not sure if duplicate servers are supported with AP, I suspect it will cause the posts to be shared twice.
I have been thinking about whether instances also being available on TOR could help, mostly due to Saudi Arabia banning lemmy.blahaj.zone. Commercial VPN's are apparently something problematic governments detect, so I doubt that accessing the TOR network is safe.
Yeah I think along the same lines can only hope if servers are compromised like this they get defederated immediately to make a point, ultimately though I think the design of the fediverse pretty much keeps it safe but some servers may unfortunately face consequences
I'm not really expecting any attempts to compromise the servers themselves, I think it's more likely to see more website blocks like Saudi Arabia did with lemmy.blahaj.zone did some time ago.
I hope not. I just arrived!
Dont worry, lemmings worry about some shutdown every other week. Been here since the API closures, and its quite nice (if you block the news communities)
Yeah I finally decided to actually commit to getting off reddit would be unfortunate.
Welcome!
then we will all get on WordPress or something and go back to rss feeds. they can't ban everything, the Internet is too big. people will find a way
they can’t ban everything, the Internet is too big. people will find a way
they don't really have to ban everything. for example, the persistent chinese internet-goer has the ability to view things he's not supposed to see even though China bans large swathes of the internet.
but by making it as difficult as possible for most people and creating strict punishments for breaking the rules, you can effectively ban most things you want for majority of people
if posting on lemmy makes you an enemy of the state and the state is becoming increasingly harsh with its punishments... would you still be going on and posting regularly? i would certainly think twice.
If social media becomes decentralized we might even gain traction reversing some of the brainwashing on the masses. The current giants are just propaganda machines. Always have been, but it's now blatant and obvious. They don't even care to hide it.
This is why I don't agree with the "lemmy is cozy, it doesn't need to grow" point of view. There's always specific, largely defederated instances that provide that cozy feeling, but I really want decentralized platforms to replace the corporate ones. If that's ever going to happen, the fediverse needs to grow.
check out “the gentleman’s guide to forum sliding”….
as long as teams of people sit in a row of computers using dozens of sock puppets, no place is safe once it gets kinda popular….
Assuming you're talking about this? https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm
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Let's call it by it's name: neofeudalism/technofeudalism
Tildes (a closed garden Reddit alternative) frequently love to reminisce about the days of small forum communities. Maybe we need to bring them back.
They still exist. I’m active in one, love it.
I sometimes fantasise about a lemmy like decentralised protocol that works for old school forums.
NodeBB has added ActivityPub federation today. So that should work
what does closed garden mean in this context? as in contrast to the fediverse?
you must be accepted after filling out an application, then you'll get your ssh key validated and only then can you tunnel in and join properly
In the same way that email has been decentralized from the get go, social media could have been equally decentralized, and I don't mean in the older php forums, but in a different way that would allow people to reconnect with others and maintain contacts.
I'm currently reading The Expanse, and at one point a character mentions checking in on the family aggregator his cousin set up to help everyone keep track of who's living where.
Dude spun up a private Lemmy instance for his family. The future is now!
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Hey, that's us!
There's another alternative, which is no social media at all. There is no particular problem that it solved. If it disappeared, would your quality of life be worse in any way?
Forums and communities like these were very important for me growing up in the rural US South
Same here. Forums (about science fiction, aeromodelism, electric vehicles) have been important to me, and continue to be important in some fields.
I'm actually going to suggest; Yes, possibly. But for a very specific reason.
While much of social media isn't ultra necessary, federated social media could be quite essential to collectivising and resisting state and corporate manipulation and propaganda. All other forms of media and news are corporate or state controlled, and thus can construct and project false narritives that are beneficial to their aims, much to our collective detriment.
Social media has become the dominant way that many, possibly most people, see the news, discuss such news with eachother from people around the globe, and build a picture of what's going on outside of their isolated part of the world. I think Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent gives a pretty fantastic argument on the importance of citizen controlled media, and federated social media is about as citizen controlled as it can possibly get. It's non-corporate self-hosted open source software as far as the eye can see! It's not perfect, but holy shit this is as powerful as a tool to diseminate ideas and information on a grassroots level that we've ever had, and we should not underestimate its usefulness in the coming decade.
We wouldn't be having this conversation though.
I could live without all the news and stuff, and I do just ignore it when it gets too much. The ability to communicate with other people across the entire world however is something I really appreciate.
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