Big Tech designed their platforms to keep you trapped.
YouTube, X, Instagram, and TikTok aren't neutral spaces. They're businesses built on capturing your attention and data. Their algorithms, notification systems, and content policies all serve one purpose: keeping you engaged on their terms. And their terms alone. There's no freedom
I hope more active users move to the fediverse. That way we will have a lot of variety in content and can also potentially prevent communities from becoming echo chambers. I suppose moderation will also have to be taken up a notch for these changes to actually have a positive effect.
Echo chambers are not bad when the echo is due to the majority opinions being in favor of basic human rights and equality. Giving voice to those that spew hate is not conducive to going anywhere except a circle.
Also, more active users means more niche communities. I just realized there’s a Severance community that is medium active. One less thing I need Reddit for.
Niche communities are awesome ! Sadly reddit is still the king in this aspect.
Maybe in a few years lemmy will reach that level or even surpass it… One can dream.
What! My outie loves Severance.
I can’t locate this community using search on the term ‘severance’.
Do you mind sharing the instance and community name?
Praise Kier!
Come join the music/dance experience!
https://lemmy.world/c/severance
I suspect this will still become a problem since we can subscribe to whichever communities we like and vice versa.
It is a feature, not a problem.
I have, like, this whole rich life offline. My curated list of instances and communities (plus my user block list) is just my entertainment and a small portion of my day.
You may not believe this but I have numerous thoughts, activities and interactions that never leave a trace online. I have no obligation to drink from the firehose that is being pumped from the septic tank of the human psyche.
@Flagstaff @gunpachi I’m not sure echo chambers are inherently a bad thing. My real life is a carefully crafted echo chamber of people I like to spend time with (which conveniently includes my family). The problem comes when we get *all* our information from that echo chamber.
I agree with what you are saying. What I really meant is that every community should have some amount of people who think differently and see things from a different perspective. This can help widen the variety of posts, comments and even sources used for citations.
For instance, here on lemmy I’ve noticed a tendency for people to see things from a political viewpoint and don’t hesitate to start a flame war in the comments. Maybe the average user will feel more welcome to express their opinions if they see that the existing users are open minded. Thankfully most communities I’m a part of are very nice, more so than their reddit counterparts.
P.S: forgive me if there are any logical inconsistencies in my comment. I might be a little intoxicated.
Why moderation? The old internet didn’t have moderation. Why does everyone feel the need for moderation?
The old internet was hidden behind dial-up modems and TCP-IP stacks and weird telnet and usenet protocols. This complexity worked as a filter and the people using it were mostly academics, students, techies and other nerds (me amongst them). The moment uncle Bob could poke his way through social media on his phone from the shitter, the whole thing cascaded into Eternal September and “the old internet” was lost forever.
I don’t know what old internet you used, but the IRC channels and forums I used to run around on definitely had moderation. This was about '97. Maybe you’re talking about the late 80s when barely anybody knew the Internet even existed and it was just academics and ubernerds?
Trolls, bots, and scammers make them necessary at a minimum, and then the subliminal messaging from the cronies of politicians, etc. make them welcome. Bots are easier to make than ever before so you can’t compare the past with the present that easily. kbin.social died last year because of relentless spam bots posting garbage/malware links 100x/sec.
Computer bots always act a certain predictable way. You can filter out most bots easily based on time-based filters or other algorithms. The rest should not be moderated, except for illegal things like selling weapons, drugs, or hiring a hitman.
Moderation is a skippery slope. Everyone wants to moderate something different. Rights want to moderates Lefts, Lefts want to moderate Rights. Moderators have the power to decide which side they are on. If we had clear laws that forbid most moderation, there would not be any discussion about it anymore. Just allow everything and deal with it.
That hasn’t been true for a long time. Filtering bots has increasingly become more difficult, expensive, and sophisticated. Not to mention that there are still plenty of state sponsored bad actors using real people and hybrid approaches.
And the extremism follow.
What? The old internet absolutely had moderation, even back in the day of BBS.