PhilipTheBucket

Yeah. The whole concept of the fediverse is a huge step forward. And even squatting on community names doesn't really work. If gaming@lemmy.world sucks, people can move to gaming@lemm.ee.

I do completely agree that the protocols are not really set up fully with these considerations in mind, and they should be, more so.

To start with, Usenet was often just as toxic as any current social media/forum site.

I definitely don't think this is true. That's the whole "eternal September" thing.

I do think trolls existed, definitely they did on BBSes, but the magnitude of the problem was just not even in the same ballpark.

Then we started to get the first web based news sites with a social aspect (Slashdot/Fark/Digg/etc).

I remember very distinctly being around for that first big meltdown on Slashdot, with Jon Katz being put in a special position by the site administrators in a way that the userbase didn't agree with, a little bit of that impedance mismatch developing from that in what had before then been an all "us" type of place, and then something escalated and there was a big explosion and exodus. I don't even fully remember the details, but I think I remember one of the site admins getting into a big public spat with some big part of the userbase, and going and tampering with the comments database to make his point, and that was pretty much the beginning of the end. It never recovered and what had been a pretty good thing up until that point just flamed out and became a shell.

Everyone sort of assumed it was an "us" place that the nerds were finally in charge of. That's what made it special. Then that perceived betrayal of trust when the administrators tried to assert that it was "their" place firstly, and the users existed only at their pleasure, was really shocking to a lot of people. Again, on the modern commercial internet, even on moderator-curated Reddit clones like Lemmy, that's normal, that's the whole point of what I'm saying here. But back then the template of assumptions was much more innocent.

That's the central conflict I'm talking about. How we can get back to the days where it's all an "us" place. Lemmy is a huge step forward, I think.

Like yourself, not sure how to fix it, but splitting the tech companies apart from their advertising divisions would be step one. Probably would be helpful to require social media companies to be standalone businesses. Would at least be easier to hold them accountable. And maybe require that they be operated as nonprofits? To help disincentivize the kind of behavior we’ve got now.

I'm mostly talking about the volunteer internet. I don't have any active accounts on commercial social media, even for business things. Why would I? It's horrible, and I don't see it getting any better for any reason any time soon. I think just outcompeting it from a better direction, and letting it follow along into the new protocols or not, is a better way.

I'm mostly talking here about Lemmy and its design, and to a certain extent the other platforms on the volunteer social internet. Having the government break up the Lemmy monopoly doesn't sound like a step in the right direction.

"They" meaning developers, administrators, and moderators. There's quite a lot more hierarchy in the social structure than there used to be.

One example is that some site admins want some moderation features, and they lobby the developers, but the nature of the technology is that it's difficult for them to just lay out their own features, and the developers' time is limited, so the developers say no. So people don't get their moderation features. On the long-ago internet, there were many, many different software options that supported the same protocols, and they were also a lot more configurable generally speaking, so that you weren't stuck lobbying a single group of developers to implement your thing or get stuck with things not being the way you want.

Probably a bigger example is that there are constant little impedance mismatches between how people want certain communities to be moderated, and how they are moderated. People do want for the experience to be curated. It's unwieldy, with the current volume of assholes, to say that it's each user's responsibility to encounter a handful of assholes in every comments section and block them individually, so that the overall experience splinters, consistent assholes are free to continue harassing new users until the new users learn to block them, and any given asshole is everyone's problem. That's the problem with just blocking the MBFC bot if someone doesn't like it. It's fine as an individual solution, sort of, but the fact that it's even an issue in the first place speaks to a code-enforced hierarchy of control that doesn't match the hierarchy of respect and consent. That's why people keep bringing it up instead of just blocking the bot, I think.

I think that this is one thing Bluesky does right, where you can opt for certain people to "moderate" your experience, but there's not a single grouping which has a monopoly on being able to do that. It's under your control. That would be an example of what I'm saying, where on Lemmy there is a "they" that is uniquely empowered to ban you from a community, or decide not to ban someone else that you think is objectively being a nuisance, but the "us" that is in the community can't make that decision. On Bluesky, it's all one grouping of users, and they can decide how to control that aspect of their own experience, and that's a good thing.

Hopefully that makes sense. I'm not trying to air any sour grapes, or say that the developers should immediately prioritize any wishlist thing that comes their way. I'm also not trying to say that the moderators need to obey how I want MBFC bot to be handled, or let me post if I want to change the title of an article for clarity, or anything like that. I'm saying that, in terms of system design, the very existence of a unique grouping that I need to be lobbying to do these things is a development that should be worked away from, over time.

I don't usually talk directly to this person. I interacted with him a little bit in these comments, which might have been a mistake. You're completely right that interacting in this way is often a waste of time. Most of the time, I'm talking to other people who might read the comments.

I am completely serious, though, in what I was saying about being concerned. To cut a long story short, I've been curious enough to examine a lot of these weird political propaganda accounts, and I think this person is just a freelance individual honestly spending every free waking moment posting on Lemmy about their particular brand of politics, and working themselves into a state of cognitive dissonance where it's a good thing that they're getting so much attention from it, even if it's negative, and that's why they keep doubling down. As you said, a troll. I don't know why I decided to feed the troll, in this instance, but if you unfocus your eyes and really look at this story and this posting pattern, you can see someone behind the keyboard who's really in a very bad and unhealthy state.

@UniversalMonk@lemmy.world: I think you should try an experiment. Write the same three thousand word campy horror story, put the same mad energy into it, but don't make it a mean-spirited attempt to open a new front in the conflict you have created between you and everyone else on US political Lemmy. Just write a story. Be creative without clinging to the conflict you've created.

See which process you enjoy more. Maybe you'll enjoy the one where the mom-basement-dwelling person who called you a Russian bot finally gets their comeuppance. It has a certain mean-spirited satisfaction. I get that. But I think you will have a better feeling from just letting go of that, for a little while, and putting the energy into having fun writing a story.

Edit: I took away some condescension, some is still here.

This isn't hard to do. I share the skepticism of some of the other users that this simple algorithm is going to give you a good feed, but I can probably knock up a quick script that can do this for you, if you want.

These people are not thinking hard enough about what a second Trump term would mean.

It is hard to take in record profits when the dollar has fallen by 35% and there are parts of the country engulfed in a civil war after Trump cancelled the 2028 election.

It is by design.

All it takes is a political leader willing to do the politically painful job of taxing the fuck out of the Parasite Class

I don't think it works that way.

I'm not trying to say that would be a bad thing, it would be great. I think, though, that what really has to happen is strong unions fighting for their fair share.

For as long as people are looking to elect "the leaders" to fix things, things are going to stay unfixed. As soon as they take for themselves the political and economic power, within structures of power that are not political parties, they can have a real seat at the table, instead of finally finding someone else to send on a voyage to the great white father to come back to them with the right caliber of benefits secured.

It's been happening, the last few years. It's grand. And obviously, not having political leaders who want to return us to the days of feudalism or Nazi Germany as enforced with terrifying modern technology would be a nice boost to being able to get that done. But I think it has to come from unions and citizen activism in order to really come true in the right way. That's how it happened back when things really were okay in the country.

Cool beans.

https://business.time.com/2012/09/21/bitter-harvest-u-s-farmers-blame-billion-dollar-losses-on-immigration-laws/

https://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/article227483414.html

They're not exactly the story I was thinking of, but the pattern of actions is generally the same.

Good stuff. You can also do the same by talking with bot@rss.ponder.cat, if you don't want to install something separate:

https://ponder.cat/post/248105