I mean it is worth the attention and topical for this site. But it is unusual. Bots are active on HackerNews so it depends on whether they got past the moderation here. Hard to do anything about the kinds of bots, possibly just humans from fiver + chatGPT, who post misinformation on the more politically spicy topics. And i could see something similar working to create an upvote bot network too.
I was going to upvote and move on, as the video is self-explanatory and fun. Now I feel compelled to leave a comment to disprove this conspiracy theory.
I'm sure that this applies to later upvotes, but the first few minutes when this was posted are off the scale. Once something is on the homepage it will usually stay there for a while because some fraction of the people that visit the homepage like it.
Hacker News is certainly more hostile to video than links - to me it wasn't obvious it was a video as normally people will append [video] to video links out of courtesy.
I thought it was excellent. A good critique of the loops people get stuck in, but also very funny. And the comic timing was on the nose.
I feel like the humour is quintessentially British (I doubt Harold Shipman is well known on the other side of the duckpond, let alone the cultural subtext of an OBE). Maybe it's not as funny in America.
For those unwilling to follow a twitter link: the latest post is from 2 days ago. Which is much more recent than his "I'm leaving" annoucement.
EDIT: I guess this begs the question then, how do you break the cycle? Do you just stay trapped in one walled garden despite it getting much worse, or do decentralised platforms offer temporary/permanent respite?
I guess their lawyers ignore the GDPR because they are not a business doing business with europeans.
If this forum had any kind of paid offerings this might differ, but what do you want, them to block the whole EU a la Threads/Bard?
As I understand it, this is due to the limitations of current (mod) tools, and justification just means you have to provide a human for some good reason to do -free work- for you. Like fearing being doxxed or whatever.
I dunno, I'm a happy member of this forum and I appreciate dang and how the moderation works here, it could be better and automated but this is a small niche tech forum after all and not some giant social media network
> I guess their lawyers ignore the GDPR because they are not a business doing business with europeans.
That's not how the GDPR works. The GDPR does not kick in when there is a commercial transaction, it kicks in when you're talking about data, specifically data provided by EU subjects.
That's not how law works, you cannot force other countries to abide by your laws just because you say so, well you can if you're the US, and you say so (but there's also the subtle threat of physical violence if needed)
> That's not how law works, you cannot force other countries to abide by your laws just because you say so
No countries are forced, just corporate entities in those countries that aim to transact with EU citizens. And that's perfectly fine, lots of countries have laws like that on their books and ways to enforce them. The only people that tend to object are those that are part of the group that wishes to trample on the rights of the people whose data they collect.
Because there's no automated system, (and I guess, since there's not lots of requests, no need for it)
And so for you to want to utilise a finite resource (moderation time) for something that should benefit you, you better have a good reason for it?
Why should companies go above and beyond to comply with laws that don't affect their country or business doings?
The only reason a US company might comply with EU directives, is if they plan to do business in the EU, not if they're storing data or not from an European citizen
- Change your account email.
- Change HN password with password generator (don't' record it)
- Log out.
The account and info are still there, but at least you can't get in! Obviously if they later introduce account deletion you've retroactively made a small mistake.
It also helps to delete your account when you want to leave.
That’s what I did when I stopped using Facebook years ago. Deleted my account completely. All data gone. Profile gone.
If he had deleted his Twitter account then all followers would be gone and there wouldn’t be so much point in coming back.
In some cases even deleting your account is not enough. For example I recently deleted my Reddit account, but I still come back to check the posts on Reddit now and then.
I tried to run a Lemmy instance but got hit by a wave of bot accounts, so I turned off my Lemmy instance for now. When I have time to get it back up and running then hopefully I can get more real people to come join the instance and the I can stay active on my Lemmy instance instead of continuing to read posts on Reddit.
At least I have stopped posting to Reddit though. So I am not providing their business with free content anymore. But still providing them with my eyeballs for their ads for now.
In the case of Twitter, people who had a lot of followers and were frequently tweeting would probably be better able to leave if they deleted their accounts. And as a bonus thanks to recent changes if you delete your account you can’t even read Twitter anymore, since reading requires that you stay signed in. So in a way Twitter helps people when they want to leave, as long as people do their part and delete their accounts.
My solution was to not make a "I'm leaving for X" post but rather "I do most of my social media posting on X now" post. I do still make a few posts on Twitter but not nearly as many as I did before.
People like Paul are tied to twitter because they are addicted to popularity. I bet you don't have that same problem, so you just leave. Just stop going there one day, and keep doing that every day. You'll notice that, although it felt really important, your life will not change at all.
I started to read a book on a summary of Norse myths. In the introduction, it suggested that since in pre-Christian Scandinavia there was no strong or even existing belief in a timeless afterlife, people, particularly of the Viking stock, would seek their fame as a way to live on after their own death.
I thought this was interesting in that it could be profound in the minds of public individuals, whether conscious or not, particularly if they share a lack of an eternal life.
But the Vikings did have believes in afterlife. Later records of Valhalla or Folkvangr speak of that very clearly. There is also the fact that items were added to burried bodies which usually is done with the believe that these items would be useful for the deceased person in the afterlife.
Well he mentioned Norse mythology and particularily the Vikings. The whole Pre-Christian Scandinavia of course is a way too wide a time span with very spotty historic records the further back we go.
While it's true that the afterlife was not eternal (Ragnarök) the same goes for the fame or legacy because the whole world is pretty much rebooted in their belief and with that the legacy vanishes.
Tangentially related: the story of Herostratus, whose name it was forbidden to mention since he destroyed the temple of Artemis simply in order to have his name remembered. The ban didn't work out; he is now one of the more famous ancient Greeks, but had his name not been banned he would surely have been forgotten.
Tangentially related to that: the urge to "be someone" is likely shared by all, but the "being" that follows from having your name in the paper (or on Twitter) seems likely a surrogate for one's impression of being remembered and appreciated by people that knows you well, or something that can compensate for a lack thereof.
Point in case: the large proportion of of petty criminals and social outcasts among terrorists and the like.
At least they get to be in the paper (and/or on TV/Twitter/Facebook/Threads/Youtube/Mastodon).
Ironically, after watching "The Emperor's Club", Shutruk-Nahunte is the only Elamite leader I'm aware of, and I had to look up the name of the film to write this comment.
For those who haven't seen it, the main character starts the film making a big point about how Nahunte is largely forgotten despite his efforts to be remembered, because he contributed nothing of value.
> I started to read a book on a summary of Norse myths.
When you mention an interesting book/movie/any piece of media in a post, please include its name. There will always be someone interested in checking it out. I am.
> I bet you don't have that same problem, so you just leave.
I believe lots of Twitter users have the same problem. As long as they see a bit of engagement on their tweets/comments, even if they have 10 followers.
I get more engagement on Mastodon than I did on Twitter. New twitter accounts are essentially shadow banned by default whereas that is not the case on Mastodon.
Besides, most people announcing they are leaving or pondering it loudly are doing it exactly for popularity ("I hear that 'Twitter is now awful' is the latest trend! Acknowledge me as a cool person that flies the outrage flag of the day").
People who actually care for decentralization and the like over popularity, have long gone.
I did post that I was leaving as doing so did genuinely interrupt some nascent friendships I had developed on Twitter. I am sad I lost those, but staying there seemed worse at the time.
I left twitter because I was addicted to popularity. I said the absolutely worst shit all in the name of driving engagement. I spoiled secret product announcements for Big Company because I loved the high of getting 1000s of likes on a tweet.
I moved to a different platform, left behind that community, and I feel a whole lot better for it. Barely anyone likes my posts any more, and I barely post. I feel great.
Non-commercial platforms have less pressure to drive engagement to pump DAUs, so I think they will always inherently start from a healthier base. Even if they do have algorthmic timelines, I think they can be done healthier because there's less incentive to send you engagement-bait and can instead just focus on sending you think you'll genuinely be interested in.
I don't understand that mentality. I'm a nobody-have-nothing and I dread the day somebody would link some of my Internet pseudonyms to my real-life identity. If I had a few billions stashed somewhere and it was of public knowledge, how could I ever know who is earnest and honest when interacting with me?
All this microblogging drama lately has really shown just how addicted manybpeople are to the popularity and attention engine. Its kind of sad. There were a lot of people saying they would leave when Musk took over. I have not been there since then, but several of my friends have gone back, and its a bit disappointing.
I've been off Twatter since November.
I'm enjoying Mastodon / methadone right now. Satisfies the random info itch, not enough of my social network to be addictive.
You do break it by replacing the walled garden with something more sane. I personally left all traditional social media and replaced it with a personal blog and private emails and mails to people and I couldn’t be happier.
I honestly don’t consider HN social media because the vast majority of the content here is driven by 3rd party content since it’s mostly external links.
I see it more like a forum than a social media platform.
You're not wrong but we can stretch the definition of social media to the point where it's no longer useful. Still, doesn't change the meaning of my original post. Sharing content on your own site, on your own terms and interacting with others directly via email is by far the best replacement to the current situation. At least it is for me.
I think the differentiating factor is a simple one: you interact with people that you would not have known in real life, a global 'two way street'. If it doesn't have that component then it isn't social media.
I read “the last straw” as being the final bad decision among many (which I think is what the idiom means). A tipping point. Usually you can’t remove “the last straw” to fix the camel’s back.
If the linking policy was the sole issue I think that tweet didn’t convey his meaning. However, I actually think that, like many people, he returned despite some remaining issues he had.
Also, I get it, social media is made to be addictive. Even more so when you have a following. My original point was that I think moving through a long chain of alternatives on moral grounds is not a common pattern.
My guess would have been the video was made with an animation program like Adobe Animate (the product that was previously Adobe Flash Professional and before that Macromedia Flash) or Adobe AfterEffects.
Lots of animations are generated by code partially or fully. But I read the question here as whether this is rendered in real time on the browser via custom code rather than a video codec. This is because the sharp black and white graphics appear almost vector like. However it’s a normal video.
I meant that watching this video made me realize that one could write a program that generates the graphics, like in a video game, and then captures that in a video file, without any intention to run the program separately. A programmatically created video.
A for effort. Still I left Twitter. It rewards posts expressing strong negative emotions too much, and the sycophancy around popular accounts is depressing.
Everybody's looking for a technical solution to a human problem. There's no COC, algorithm, policy, federation, whatever that will fix social media. The only thing that worked long-term where limited scoped* forums with 100% human moderation that basically had one single rule: "this is my forum and I appoint moderators that enforce my vision". You built long term reputation and relationships on these forums so whatever you posted was taken in context.
* limited scope = geographically, culturally, interests, numbers of people. But this of course will never make a billion dollar business.
So until people give up on the idea of the global app and return to "local" communities I don't think we're going to have decent social media.
EDIT: by local I don't mean subreddits, discord servers, etc, but the entire site/app to be local. Not a global with local divisions.
NextDoor is not local. It has local divisions, communities, whatever you want to call them, but the app is not local. So the owner of the app is not involved in the local communities, he does not personally appoint moderators and so on.
Well, geographically local has never been a particularly good division anyway - neighbor disputes are a story as old as time, and "don't know your neighbors too well" is sound advice.
1) it gets dominated by whoever shouts the loudest/who can spend most time on social media
2) You only get one local community really, and if you aren't in it, you aren't in it. I can join one of thousands of gaming discords, if any of them get too toxic for me I can just join another one. I can't do that with my local community, so you don't have the stick of "if you continue being toxic assholes I'm going to go somewhere else". You can of course stop using it but that's not "taking your business somewhere else".
> The only thing that worked long-term where limited scoped* forums with 100% human moderation that basically had one single rule: "this is my forum and I appoint moderators that enforce my vision".
So basically Reddit before they declared war on their volunteer mod teams.
Reddit was a cesspool long before their recent war on mods. In fact, the war on mods wasn't a bad thing, since SO many mods were such horrible people; there's countless stories of people being perma-banned for just asking a mod a question (which is something that happened to me once too).
The only social media I've ever seen that was really nice was back in the USENET days, or later some things like Yahoo groups, where there was a small group/forum dedicated to a very niche topic, with a decent moderator who wasn't on a power trip, and a fairly small group of subscribers. Of course, this was no guarantee of quality of lack of drama, but it's the best I've ever seen. The larger and more general the forum, the worse it's likely to be.
I agree 100%. I have dozens of friends still from those days that i chat/talk to very often. Friends from “global’ apps ? Maybe 2-3. Once you take the personal touch aspect away its all just noise really.
Incredibly repetitive for being only 2 minutes long.
We get it, VC funded social networks become worse over time so you have to periodically jump ship to something new, which will quickly let you down again once it gains critical mass.
Really? I thought the best part was about the autonomous armored car that learned to be anti-Semitic on terabytes of unmoderated Nazi posts.
Repetitive is the point, because we repeat ourselves, but in time periods long enough that we forget and don't notice. This is our stupidity, compressed.
Yeah, I guess that's one of the points that the video tries to make: the repetitiveness is so numbing that you stop noticing that the behavior of the platforms is getting more and more egregious...
Stop chasing "VC funded social networks". Let's look at the indieweb for a sustainable model. Let's patronize separate, small, independent service providers to keep the servers running.
You either have problems with censorship (or moderation, if you want to use a more moderate term), or you have problems with raving lunatics and trolls scaring everyone else off your platform...
You can't justify censorship by across the board smearing censored people as "raving lunatics" or "trolls". The "scaring off" excuse for censorship works for forums like HN, but it doesn't work for social media sites, since on those you choose whom to follow yourself, and even in the replies to posts (of yourself or people you voluntarily follow, and whose followers are likely similar in opinion to yourself!) you can selectively mute or block people. So individuals do not actually need any additional censorship.
That's a fantasy solution. Person A can send you abuse, so you block them. Person B though is free to send you abuse, and so can the next 10,000 people. They might be a minority but even if you block them all, you've still received 10,000 hate messages and you have to spend a lot of time doing your own policing.
And then everyone else still has to wade through all this crap, or see "blocked message" everywhere.
Moderation is essential for most online communities.
And then those 10,000 people can do the same to everyone else.
> Person A can send you abuse, so you block them. Person B though is free to send you abuse, and so can the next 10,000 people.
That's a completely fantastical example. A normal person will never have close to unmanageably many replies. This is at most a problem for celebrities, which can be granted other solutions, e.g. only people they follow can reply, which solves the problem.
> Moderation is essential for most online communities.
There is a big difference between forums and social media, where you choose your own filter bubble anyway.
The majority of Mastodon servers. And if you are on a minority, your server is probably blocked by the majority. So it's a general problem on Mastodon, not just one of specific servers.
I'm not a fan of the moderation policies from some in the more popular servers and I certainly don't like the idea of some overzealous moderator blocking whole instances, but this has nothing to do with (system-wide) censorship.
If each instance is a home, we should expect to follow their owner's rules when we are there. No owner is forced to give you a soapbox in their home for you to talk. If you want to have your own space, with your own rules, you are free to do so. You can invite whoever you want to your home and no one is going to come after you for the things you say in your home.
> I'm not a fan of the moderation policies from some in the more popular servers and I certainly don't like the idea of some overzealous moderator blocking whole instances, but this has nothing to do with (system-wide) censorship.
It has a lot to do with system wide censorship, as in the end the effect is approximately similar.
> If each instance is a home
That analogy is bad, as you could equally say that each social network "is a home" and therefore can censor everyone without mercy. You could even say that each country is "a home", and if you don't like state censorship, just emigrate etc.
> That analogy is bad, as you could equally say that each social network "is a home" and therefore can censor everyone without mercy.
And that would be perfectly justifiable. None of the big social media networks are forced to provide service to a customer that they don't want. It's not an utility, it should not be treated as such.
> if you don't like state censorship, just emigrate etc.
- The cost of creating a Mastodon instance for yourself is negligible compared to the cost of moving to a different country
- To "emigrate" to a different country implies having to abandon your original home country. In some cases, it even means having to renounce your original citizenship. Online, you can have different digital identities.
All that is being asked of you is to respect the rules of the home you are in. If this is difficult for you to understand, it's not a problem of your social peers.
> And that would be perfectly justifiable. None of the big social media networks are forced to provide service to a customer that they don't want. It's not an utility, it should not be treated as such.
The effect of big social media sites blocking free speech are not much different from the state doing it. It's like saying: "You are perfectly allowed to state your opinions! (but only at home, where nobody hears them)" This wouldn't be functionally different from the situation in China.
> The cost of creating a Mastodon instance for yourself
Doesn't solve the problem, as free speech instances get blocked by the other big instances.
Your problem is not of "free speech". Your problem is that you feel entitled to other people's attention, and you think if you are not "getting heard" by them, you are being censored.
Sorry, this is complete bullshit.
> but only at home, where nobody hears them
You can still invite people to your own home. If nobody is hearing it, it's because they are not interested to join you.
> Your problem is not of "free speech". Your problem is that you feel entitled to other people's attention, and you think if you are not "getting heard" by them, you are being censored.
That's false. On social media, everyone is free to follow just the people they want to follow. Muting is also an option.
Your problem is that you hate free speech. You don't want to just choose what you see yourself, you want also censor what other people are allowed see.
> You can still invite people to your own home.
Yes, that's possible in China as well. According to you, this justifies state censorship. After all, you are only censored in public on social media.
> That's false. On social media, everyone is free to follow just the people they want to follow. Muting is also an option.
This right here shows why you don´t understand why instance-wide blocking might be needed.
I can give you one clear example: my instance is running in Germany. As such, I need to comply with German laws. Now, if anyone from my instance follows someone from a "free speech extremist" instance and my server ends up with Nazi propaganda, guess who will be under investigation?
Substitute "Nazi propaganda" for "instances for sex-workers who might be victims of people trafficking" if you prefer.
> Yes, that's possible in China as well.
No, it's not. The Chinese police will come after you if you try to organize any type of opposition and they will have the power to hurt you without a fair trial.
Eugen is not going to do anything with you if you go talk shit about him on your instance. I know because I did it. ;)
> I can give you one clear example: my instance is running in Germany. As such, I need to comply with German laws.
Of course no admin can do anything about the law. That's in fact what Elon Musk said: The platform should only censor as much as is required by the law. But in practice on Mastodon much more is censored than on Twitter.
> The Chinese police will come after you if you try to organize any type of opposition
The Chinese police will certainly not come if you utter your opinions in your own home, precisely because nobody will hear them. Restricting free speech only to areas where it can't be heared isn't free speech.
> will certainly not come (...) because nobody will hear them
> Restricting free speech only to areas where it can't be heared (sic) isn't free speech.
You missed the part where I said you can invite others and use that space to organize opposition. Was that intentional?
Also, I can't believe that you are making me say it:
- There is no global/universal definition of what is Free Speech.
- You don't get to decide what is or not "Free Speech".
- Even in the US, "Protection of Free Speech" is only about avoid persecution from the Government, not about being able to say whatever crap you want without consequences.
God, even for a conservative like me, this shit is tiring...
> "Protection of Free Speech" is only about avoid persecution from the Government, not about being able to say whatever crap you want without consequences.
The same thing could be said to you when your political opinions get censored. But it seems you can't imagine that.
I don't post things on social networks but I follow people. There are plenty of examples where people on Twitter (pre Musk) got censored for alleged "hate speech", which was just an excuse to censor tweets or people the (yes, far-left) censors hated.
And it never occurred to you to tell them "hey, if Twitter is blocking you, you can use these alternative networks where you get to control your presence so you don't get censored, and I will follow there"?
Shit, has it never occurred to them? Are you telling me that the overwhelming majority of the right wing influencers sees themselves as beholden to Big Tech that much? Wouldn't you at least consider the possibility that all this talk about "censorship" is just a lame excuse to rile up gullible people into a "fight" that doesn't really benefit anyone but themselves?
It is totally different than the state doing it, because people are free to associate with other websites, but are not free to associate with other nations.
Imagine if the major social networking sites censored a certain opinion. The effect would be basically the same. Just like if Google removed your website because they don't like your political opinion.
Ok I imagined it, and once again noticed that, no, the "effect" is not the same at all, because once again I'm free to associate with other websites that do not choose to remove my opinion.
But Google's market dominance is so high that most people won't see your website because it is blocked on Google. The result would be almost the same as if it was blocked everywhere.
You're so close to getting it. It's a good analogy because you could equally say that each social network "is a home". That is indeed the case.
And yes, countries do indeed also get to choose their own laws through their own government process. I'm happy to live in a country where our laws forbid government restrictions on speech but allow private "homes" to make their own rules. I think that's the right balance. But I don't get to tell other nations what their laws should be.
You mean if the government of that nation censors speech that challenges the status quo? I think it's very bad for governments to do that, and would go to some length to ensure that the government of my own nation does not allow that, but I also don't get a direct say in what the governments of other nations do and how the citizens of those nations respond. I can certainly criticize from afar, but I don't get to vote or protest or fight to change the laws of those nations.
No. The private freedom of association is important. I'm similarly free to disagree with the choices the social network makes, as are you. But it is not bad for them to make their own choices, it's good.
My instance is not "left-wing", I have had plenty of (civil) arguments with people all around the spectrum and no one is trying to cancel me because of that. I also have so far managed to go by without having to block any instance (but I did personally block a bunch of trolls and assholes from poa.st and fse)
I was initially inclined to invite you to my instance as well, but I'm starting to get the feeling that you are more interested in not being called out for any BS you put out than in a healthy social discourse.
The large instances block other instances whose politics they don't like, and since the majority of Mastodon has a certain political direction, that in turn results in homogeneity in which political direction is blocked. It's admin tribalism that goes beyond what individual users can decide.
- Why doesn't Jordan Peterson (which I bought the book, watched the videos and love to rewatch destroying Cathy Newman) take his thinkspot.com platform and make a Mastodon version out of it?
- Why no popular conservative figurehead left Twitter to create their own server on the Fediverse?
Twitter no longer censors right-wing people like in the past, so there is no need for them to switch. Twitter still doesn't censor left-wing people, but the left-wing people preferred the previous situation where right-wing people (their political enemy) did get censored. So many of the left-wing people were upset with the subjectively worse situation, so they switched to Mastodon, which is why most of Mastodon is very left-leaning.
You are so invested in the cultural wars, you didn't even stop to think about I asked and you rushed to find a rationalization to explain the current situation.
Some more questions for you to ponder:
- why hasn't the right wing got out of Twitter when it was dominated by the left?
- why was Mastodon popular for the woke leftist crowd since, I don't know, 2020?
- Jordan Peterson is still complaining about YouTube censoring/blocking/demonetizing his videos. Why doesn't he make his own Peertube?
Does it matter? It didn't stop Trump from creating Truth.social, did it?
Why couldn't other right-wing influencers get together and do something similar? Perhaps because there never was actual censorship?
Perhaps they just attracted more suckers to support them by bitching and moaning about "censorship" and "deplatforming" than if they went on and actually took control of their own social media presence.
Almost every platform is "only as much censorship as necessary". The threshold for necessary is just different. (4chan gets away with a lower threshold since the posts are very ephemeral)
They do it because the overwhelmingly vast majority of people don't like all that crap, and they are more interested in catering to that large group of normies than to the tiny group of edgelords out there. You just aren't their audience, and as you say, there are other places you can go for that experience.
It is true, you just don't like that it's true. Which is fine. You're entitled to that opinion.
And yes, every mainstream social media network absolutely does remove toxic radical posts across the spectrum, left right and neither. And toxic radicals across the spectrum all complain that it is only they who are being "censored", while the rest of us roll our eyes.
It's server admins making their choices for/against users, by blocking entire instances whose politics they don't like. There is a big difference between users making their own choices and admins making them for them.
Ok, so what? Server admins are just private people hosting their own thing. They can do whatever they want. It's honestly none of your business what they choose to do.
I argued that there is a lot of censorship on Mastodon. You may be okay with this (presumably because the censorship doesn't affect your own political opinions) but that's a different point.
It isn't "censorship", it's private people choosing not to host stuff they don't want to host. That's their choice, and it's good for them to be able to choose.
No it isn't. For instance, even though you seem to be mad about having your reach there limited by the choices of mastodon server admins, here you are freely expressing your opinions on a different website. You have not been censored.
Okay, Google removes your website from the search index. You have not been censored, after all, you are still on Bing. Oops, Bing also removed your Website. Don't worry, you are still on, err ... yandex.ru?
Yes, correct. Your website is not entitled to be included in any search index; many websites are not, for many different reasons.
This is a uniquely internet-era phenomenon, where people feel they are entitled not just to speak, but to be heard.
Nobody ever argued about whether the Wall Street Journal has an obligation to publish any article sent to them by anyone, or whether CBS is required to broadcast any television programming sent to them. It's an absurd idea.
Either you are a generous person who is paying out of his pocket to host a platform, or you require people to pay for usage (or your platform it truly p2p but good luck with people having the means to self-host nodes).
Fact is, most people are freeloaders so this is not sustainable either way.
Let's just say it like it is: most web communities are not worth the price it would take to keep them afloat. If I had $20 to spend I'd rather buy a bunch of books instead of 4 months of whatever mastodon server would ask me to pay for.
Usenet days, in which you paid a single amount to a single provider and all the boards were populated by technical people, are over. There is absolutely no single place on the web where you can interact with knowledgeable people in every field all clumped together (except sci-hub + email heh)
Gotta make a Pied Piper type thing that uses the indexedDB and some light blockchain to store data on all devices, maybe while tricking Cloudflare to do the bulk of the caching and serving lol.
Perhaps you could host on twitter while stenographically hiding from twitter. Let them collect ad revenue for rendering ads in a headless browser to nonexistent users.
> most web communities are not worth the price it would take to keep them afloat
Maybe this is more a problem with how we've structured the web and less a problem with the type of app or our expectation of it.
99% of what I view on the web doesn't have to be absolutely up to date. I can tolerate some latency. If we dropped the whole request-response thing in favor of pub-sub, and just had the servers wake up for one minute every hour to propagate state changes, we'd only need to pay for 1/60th of the uptime that we currently are--the cicada approach.
I realize that this would be very inconvenient for advertisers who are trying to create a controlled experience re: which material I see when. They would absolutely hate it if the default mode of consumption happened in an offline-friendly way. But given that I don't give a damn about what they want, I think it would be ok.
I would. Especially if the switching costs between paying those pennies and running my own node on a raspberry pi were low. And as the situation re: the normal approach continues to deteriorate, others might too.
If you really need something larger, the text could be an IPFS CID. Sure, you have to pin the data, so maybe that's a few more pennies, but IPFS has nice scalability features that would keep this overhead fairly low.
Yeah, I guess that reiterates the "who would join" point. I've tried to get my friends to join me on SSB. No luck.
We may have to wait for the solar flare that knocks out the internet. Then point-to-point stuff like SSB will be the only thing that's working... between the seventeen people that were using it in the first place.
Also, for the sake of humor, the offenses that the companies did should escalate. This started with the first platform declaring that it owned its users' pancreases and everything else seemed pretty minor compared to that.
The discussion around this topic is severely limited by the tech echo chamber we're in.
Ask random people on the street whether they care about their data or privacy, and if they care enough about it to boycott a popular web service, and you'll likely get blank stares or be laughed at for making such a proposition.
Most people don't care. Which is why this cycle of service hopping will never[1] be broken, and only privacy and tech enthusiasts will keep using privacy-respecting services. All this technobabble about privacy falls on deaf ears.
[1] Service hopping will still exist, but the only way privacy-respecting services will catch on in the mainstream is if they also offer a clear user experience advantage, and if they gain enough momentum for everyone else to want to use them. This is unlikely to happen with the modern indieweb movement, which is focused on the wrong things.
It's about ad-funded internet that can makes content creators prioritize quantity over quality.
It's about the destruction of healthy civic debate by having media channels that increasingly polarize public opinion, because it's easier to sell sensationalism than good reporting.
It's about how unsustainable the current model is.
They also worked back in the starting days of telephony (imagine everybody being forced on the same telephone network because telephone numbers were unrelated between networks, that would be pretty shitty, so ... we did something about it! [1])
Oh they will, but not in a way that anyone will like. With LLMs getting cheaper to run in the coming years it'll be passport based verification and login for everything or drown in completely human looking spam.
Repetition as a form of comedy is a classic. Monty Python used it a lot (eg 'The Larch'). I found this really amusing. Maybe you need to be British though.
I forgot it was a literal video and thought it was a CSS trick, where it randomly selected among text options and constructed the cycle forever, never stopping.
That would be amazing, by the way. Make it look like a video, and then the progress bar just slows and stops, and you're still there looking at new silly names and dumb stunts, hours later…
This seems like a thinly disguised jab at people using Bluesky and Threads. I've seen a lot of fediverse enthusiasts who are extremely cynical about those two new platforms, because the former is by Jack Dorsey (ex Twitter) and the latter is literally by Meta, which is of course run by Mark Zuckerberg. I can understand that towards Meta, but Bluesky seem to be trying something different and building a new protocol; when it comes from people who've been on the fediverse forever and regularly complain about how many other people aren't using it, this feels like sour grapes to me. The existing federated social media have some deeply ingrained problems stemming from the protocol, and new ideas ought to be welcomed.
What about the Fediverse flaws that can not be fixed within the context of ActivityPub?
BlueSky creation of a separate protocol is an obvious attempt to create a platform where they get to become the gatekeepers of content distribution. The fact that they haven't opened up yet for other nodes makes it clear.
ActivityPub has effectively become a drop-in replacement for the constellation of older systems (OStatus etc) that the fediverse used to use. That was possible because it didn't require changes in how the nodes in the network relate to eachother. Bluesky on the other hand is trying out a completely different network topology. It's too soon to say if it'll ultimately be better, but if it does succeed, it won't necessarily produce something that could be retrofitted onto ActivityPub.
> The fact that they haven't opened up yet for other nodes makes it clear.
That's far too cynical. A federated social network is a really difficult project and there's many good reasons you might want to start with a single node.
> A federated social network is a really difficult project and there's many good reasons you might want to start with a single node.
And yet, Nostr is growing just nicely, with a perfectly reasonable decentralized model.
I was a bit involved with Bluesky early discussions. It became clear from the get-go that they were not willing to give a chance to AP. They wanted to have something they can control, top-down. Even if that means reinventing all the different wheels they are doing.
Not the point. The point is that if Bluesky really has a goal of building a decentralized solution and had seen a fundamental problem with AP, they could work on their alternative while showing how their alternative can scale better. If it they are criticizing AP but their software is as centralized as Twitter, then they are just larping.
I find it tremendously funny a bunch of tech people are fuming over "tech billionaries" all of a sudden when the previous generation of tech billionaires were actively liaisoning with government agencies to erect horrible censorship regimes*
(Also, you might want to check on the concept of "multiple people" which may, surprisingly, hold different opinions and express them at different times or events. Noone in this world owes you consistency to other people.)
The accusation of hypocrisy is generally untenable from a moral point of view unless the discussion was about the virtues and vices of that person to start with. It's just one of those modern virtue-ethical fallacies. The question of whether a standpoint is morally the right standpoint is orthogonal to questions about the personal consistency of persons who defend the standpoint. A signpost does not need to walk into the direction it points at all.
Another, more general fallacy is the computation that two moral wrongs can somehow make a right. They never do.
These are not moral opinions, by the way. These points are codified into law and common jurisdiction. You cannot defend yourself in court by pointing out that others have broken the law, too.
An observation of hypocrisy does not per-se invalidate the original observation, but it does expose the speaker as acting from motivated reasoning, which may put into doubt their motivations and hence their conclusions. It does not invalidate any evidence presented, but it contextualizes it by showing it to be produced by a biased and selective process. This is particularly important in political rhetoric, where framing is usually more impactful than facts.
> may put into doubt their motivations and hence their conclusions.
That's literally a fallacy, too. Look, you can attempt to frame it as you like, accusing others of hypocrisy is deviating from the original argument and fallacious. It's an invalid ad hominem attack to distract from the topic. The only exception is when the accusation is that the arguer does not really mean the argument sincerely, but that's another type of argument and not under discussion here.
Likewise, to re-iterate this point, two wrongs never make a right, yet in nearly all cases of blaming someone for being a hypocrite that type of fallacious argument is exactly the motivation behind the accusation. It certainly is in the above discussion.
It's only a fallacy if you're looking at the conclusion in isolation. In many cases, that a conclusion was brought to your attention implies a large amount of other conclusions that you assume to be false because they were not raised. This is the difference between "telling a technical truth" and "actually telling the truth" - when you omit observations that would contextualize a conclusion, you're using a valid argument to mislead people. So hypocrisy is not an accusation of lying by falsity but by omission. If I say "X was stealing office supplies from the breakroom" and I omit that every other employee was also stealing office supplies from the breakroom, I am lying even when X was in fact stealing. The exception implies the rule; the rule is a lie. If I speak a sentence that I know will mislead the listener, the sentence being logically true in isolation does not save me.
In the cases under discussion (like the above one), the person accusing the arguer of hypocrisy is trying to distract and is arguing in bad faith. That's why it's called whataboutism.
As a typical example, Russian propaganda sources have replied to accusation of Russian war crimes in Ukraine with "The US has invaded Iraq and committed countless war crimes." This is not only fallacious, because US war crimes have no bearing on Russian war crimes, it's also hypocritical and logically inconsistent. It's hypocritical because the accusation would only work (from the perspective of the arguer) if they recognized war crimes and argued against them, but the rhetorical goal is the opposite. It's logically inconsistent because the desired inference is that what Russia does is not bad but the argument schema rests on the accusation that what the US in the past did was bad.
That fallacious scheme is very common. You can observe it nearly everywhere, especially in political discussions, despite the fact that it makes no sense whatsoever on a closer look.
The original example under discussion has a similar structure but also differs in an important detail. Somebody argued "what about previous tech billionaires who did some other nefarious things." The correct conclusion from this would be that previous tech billionaires (distraction topic) and current tech billionaires (real topic) did some nefarious things, if the claims are true. But that's not what the arguer had in mind. The arguer wanted to relativize the arguments against tech billionaires in the real topic. In this case, the accusation of hypocrisy against whataboutism is made in bad faith because the arguer knows that the two topics do not have anything to do with each other. Understanding the context of what previous tech billionaires did does not help you evaluating the morality of the real topic in this case. It does not provide any context needed because the contexts barely have anything in common (different times, different tech billionaires, etc.).
That's in my experience another common case when people argue against pointing out whataboutism. The people who do that have rhetorical goals, of course, but they are not arguing correctly. Whataboutism is practically always a fallacy. I believe there are cases you describe where pointing out a hypocrisy can lead to a better understanding of the subject matter, but these are very rare and even then they still distract from the question under discussion.
I believe the reason why you're so keen on insisting that you're right and that whataboutism is often wrong is mostly psychological. People want to set themselves apart and it's normal to come up with contrarian opinions about perceived wisdom. I have strong tendency do that myself.
Sorry for the lengthy post. I just wanted to make it very clear that you did not convince me at all. The topic is important to me for various reasons, both professionally and personally.
> As a typical example, Russian propaganda sources have replied to accusation of Russian war crimes in Ukraine with "The US has invaded Iraq and committed countless war crimes."
Sure, and if someone only called out Russian war crimes you shouldn't take them as "a person who dislikes war crimes" but "a person who dislikes Russia", and expect them to produce information on that basis. This is not fallacious, it's vital information to understand what they're saying: when they say "Russia has committed a war crime", it does not imply that this is an uncommon crime to have committed. Other nations could be committing that war crime all the time and that person wouldn't raise it to your attention, because they're focused on Russia. The knowledge of their stance is necessary to understand what they're saying at all. And that's even before accounting for positive bias, where you're not mentioning American war crimes despite knowing of them because you have positive feelings about America. (The same thing happens, of course, in reverse.) You can't have a discussion only in the positive space of what is actually said; words simply don't work like that. Every concretization in a message implies information by means of generalizations you didn't make. If I say "jews murder thousands of people every year", then I imply that this number lies above the baserate of murders; if it in fact doesn't or is less than the baseline, then I've been (possibly intentionally) deceptive without ever saying a false word. (Base rate fallacy!) This is not a rare corner case, it's extremely widespread.
> The arguer wanted to relativize the arguments against tech billionaires in the real topic.
Correct, and this is a valid argumentative technique. Why wouldn't it be? That's just a framing/categorization debate. They're a proxy for causal-structure debates for people who don't know the term "causal structure". "Is Elon Musk an usual or unusual member of the category of billionaire social network owners" is material to the article.
I couldn't disagree more, especially about Russia example because the Russian war qualifies, by application of objective criteria from UN conventions and ICC, as a genocide. You're right about the murders example, but this is not related at all to the above debate and, again, a deviation. Whether Elon Musk is an outlier and exceptionally evil as a tech billionaire or whether every tech billionaire is as evil as him has absolutely not the slightest bearing on his evilness. That's why the accusation of whataboutism is perfectly adequate and reasonable in this case.
As I said in my initial post, the moral independence of actions is codified in law and common practice. The "others did it too" defense does not work in criminal court, and I can assure you that it will also not work for Russia.
> Correct, and this is a valid argumentative technique.
It's provably a fallacy. On a side note, framing has nothing to do with making fallacious arguments, it only pertains to how you express arguments. "The glass is half full" vs "The glass is half empty" -- that's framing. Two different arguments about the same topic -- that's not framing. It also has nothing to do with the baserate fallacy. If someone commits a baserate fallacy, you simply point out that they've committed a baserate fallacy. This only makes sense for statistical arguments. Framing and categorization are also two totally different terms for different application domains. Framing does not concern the categories and population you choose when making statistical inferences. I don't know why people misuse the term all the time, it's not hard to understand if you look at the original literature in experimental psychology. Framing is also not related in any obvious way with causal structure/causal models. Moreover, your example about Elon Musk is not about causal structure, it concerns a statistical property; at least, I cannot see how a causal model can be used to support "usual" vs. "unusual" attributions. However, I grant you that maybe it could be spelled out in causal modeling terms, for example in Judea Pearl's approach, but it's not obvious how to do that.
Anyway, for me this discussion is closed. You're not very persuasive because you're using the wrong terminology. As I said, I'm interested in this topic also from a professional perspective. I know what I'm talking about (whether you believe me or not). I'll keep it at that and close this conversation.
Whataboutism is constantly employed by individuals more concerned about their "side" winning than concerns about actually solving problems. It is rarely a question asked in good faith, but rather a thinly veiled accusation of hypocrisy (as per your comment). That the question might have a legitimate answer is never considered.
Getting to the original point: What about the previous generation of tech billionaire? I think Zuck is an awful person and I will not sign up for Threads. I also think that Musk is an awful person and I will not sign up for Twitter. Where is the hypocrisy in this stance?
I apologise for misinterpreting your comment. I did delete my Twitter account under Dorsey's tenure as I became more aware of his behaviour and policies, so I believe that my point still stands.
Fair enough! But then your strongest counter isn't "you are engaging in whataboutism", but "Yeah what about Dorsey, I left under Dorsey, I act consistently." "Whataboutism" as a concept is only needed if that defense is unavailable.
theres some truth to this. I live in an EU timezone and often see the pattern where I receive a upvotes during the day and as evening comes along theres a shower of downvotes
I left WhatsApp when it was acquired by Meta (née Facebook) in 2014. I actually lost friends because of it-- they didn't answer calls or texts or any other form of communication on another platform reliably. It was surprisingly difficult to stick to my guns. I did--but it very much impacted my life.
Here’s a fact: Meta grossed $117 billion in 2022. Almost as much as a major car manufacturer. They’re doing things with that data. It’s a scary amount of power.
If I tell a friend "I am not going to use WhatsApp. But you can call me, email me, text me, use Signal, use Matrix, knock on my door..." and this friend refuses to keep in touch, who is the one "dictating" the messaging system?
I'm not asking them to change their mode of communication with others. I'm just saying that I'm not going to join something that I believe to be harmful out of peer pressure.
> Some of you really are absolutely socially inept.
So if someone tells you "I'm sorry, I am not available at this channel, can we arrange some other method?" and you refuse to accomodate you take the other as socially inept?
This is madness, I will say it explicitly, spelt-out.
There exist systems which may violate your privacy, and you think that a possible demand to use them from any third party would be "fair", aproblematic?!
Good normalcy is that if some acquaintance put as a condition any controversial constraint, such as destructive behaviour ("binge drinking" etc.), irresponsible behaviour, degrading behaviour (that spyware is part of this latter) - the reply is simply "No".
And that would be antisocial behaviour, "No, I will not get tattooed (etc.) just because you would like that"?!
Children have replaced Men in this world.
Edit: oh, and by the way: behaviour that would stick to the framework of proper Society would be «[anti-]social»?!?!?! That is a dire reversal terms, and it shows the (satanic) perversity these """societies""" have reached.
I have no control over what they do. If they’re so attached to using whatsapp that they’d stop being friends with me rather than use signal, the friendship wasn’t worth a lot in the first place.
I hope you do not have the expectation that in order to contact """friends""" one would ever adopt bestial behaviour. It takes a beast to act like a beast. Everybody will live according to nature.
Your post seems to be assumptions loaded. It sounds as if you were accusing strawmen of expecting people to behave rationally, wisely etc. That image has been superseded even in the theoretical grounds in which it had been used historically as a premise (e.g. Economics).
- They don't need your contact list to still build your contact graph.
- They still collect things like your location, your call history, etc. In Brazil it's quite common for people to use WhatsApp to call their doctors. This means that Facebook can know what type of health issues you have just by checking if you are calling/texting a specialist.
- They are still owned by Facebook and they take whatever data they can to feed the Borg.
- I can not prove it, but I am convinced that they scan the video stream in the device.
Why wouldn't you assume they do? Sorry if that sounds argumentative, it's not my intent. As I understand it, their software processes everything you send to/through them. (And it's easy to imagine reasons why they would be interested in doing so)
Taking your first three points as true, the trade is you get free global multi-way instant messaging, including pictures and video/audio clips, and video calling, for no cost other than minimal data costs.
Lots of people are currently willing to make that trade, at least until a competitor comes along that offers something better.
I recently started using WhatsApp regularly because it's the only convenient end-to-end encrypted messaging app I know. The only thing they seem to be getting out of it is some metadata and the opportunity to sell services to businesses. Seems like an acceptable compromise to me.
Previously I used Matrix/Element but never got it to work reliably with my friends (decryption issues, session verification obsession). And Signal has no web app. So WhatsApp it is for now.
Can you tell me in words the value (V1) or values that you're filtering for with this life choice? And whether there are other values (Vall) that you hold and would like your friends to hold. And talk to me about the correlation between V1 and Vall.
Because my opinion is that my friends willingness (or preference) to use a non secure messaging app owned by a giant tech corp has very very very low correlation with whether I'd like them to be a friend.
I'd also point out that this is exactly how bubbles occur. "Everyone I know hates WhatsApp/Facebook/whatever" says the person who refuses to communicate via those platforms.
> I'd also point out that this is exactly how bubbles occur
No it isn't. You'd be surprised in the variety of people that you meet when you don't use algorithmic systems to do so. Just because you only maintain relationships with people who are not so glued to WhatsApp that they won't communicate through any other means, does not mean you have created a bubble for yourself.
People who use WhatsApp also go places, do things and talk to people. They don't sit at home alone in their room on WhatsApp 24/7. That's what Hacker News is for.
i use whatsapp to call my grandma and my aunt among other people, because that's what they use. Actually, my parents too, now that i think about it, they fall back to whatsapp all the time. How in tf is that an "algorithmic people-meeting system"??? did it pick a grandma for me according to some algorithm?
> think about it, they fall back to whatsapp all the time. How in tf is that an "algorithmic people-meeting system"???
It isn't. Nor did I say it was. The person I replied to said that not using WhatsApp is how social bubbles are formed. It isn't. That's what I was refuting.
It's true you are always able to avoid bubbles, and nothing I say precludes that ability.
However, information bubbles are a function of friction and defaults. If communication lessens with a people who don't share a particular view (ie, that Whatsapp has to be avoided) then that friction lessens exposure to that viewpoint, forming a bubble.
> you meet when you don't use algorithmic systems to do so.
AFAIK there is no algorithmic system on Whatsapp to meet people.
Most non-techies don't give a crap indeed. Maybe these people haven't traveled much at all. When you are in the middle of a non-US city, you're trying to get the keys to your stay and the night is falling, you fire up that one messenger you're not supposed to use because zuck bad, and figure out the key situation in 1 second. Then you lecture your newfound "whatsapp bubble friend" who brought you the keys about how low and unethical it is of them to use whatsapp.
This is a useful thing to consider when using social media or, say, dating apps in general, come to think of it.
Like you, the choice of messaging app is quite beside the point (except FB Messenger being out of the question for reasons I'll explain). So, I still use a combination of WhatsApp, Signal and Skype.
If a friendship depended on me having a Twitter/FB/TikTok/Instagram profile though, I'm more likely to let that fade away. Similarly with dating: it'd be a dealbreaker to have to maintain a social media presence or find someone solely through Tinder or Bumble or whatever. I enjoy life more without social media in it, and without tech companies gatekeeping human connection through a mobile app. Some things just have to stay offline for the sake of me and my mental health.
Practically it's impossible to quit WhatsApp, more so in certain countries. However if you still have that old account, you can choose not to accept any of Meta'a new terms and agreements, and surprisingly they still let you use it! The last time I accepted the terms was probably around 2013.
I just say "can we use Signal? It's super secure." And people generally are fine to use Signal. They don't use SMS because it's expensive and many that own an iPhone in countries where Android dominate don't use iMessage because, well, few around them use iPhone and the interface (i.e., the phone number) doesn't really tell them that they won't get charged for a text message.
I've posted up in many countries, and it's rarely a show stopper.
Anecdotally, all of my friends who are part of group chats are annoyed by them. Too much noise for too little signal. On a personal level, if there’s anything in a group chat that would be relevant to me I’ll know about it from one of the participants through another medium, like an SMS or phone call or when we see each other.
If they are really your only option, you can use whatever insane platform they are on long enough to forge a couple friendships, explain your stance and then quit.
If they are your friends they will understand, if not it wasn't worth the effort to begin with.
Someone does not have to understand your idiosyncrasies to be your friend.
Most people will not, in fact, understand why you are so picky about the chat platforms you are willing to use, and they will think (correctly, I would say) that you care more about your social media stances than you care about their friendship. So you will think they were not worth the effort to begin with, and they will think the same in return, but ultimately they are not restricting their potential friend pool nearly as much as you are. If it works out well for you, great, otherwise you have to be a bit more pragmatic.
My statement still stands. If you ask me to do hard drugs with you, I will say no. Does that mean I value my physical and mental integrity over our friendship? YES! I absolutely do.
It is perfectly fine to value certain things over friendship. You just have to be conscious of the friction that your convictions will cause and ask yourself whether it's worth it for you. Health is worth it. Chat apps? I don't know. If you ask me to use Signal, that seems reasonable enough and I'll do it, but if we're a group of 10 coordinating over Whatsapp and you want me to tell you whenever plans are being made, it's like, OK, but I'm doing the effort for our personal convos, can't you meet me halfway or something? That's the kind of friction you're going to deal with. Up to you.
If the content is compelling enough you will chat where you both agree to. If not it is like telling someone the only way you will talk is in the park by the chess tables.
Sure maybe you talk to them by chess tables sometimes, but if they won't meet you for coffee then they aren't your friends, just chess table acquaitances.
Real example: My friend group has a hiking group on WhatsApp and there is one friend who is not on it. One person will propose a hike, and will keep messaging the group with information about it. Someone then has to message that other friend and tell them about it, every time there is a slight adjustment to plans.
Let's say you are my friend, and Bob is arranging a hike for 10am on Saturday. You usually come on the hike so I let you know. Even though all the details are on the group, you ask me all the questions and I have to fill you in. Then on the morning of the hike Darcy's car breaks down and the time gets rearranged from 10am to 11am, so then I have to tell you that as well because you aren't on the group chat, and suddenly I feel like I am becoming your PA (and if I forget to tell you the time has changed then suddenly it's my fault - even though i'm not arranging the damn hike and you could have been on the group in the first place you just refuse).
Some of my best friends decided to quit certain platforms like Facebook and yes, Whatsapp too (two people). I definitely understood. I even have signal and telegram installed. But I never remember to check them. It's just not practical.
> if they are people worth your while, they'll make sure to let you know about it using other means...
Ugh, I might but it's annoying for me (your friend) to be your personal messenger whenever there is something you might be interested in on the group chat.
Why is it on me to keep you in the loop? It's why we created the group chat, Dave.
Particularly that time when you got all annoyed at me for not being invited camping - I didn't even organise the trip in the first place, it's not my job to tell you about every event on the group chat just because you won't download WhatsApp.
If you want to know what they talk about, then you have to use the same platform. This is trivial, and doesn't have much to do with being able to quit WhatsApp.
It does have a lot to do with quitting WhatsApp - because WhatsApp is the platform that is the de-facto application for this in some parts of the world.
For this use case, I use a burner Google voice number, give that to Whatsapp and don't give it access to my contacts or anything on my phone. Late model phones don't give apps IMEI or real MAC.
It's not perfect: when you connect with people they can easily associate your WhatsApp account with your identity (add contact) and also share info/pics/etc about you that you wouldn't want shared. They can do this even if you're not on WhatsApp, and Meta can use face recognition and other techniques to create a profile for you, then associate that profile with the other days and profile they have for you. It's trivial to narrow the down to a few million users then match on photo etc. Unclear if they bother, given that 99% of users just give away their privacy.
Also, Whatsapp verification uses SMS. If they'd used a verification URL, they could've (bounced through) Facebook.com, Instagram.com, etc and associated the account via (first party) cookies. I'm guessing they don't because 99% of users happily give the app all the permissions it needs and SMS is more universal.
In countries where WhatsApp is ubiquitous, it is used for more than just messaging friends.
For example, many childcare places will send updates through WhatsApp groups. So you have to convince the business and all their clients to switch to signal or do without notifications for your child's childcare.
Aside from people, a significant number of companies, and even government services, offer service through WhatsApp as well. In some parts of the world it's really impossible not to use it.
Why have they been so successful? Why didn't MMS 6.0 implement everything that exists in modern chat applications. Why is Meta anything more than the anonymous humble entities producing sms and "phone" apps?
I guess because Whatsapp provides a unified and standard way to communicate between people on different provider networks / countries for free? You get groups, text/images/location sharing, video/audio calls, cross-countries, that works very reliably, and you only need internet (which can be found almost anywhere even if that's just wifi).
MMS still don't work reliably for me (lost a message just last week that someone swear to have sent). And for a long time they were not free as well.
I'm not actually suggesting using MMS. I just wanted to illustrate that we've had instant communication technology (even "rich" multi-media) long before Whatsapp etc. Why didn't the providers of that technology (telecom companies) become Meta?
The difference is that MMS/SMS is standardized and agnostic to the client interface. While WhatsApp is proprietary and monopolizes the client.
We could easily have had a "internet direct message" standard implementing most of WhatsApps features. (Wait... Isn't that SMTP?)
Maybe I'm just ignorant, but what does WhatsApp bring that let's say email++ does not have?
MMS has been exorbitantly, insanely expensive and with extremely high failure rates in much of the world until...
... actually that's still the case in varying degrees and locations. And once you've got great market penetration in an area, there's little to no reason to switch unless the competition is noticeably better, which MMS really has no claim to.
Email definitely did not. When WhatsApp was beginning its rise to domination, it was on tons of feature phones - mostly just calls, texts, and WhatsApp. Email implies a lot more general internet access than was generally supported or understood by people, since it supports arbitrary data and hosts.
Where in Africa? People just use Uber or alternatives, and it works fine pretty much everywhere I've been (I'm Kenyan. I've lived in South Africa for extended periods, and travelled extensively in Namibia and Tanzania). I've never once heard of anyone using WhatsApp for cab hailing. It gets pretty exhausting finding people talking about a whole continent on HN in broad strokes as though it's some small town they once went to on holiday, and can now offer their expert opinion on.
As an Australian I sympathise, it's not all HN'rs [1] but there's certainly a strong core of proud ignorance confident in their assertaions about other cultures, countries, political systems, etc.
Here I was expecting something from Tanzania or Kenya and we're back in Northern Mali!
I'm a bit old - I travelled extensively about the globe when I was younger doing geophysicsl survey work and ground truthing the transition from many paper map systems to WGS84.
Africa has some fantastic musicians.
All I can offer in return is some Australians and their collaborations ...
Tjamuku Ngurra is beautiful. I don't think I've listened to Aboriginal fusion (there's all sorts of interesting things happening there) before. My consumption of Australian music has mostly been limited to Tame Impala, whom I love, but this is special. Thank you so much for sharing.
Australian music is surprisingly broad for such a small (population wise, physically it's the same land area as mainland USofA (and together the US + Australia are less than the area of Africa ..)) .. "aboriginal fusion" (that works) is also broader than many might imagine.
That may well be true for your one experience in Tanzania. I wasn't there with you. I have neither a reason, nor the desire to counter your personal experience.
Here's what I find baffling. You had a single, curated, extremely limited travel experience, in (I'm guessing) a handful of places, in one country, over a limited time period. You extrapolated from that experience to making a bold, sweeping claim about an odd 1.2 billion people living in 54 countries. And with an air of worldly confidence, to boot. What you said of Africa is not even generally true of the city of Dar es Salaam, let alone all of Tanzania. How could it possibly be true for a whole continent? I'm genuinely in awe of both the audacity it takes to make such a claim, and the thought process that leads to it. I do feel a bit bad for singling you out (but only a little bad) since it's sadly not unusual for people to choose to talk about places in this way when they don't expect to be challenged.
If it makes you feel any better, people also do the same sort of inaccurate cultural reductivism about the United States -- a vast geographical area containing many strongly differentiated local regional cultures -- on a daily basis.
It does, actually Quite unexpectedly, too. I have an American friend who keeps recommending places I should visit in the States, but I always respond by saying I don't want to get shot or racially profiled. It's a source of constant frustration for him. I did not expect HN to be where I'd find empathy for his perspective.
I did the same (although some years after the acquisition) and had a similar experience, though over the years I've managed to claw back some of the friends I lost. Though it's still hard to communicate with them.
It's been slow, but I've noticed a slow trickle of users towards Signal, at least in Europe. I was happily surprised when the owners of a house we viewed defaulted to reaching us via Signal instead of whatsapp.
Most people I know are on Signal here (Germany), that includes older relatives.
Alas, for group conversations or bad connection situations (e.g. at a festival), everyone uses WA. Not sure why groups are always WA, but Signal (and actually any other messenger) sucks for bad connections.
and at unsecure communication. Their chats aren't e2ee by default, making it worse than Whatsapp. Also, videocalls in telegram are much worse compared to said messenger
No, WhatsApp is truly e2e encrypted and uses the same Ratchet algorithm in Signal, IIRC. That's why tptacek and moxie were generally positive about it.
I think there's something about key rotation and a default setting where it doesn't notify you if the keys change, or something like that, at one point.
It's most likely e2e up until the moment LEO requests information on a particular user and then Meta updates your app to a trojaned version, that just APPEARS E2E.
It also heavily encourages you to “back up” your messages to them in an unencrypted manner. It will bug you literally every time you enter the app if you opt out of this “feature”.
For what it's worth I have a few Signal group chats going. We had our video call to talk to the owners (we're moving to the Netherlands from Ireland) over Signal and it worked well, but that was on a strong wifi connection
Telegram is getting almost as common as whatsapp for my social circle, including friends, co-workers and family. Most people I interact with are on either platform.
Thought something similar, but for my personal network of friends and contacts. Sometimes I am pleasantly surprised to learn, that yet another person I know has or is willing to get Signal.
We need to build and keep asking people whether they have Signal or would please get it.
The crypto integration put me off as well. Not because I'm opposed to crypto currencies in principle, but integrating them into a privacy focused chat app is plain idiotic.
Crypto disposals are taxable in the UK and I believe in most other countries as well. So tax authorities have a legitimate reason to look into what's going on there. There is no right to privacy when it comes to buying and selling securities.
Everyone I communicate with uses Signal now. In Europe using Signal costs the same amount as using WhatsApp, if not less because of the missing bloatware (backups etc).
In a lot of the world, WhatsApp is free (I assume some kind of payment from Meta to the telecom). There's no way Signal will compete with something that is bundled with every phone contract for whatever reason.
In Australia both Signal and WhatsApp are free, aside from using the data service rather than the "telephone" service, and we pay for a monthly or annual data quota with our phone plan.
Do you have separate charges for Signal and/or WhatsApp?
Yeah I guess I confused a lot of people: the charges are for the data, not the app. They are tiny, but if you use the app heavily and rely on it, you don't want to be disconnected when your data runs out.
I read this as a phone contract having a bundled: unlimited whatsapp, Spotify, Facebook bundles where data usage is not counted towards your total data allowance in the contract. For example in my country in the middle of Europe you have bundles with unlimited traditional communication and 20 50 80GB of mobile data.
When you WhatsApp all day sending videos, gifs, messages, voice messages, pictures, documents..I can consume up to 12GB per month, this costing me an amount of my 20GB data plan. While a other provider I can choose has a 20GB data plan with a unlimited WhatsApp bundle. Sadly they don’t offer eSIM and 5G so it’s a no go for me.
This has been a big downside for years, I'm surprised it hasn't been fixed yet. Your account has to be tired to a phone number (though you can use voip) and only their mobile apps act as a primary that can register the account.
My whole extended family is on Line. It does it all really, and no ads or intrusion. It has only one single drawback - one device only (or one, plus a Windows PC, which is not an option for me).
The social-media business is neither trustworthy for me as a consumer nor more fulfilling than a real conversation with a real human somewhere. I don't want a relationship with social media.
But I'm not going to be delusional about it, if literally hundreds of millions of people are depending on social-media business for their social happiness, I can see that it works for them.
I want a secure, trustworthy, minimally-viable telecommunications channel for some contacts. I support Signal, it has characteristics that I trust, including being open source.[1]
I also have shown other people how to enable Google's RCS messaging.[2] It's better than SMS.
As someone else in Eastern Europe, 99% of people I know communicate over Messenger, Instagram (if more hip), or Viber (if 40+). I believe that the messaging app situation varies a lot from one city to another or even one "group" to another.
Interesting, my contacts are mostly in Romania, Estonia, Latvia and Poland, and mostly IT savvy (as users, not programmers), so the latter could well be a factor.
In my view, and as someone who's never used instant messaging, it should be a small accommodation to make for a friendship. In the same way that I would be happy to provide a vegetarian option at a dinner.
Let's say that person A refuses to use $APP and person B only communicates through $APP.
Then, from A's perspective, it is just a small accommodation for B to communicate through alternative means. And from B's perspective, it is just a small accommodation for A to use $APP.
"Look, I am not letting Zuck suck up my personal data and watch ads if there is an alternative that's owned by a non-profit, does not show ads and end-to-end encrypts everything as a rule."
Asking to use Zucks apps anyway as a small accommodation would paint the one asking as an ignorant who is being unreasonable and does not take care of their digital hygiene properly. Sure, they might resent the other person for pointing their own failings out, but it's hard to actually argue.
I think it's pretty clear at this point that most non-techies place no value on digital privacy. So, from the perspective of someone whose friends all use Zuck's app, the other person is trying to complicate their life for no benefit.
Within their value system, they're not being ignorant. Rather, they're perfectly rational.
The analogy doesn't work because providing a vegetarian option is something you only have to do once, or at least only the few times the vegetarian friend has dinner at your house. Changing your messaging platform for a friend is more like becoming a vegetarian yourself and convincing all your other friends to go vegetarian to please your friend (because a messaging app is only useful if most of your friends are on it).
Also, more people understand your morale position of "I don't want to kill animals".
Few people understand "this messenger is slightly less privacy focused. It's owned by Meta. It's against my principles".
I am vegan so I would definitely break ties with friends that make mean "jokes" about veganism or myself. But I certainly would never let go of friends because they want me to use WhatsApp.
Probably true. Still, perceptions change over time. Not too long ago vegetarianism (never mind veganism!) was widely seen as an irrational fringe position.
Similarly, I live sans messaging for the simple reason that I never upgraded to a smartphone. In the 2000s this solicited reactions of amazed befuddlement and surprise, occasionally mirth. Nowadays, in my experience, most people intuitively understand the decision.
I don’t get your analogy having multiple messaging apps on your device is not forcing you to do anything. Just to get in the right messaging app to talk to your different communities. I mean my kids are doing that all the time between snap (their friends), whatsapp (family) or Signal (me) (and I’m pretty sure they use at least a lot more channels (discord, insta, etc.)
That can work if groups of contacts are still grouped by app, like friends and family using different apps and you don't need to talk to both at once. But in the example given by the OP, if one friend wants to use a different app than other friends, it would be really awkward. You'd have to copy every message to your friends twice -- once on the app with the other friends and once in the app for the contrarian friend. In practice, that friend would be left out of many social events.
There was a time when you could contact anyone on any platform through a centralized application which simply called into libpurple. Really the problem here is that you along with everyone else have caved into big tech's insistence on being incompatible with everything.
Sure. The point was more about the many small frictions that may or may not exist in any given friendship, with a lack of messaging capacity being no more egregious than any other.
Demanding all your friends switch or kill their messaging apps is quite another matter, and an eccentric one at that.
Because, I am guessing it was less like friendship and more like convenient boredom reduction. The WhatsApp group is there, a joke or whatever gets posted, maybe a lets go to the bar guys (or girls?) but the bond
is not strong enough that they bother to contact people who are
on another medium.
This is called "splitting", or all-or-nothing thinking. It's a common psychological defense mechanism.
You don't just have friends and non-friends. It's a spectrum. By raising the bar for reaching you some people no longer cared to be your acquaintances, and others remained connected but talked to you less frequently. And so you lose some of the contact that you had with other people because of your own actions, no one else's.
At the "far end of friendship spectrum", that is the closest form of friendship, there's no one there. Given enough obstacles that you yourself put up eventually you'll lose absolutely everyone.
I genuinely don't get how people manage to find excuses to talk to most people. Even before I left Facebook I mostly spoke to people face to face and when that became impractical I stopped talking altogether.
"By raising the bar for reaching you some people no longer cared to be your acquaintances, and others remained connected but talked to you less frequently. And so you lose some of the contact that you had with other people because of your own actions, no one else's."
This is completely ass-backwards thinking. We don't have apps growing out of us and we are not doing things to ourselves "because of our own actions".
Leaving a bad app is a bit like leaving a country where a dangerous tyrannical dictator has set up shop. You didn't decide to rape murder and pillage your neighbors, the corrupt leader did. Getting the hell out of dodge is an extremely reasonable thing to do, and you are not cutting yourself off from your acquaintances, the evil dictator is.
Besides, app messaging is completely backwards anyways, we invented protocols because they are the best way to reliably communicate.
If you leave a "country where a dangerous tyrannical dictator has set up shop" you will also almost certainly lose friends and acquaintances. And if you don't you won't. It's always heartbreaking for all kinds of refugees. But leaving, arguably, has more upsides, for example not getting brutalized by the internal security services.
I think this sentiment underplays how useful casual acquaintances are, on their own but more importantly as a step towards forming those strong bonds in the first place.
As an adult, how do you make the strong bonds that lead to people going out of their way to remember to invite you to things? Maybe you meet someone and click immediately, more likely it's someone you know from work, and commonly it's acquaintances from seemingly superficial activities that become close friends after you're mingled and mixed with enough folks to find your tribe.
"everyone complains about group chats being noisy" but there's a good reason they're still in there (obviously a big part of it is fomo but it's not obvious to me that everyone's lives would be better rejecting them. Human social dynamics are messy and not efficient).
That second step is the hardest part. How on earth do you make new close friends, I try to be the first to reach out but people seem too guarded or busy the only way they'll meet is if the gathering is large enough but the problem with that is those are very hard to organize since everyone has their own schedule.
I think the answer to that.... is that you can't, unless by accident :( All of my close-ish friends I met randomly and we just clicked.
But like, the world is going in a direction sadly where meaningful human friendships are disappearing, being replaced with endless acquittances who do not care about you, and you do not care about them either. Which I find really sad.
Most of organising problems are btw due to the lack of effort, not a true lack of time. "I am busy" is usually just a convenient excuse to why you don't want to do something together, not that you don't actually have time. (You do have time binging netflix, do ya?)
I guess I should be out more so I can have those "accidents" with like-minded people. Ironic how we're more connected than ever yet so distant to each other. You'd think it would make things a lot easier but it's like it's done the opposite.
I have personally found that "being out more" doesn't help with it at all. The accidents happen in unexpected places and times. Going "out" mostly gets you the "usual" activities - where you are almost guaranteed to not find anything like that.
Yeah, the internet has been a blessing in the past in terms of socialisation, but nowadays, it has made it even worse than before. IRL activities are dying because everyone is on social media - but not spending any time with each other, just scrolling alone. I find it very sad.
With that being said, if you want to chat, I'd be happy to :)
Did the same for a very long time until recently I had to join a group for colleagues from Istanbul. Just wanted to be notified of any social activities in that group still refuse to use it for anything else. It even cost me a job opportunity one time. You should see the look on peoples faces when I ask them to email me something.
I didn’t have WhatsApp in a country where it’s synonymous to instant message. It did very much impacted my life, missed parties, etc.
I caved in during the pandemic. Lots of dear friends and family members, especially elderlies who couldn’t be bothered with anything else, and volunteer work to help the medical emergencies.
It felt ridiculous to ask people to use other means of communications under such circumstances. My noble ideologies felt very small and I said fuck it. I’m glad I did.
It’s the only Meta service I use, but I’m a heavy user. There’s no turning back.
You could use the damn phone as such and call. They even might appreciate it more. (Unless you have to be “chatting” continuously, of course.) And no, nobody really wants to see your face, believe me.
It's similar for me, but I have WhatsApp on a separate device that's at home and I only use it for WhatsApp. This keeps it strictly isolated from my primary smartphone and the list of contacts on it. Meta still has part of the social graph that surrounds me, but not all of it. How effective that is in the end is of no concern to me. I enjoy not just giving up completely, but resisting within my means. It reminds me a bit of the people who didn't pull their masks up over their noses during the pandemic. That's exactly how we should relate to tech giants if we can't avoid them completely.
By continuing to use a problematic messaging app you are feeding its network effect. You give it the blood that keeps it alive, and propagate the privacy issues that it brings. You know that 99% of your contacts will not take any of the measures you take and just deliver entire graphs, with yourself included, to the evil Meta or whomever on a golden plate. How many have a spare smartphone solely for this app? How many will deny it full access to contacts?
Coincidentally, just like not covering the nose with a mask in protest, this half-measure only makes the problem worse.
The only way to affect this is to pull up the mask. Stop the spread. Quit using such an app with explanations, offer alternatives to people seeking to contact you, support legislation that breaks shady business models like that, etc. Sadly, few people have courage to look weird, boring or slightly crazy in this way. (Not unlike people who are afraid to be thought of as ugly if they wear the mask.)
(I have no such problems with WhatsApp, but I’m guilty of the same with regards to Telegram. It’s built intentionally insecure by default: I have literally no contacts who use E2EE chats now, because those are opt-in and so half-assedly implemented—I used to have a couple of “secret chats” but one vanished and another broke so nothing is delivered anymore; we switched to plaintext and I keep postponing quitting the app.)
How did it start? Some people adopted it, then their friends adopted it, etc. How does it stop? The same way!
If people are made aware and meet resistance (e.g., a person they really want to keep in touch with who doesn’t use that app), things change.
A boycott that does not drive the company out of business is not automatically unsuccessful: more people learn about the issue, some stores might start stocking competitor’s goods, etc. In a functioning system, if a bunch of people voted for the loser the winner would feel the pressure to adjust policies (vs. if no one did and the winner feels righteous enacting the extreme version of the policies you disagree with), and if not well next time more people may support the losing party.
Chat programs are not stores in any typical sense of the word.
Chat programs are effectively clubhouses. Convincing a person that they’ve joined the wrong club, invested time and effort in the wrong club, and should make better and more informed choices in clubs…
Chat programs are not stores. That part was responding to the analogy of boycotts and elections.
Chat programs are also not clubs. There is no associated identity. No hardcore WhatsAppers it Telegrammers.
In fact, if you regularly meet actual humans, you might find out that most of them simply don’t care.
You dislike WhatsApp? Give them something equally convenient but that cares about privacy and they will just use it. Refuse to add them on WhatsApp and if you are an interesting person they will install whatever you use, even Signal, to stay in touch.
Hey, I don't want to argue with you and I wish you all the best. But you are twisting my mask comparison. In my comparison, pulling the mask all the way over your nose means giving in and using WhatsApp without any objections. The comparison is not a moral one but refers to how one behaves to an imperative that does not come from an individual but from a mass of people that surrounds one.
I also think that WhatsApp is evil, but that doesn't change the fact that a lot of communication takes place via this medium. Doing without it altogether has real opportunity costs. In this respect, it's up to each individual to decide whether and how to use it. It's similar to criticism of consumption and capitalism: in the end, you still have to buy your food somewhere and pay for it with money.
Choosing not to interact with people has opportunity costs, but we do it. For example, many of us choose not to interact with people with certain views (political or moral), even if we would gain a whole lot if we did.
I get what you're saying, but realize your response is tone-deaf when the GP comment said that they had to give in to support the elderly and emergency responses in their area during the pandemic.
There's some opportunity cost you just can't accept. If your only two options are a) don't use Whatsapp or b) use Whatsapp to help your elderly neighbors, I'm going to think you're not a good person if you stick to your ideology in this specific case. You can't really start arguing 'what-ifs' because you don't know the details of their situation and the decisions they made, so we should take them at their word that those are the two options they considered.
All to say, the world isn't as black and white as sticking to your guns no matter what. People that want true change would do well to remember that, since a majority of folks do not think along these lines and act with much more simple motivators.
The way I read it was “hmm that’s nice, people are now able to see the lunacy of that period in such a way as to make an off hand comment like that.”
The masks did nothing positive. It was the law of the land in public health that they were useless at preventing respiratory infections before people in positions of power wanted to scare people into compliance with massive overreach of their authority, then it became “mask up.” And once everybody “masked up,” all we got was yet more confirmation that yeah they are pointless in trying to prevent respiratory viral spread. Even if they kinda, sorta worked for that, which they don’t, the costs are still far too high.
All the masks contributed to was oxygen deprivation, micro plastic inhalation, and the degradation of the fabric of society. Think about it, it was bad enough for adults trying interact with faces wrapped up and concealed, “think of the children!”(actual legitimate usage of the phrase, btw) much worse for them having to do the same. People were harassed, assaulted, tased, arrested, for not wearing a “mask,” it was insanity.
Sad truth is most Spanish-speaking countries are effectively run on whatsapp and twitter.
Whatsapp is where your mailman will contact you to clarify an address, and twitter is where you will receive customer support for your internet.
Emails are not getting responded to or very very late. Regular phone calls are also disappearing due to staff shortage - no one to take your call.
Hah I sent an email to a Spanish website about a shipping issue.
I received a response. Three months later. They said “please send more money and we’ll ship your item”. Very helpful. I’d guess they check that email inbox once every few months based on this.
The flipside of this is that the only people who actually bothered establishing an XMPP server at scale were those who wanted to spam Google or Facebook users.
Think of it this way: why doesn't Gmail just close their SMTP gateways and defederate from e-mail? Because there's shittons of systems that expect to be able to send mail this way. They'd have to spend loads of time and energy corralling people out of open standards and into a proprietary Gmail API for no externally-visible benefit.
That doesn't apply to XMPP. It was an entirely new protocol with only two very large adopters federating with one another. Legitimate automated systems that needed to send messages didn't really exist yet, so there was no legacy cruft holding people to the open standard. But there were plenty of spammers who realized that they could get into literally every Gmail and Facebook screen with it.
In e-mail, we have a complicated setup of blocklists, heuristics, and domain authentication to handle spam. This inherently costs more time and money to set up than just having a closed messaging system with sign-ups that are controlled by one entity. But the big e-mail providers deal with it because open[0] federation is an iron rule of the e-mail system.
[0] Ok it's more like "open if you spend enough time getting an originating IP that isn't on every blocklist, setting up SPF/DKIM, getting your recipients to add you to contacts and check the spam filter, and so on"
When you die and go to secular-heaven you will be able to tell Saint Dawkins that you successfully resisted the billionaires by not giving them the pleasure of messaging your friends on their platforms, and will be permitted entry. Just don't tell him you were resisting from your iPhone.
Kind of like Marquess Brownlee reviewing tech phones, recommending a ton of them, being asked constantly which one of them he uses, saying it's one of the phones he recommended.
And then seeing him in non phone review videos reading stuff constantly from... his iPhone :-)
I did the same in 2014 and lost touch with lots of friends. I am now in touch with a very few via Signal and email or phone. But I couldn't convert many to use Signal, even though they I got them to try it with a lot of effort.
Not having WhatsApp here in Brazil is tough - Basically my entire family and close friends(?) use it as an asynchronous way of communication, which is good at the end of the day. But not answering regular phone calls is not good.
Unfortunately I cannot just walk away from it because of this.
I left FB when somebody on HN leaked they were feeding data straight to some military intelligence agency pipeline. I lost many acquaintances because of it but I saved a huge amount of time and completed two graduate degrees after.
The HN search doesn't show anything like that. I wish I saved the link somewhere. It was a long time ago but IIRC they had some bug that browser was directly contacting the agency instead of doing it via a backend or redirects so people monitoring their own online traffic could see the target servers directly.
I was ready to post the same thing. If someone is unwilling to communicate with you, well… I have some bad news for ya: they aren’t much of a friend.
I don’t use any of these social media sites, don’t use WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, or whatever else is out there, and still manage to have a robust social life and actual friends. They know my phone number if they want to talk, and I know their numbers. It doesn’t have to be complicated or mediated by some megacorp.
Every additional form of communication you take part in is a burden to some degree, and depending on the person they may only have the capacity for a handful before it becomes overwhelming. Personally I can handle like 4 forms of primary communication before either further forms become mostly ignored or it starts hurting my ability to communicate with anyone on anything. I can understand that someone, no matter how much they may want to stay in touch, may just be unable to through some forms of communication.
Yep, I use SMS and email, and don't see a need for anything else. Neither of these impose any particular demand on anyone who wants to contact me; they don't need to install any apps or set up any new accounts.
Who says they ignored them? Everyone seems to be jumping to this conclusion that these people weren't friends and that they disliked him in the first place.
We've all lost touch with friends. That's how things happen in life. We move on and what not. If you're using one app to talk to all your buddies and one person messages you on a different app. It's very easy to not even notice the other app especially if they don't have it installed or don't get notifications and only go in and check messages once a day and go through the list so they don't get constantly distracted.
I do not understand the amount of Gen-X people who are upset about Musk. Most of those virtue signalers spoke in exactly the same manner on Usenet until it was expedient financially to pretend otherwise.
You don't have to take everything Musk says seriously. He speaks like people would speak in 2000.
On Twitter everyone has his own page. There is no reason why anyone should feel associated with political content from others. I would not feel associated with Ahmadinejad (who was uncensored all the time) any more than with a purported far right poster.
The whole thing is a storm in a teacup by people who want government censorship and cannot tolerate different speech on pages other than their own.
How about leaving all .com domains because there are a couple of right wing ones, too?
> I do not understand the amount of Gen-X people who are upset about Musk.
It is not about Gen-X people. If you pay attention what he has promised and failed to deliver on. He promised to get rid of bots on Twitter and all that he has done is to make the problem worse and saying that he owns the contents of the tweets so AI companies needs to pay for access to create more sophisticated bots.
He's also just genuinely made Twitter a worse platform. The vast majority of Twitter's social cachet was based on people viewing tweets, or hearing about things happening on Twitter, without having an account there - Twitter's actual user-base was tiny compared to it's influence.
Now, if people can't view tweets without being logged in to Twitter, there's absolutely no reason to share them at all (i.e. this has led to r/worldnews switching to Mastodon links to share Ukraine war news, which in turn is a convoluted path of telegram and cross-posting from various sources).
The attempt to monetize the blue checkmarks showed very fundamentally he has absolutely no idea what Twitter's value actually was.
Weird to say, but I kinda like the new Twitter. At least in my corner it's a pretty cozy place, which is not how I would describe the platform before the sink was let in.
If things continue to improve this way I may just buy a blue check. Not because I need it but because I think the platform is actually going in a good direction.
He doesn't speak how people would in 2000 at all. It's weird corporate pandering but more politically neutral than bombarding people with identity politics as usual.
- Democracy is important because boomers: as soon as they turned 18 they were the majority, ergo huge boost of democratic decision-making everywher
- Boomers are fading and only the US has adequate young voters to support their democracy. You will see a turn towards centralized government everywhere , most of it powered by AI and tech moguls
- The free media are not important in non-democracy, quite the opposite
Ergo, you are fuming over something that won't be important in a decade
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I guess I have trouble empathizing with all the drama concerning messaging apps. I use WhatsApp for a couple international people I sometimes am in touch with. May have one or two other messaging apps I sometimes use. Mostly SMS/iMessage and GChat at work.
I think this is true for anything popular (and harmful).... if you don't listen to popular music, people apply social pressure on you. If you don't play popular video games, people apply social pressure on you. If you don't have an account on $socialMedia, people apply social pressure on you.
This is especially dangerous combined with the trend of people becoming more and more narrow-minded (see how "association by guilt" is a major thing now) so they demand more and more censorship everywhere to deplatform people who they don't like.
I think the only way to break the cycle is to selfhost.
Google will not scan your mails, will not scan your drive. Microsoft will not scan you drive. Apple will not process your pictures. Twitter will not control your speech. NSA will not see if you were at a protest, or went to a medical facility to perform a surgery of any kind.
"But does it matter if NSA sees me at a protest?" asks somebody. We will see. We will see. Maybe in a year. Maybe in two. Maybe never. Let's hope so.
Most of things you can self host. Probably the biggest problem is to selfhost videos, as they are heavy.
"But it is difficult to self host, and dangerous" says somebody. Yes it is. Yes it is.
"But I will not be able to talk with my friends" complains somebody. Let's wait how it all pans out. Maybe corporations and governments will not see and control everything we do. Maybe they will.
They have all the money they want. They can make all the money they want.
They have a machine, they can make all the money. It's not about money.
It's about control, it's about their vision of how they wanna see the world.
Self hosting is not sufficient. We saw that with the kiwi farms website. I didn't follow their story too close but it's wild how not just Cloudflare dropped them but also how big ISPs were willing to drop routing to them.
You can self host. It helps. Won't help you if major ISPs decide your self hosted ip shouldn't exist online.
There's a huge difference between some random techie self-hosting their own website and email for personal use, and a server full of people who spew hate and actively attack others.
If you're worried about getting the same treatment as KiwiFarms...maybe don't spread hate or dox and stalk people??
Governments make the same arguments. If you want encryption you are either a terrorist, or extremist. Everybody should be able to self host, and nobody should be looked down upon for selfhosting.
It is not a bad thing that somebody wants not to rely on any centralized government or corporate system, or want their data to be private.
Centralized bodies are prone to abuse power. We should work towards decentralized systems, and towards self hosting.
I mean, I agree that we should both promote and support self-hosting, but it does not at all follow that what happened to KiwiFarms was in any way an injustice or a cautionary tale about the horrors of centralized power.
If the ability to self-host came, without exception, at the cost of being able to prevent groups like KiwiFarms from bullying, harassing and abusing people, then it would not be worth it.
Fortunately, that's not the case! We can have a middle ground, where people who treat each other with respect and dignity can self-host without fear, and people who abuse the system to actively harm others can be taken offline.
How can people honestly self-host though? Mail for example, is hard to self-host, I do wonder though if this is a good use for something like (calm down) blockchain? Where we all just run a light weight piece of kit like a rasberry pi and host a hub which runs a mesh network and messages are passed over that automatically encrypted with your private key which can also be retrieved over the network.
It seems possible to create separate tiny devices for different applications and sell them prepackaged. The installation process would look like plugging it into electrical outlet and connecting to your local Wi-Fi. Redundancy can be achieved using close friends and family devices of the same class.
I am running a set of SBCs, but I read that it is better to use one server [1]. I suppose one could go with a VM, or portainer, or Yacht, or some other software to visualize everything.
Right now I am using a set or solutions:
* email * [2]
* files * using NextCloud
* blog * using Hugo
* news * using my own RSS reader
* pihole * to filter things
What I consider to use in the future
* pictures * using photoprism
* citadel * I found some sort of suites like citadel. Not sure if that works, if it is good, or if it fits my needs at all [3]. At the first glance seems like a fun project.
For me it was mostly one time setup cost and once-every-2-years Debian upgrade.
unattended-upgrade does the security upgrades and I occasionally upgrade the rss reader (as it is not packaged)
mail was pretty much fire-and-forget postfix+dovecot on file config, no DB for list of accounts + some catchalls.
If I had to pay say $5 for each of those services vs pay myself to manage that it would more less come out the same, minus ability to fix any little annoyances I had directly vs hoping cloud provider gives an option for it.
I do use syncthing for file sync so no annoying dealings with PHP apps
...and the ones that do are an insignificant drop in the bucket in terms of numbers. Unless "self-hosting" one's digital infrastructure can become easy and off-the-shelf for non-tech folks (or even tech folks that value their time and effort), it just not going to happen.
Mail isn't hard. There are several one click mail set ups for docker or a VPS. I ran Mail in a Box for years and never even had to look at it because it was all self updating, unlike my webserver, which I had to remeber to go update occasionally.
> I do wonder though if this is a good use for something like (calm down) blockchain
I think you might have meant distributed and decentralized systems in general. But the answer has nothing to do with technology. We have all the decentralized technology we need (long before blockchain by the way), even e-mail is somewhat decentralized (well, at least distributed), yet it doesn't solve the problem by itself.
Mail is not hard to self-host. There is a one-time setup toil you need to just sit down and get past, but then… it just sits there working. I’ve self-hosted Email for over a decade, on a $5/mo Linux VPS running Debian, exim, and dovecot. Multiple domains, multiple users, SSL, SPF, DKIM, the works. Since Email doesn’t cost anything in terms of computing load, I do light duty web hosting from the same box. $5 a month to not have to rely on the graces of megacorps to function on the internet.
Even if you’re scared of Linux and writing exim.conf, there are more or less turnkey docker containers out there and whatnot too. I can’t recommend one because I think docker is pointless for a single host running a few applications.
it's pointless to self-host mail (except for backups maybe) because 99% of your normal-life recipients are likely to be on Google and the content of your emails will be ingested by the big brother anyway.
My reason for self hosting is not to keep my data away from BigTech. That’s a fight nobody can win anymore.
The reason I do it is that E-mail is often the only identity on other services I use (it’s often the only way to reset your passwords), and I feel it is too risky to be dependent on a megacorp for my identity, a megacorp who may decide out of the blue to suspend my account for no reason.
I’m dependent on my VPS provider, but I have backups and can take my Debian config with me to a different one. Or bare metal if I have to.
I’m dependent on my DNS registrar and haven’t figured out a good way to mitigate that risk.
I agree about identity, but this can also be accomplished by "owning" your domain and using a mail provider that allow you to use it. Even Apple does nowadays.
Has domain management gotten easier over the years? I had always hard how much of a game it w trying to keep up with making sure a self-hosted email server isn't blocked or flagged as spam.
That plus the fact that the receiver on almost all my emails would be storing them on one of the few big providers and it just never felt worth it.
I basically don’t even have to lift a finger. Once set up, everything just hums along. Security updates only.
I have very, very rare deliverability problems, maybe once every two years AT&T decides to block mails from my domain but I resolve it through their easy process.
I have the advantage of having done this for 15 or so years so my IP has some good reputation, but I don’t think IP reputation is really that huge or necessary. The first rule of self hosting Email is “never spam—not even once.” Follow that and you’re in good shape.
Until Google and Microsoft decide they don't like your IP, or you missed a step in setting up the things you mentioned like SPF or DKIM. It is easy to stand up a mail server, but deliverability is still a challenge.
Neither Google or Microsoft use long term IP reputation. They may temporarily block an IP for various reasons (it will even reflect that in the SMTP error message), but never in the long term. All major email service providers work with domain reputation, not IP reputation.
However, you do need proof that you 'own' the IP address by means of a reverse IP address. ISPs generally don't allow their customers to set a reverse-DNS record for the IP address, because you do not own the IP. Since most spam originates from botnets from consumer IP addresses, adding the reverse-DNS requirement resulted in a huge reduction in spam.
The email service providers didn't ruin email, spammers did.
What if you could self host on all your devices and they were all seamlessly connected to each other like a single distributed OS without any kind of server in the middle? Then when your data is abused you have nobody to blame but yourself and all your data is always available so long as your devices are connected. No ads, no weaponized personal data, no spam, no extra expenses. Its just your hardware, your internet connection, and just the right software solution.
The problem there becomes bandwidth. Its better, but upload speeds are still not great and sometimes I think that its intentionally done to help funnel people to using monitizable web services instead of just self hosting everything.
In asymmetric networks this is true, however as asymmetric bandwidth is an old trend that is dying out. That is good. On high bandwidth networks, 300mbps+, everything is symmetric. For example my home network connection is about 860-920nbps up and down where the upload is generally quite a bit faster than the download.
The reason why networks used to be symmetric is because ISPs believed users downloaded far more frequently than they uploaded and therefore a greater percentage of the pipe was dedicated to download channels. That increases QOS on bandwidth constrained pipes but comes at a traffic management cost. Now IPS figure if the network is already fast and the user wants it to be even faster then they can just pay for a larger pipe and everybody's happy.
so you punish your lazy "friends" like, i dunno, your real estate agent by refusing to read emails from them because they sold their souls to Gmail. This is so absurd.
This is the order of preference to store my personal data (i.e email, files, etc.):
1. Self-hosted by me
2. Stored by a for-profit company I am paying
3. Stored by a megacorp
4. Stored by a non-profit
--
2 and 3 have an economic incentive not to lose my data, and have money to pay for decent engineers. 4 is basically having my data stored on a crappy Core2 Duo server under a staircase, managed by a teenager
See my comment, but I have some terrible trenched stories with how non profit run service.
A last one : I was ask to pry open the personal windows of a freshly dead employee because apparently a bunch of critical informations were stored on it ( payroll, bunch of passwords to Linux boxes running stuff )
I refused, then asked to get permission of family.
Then I learned that the plan was to basically reclaim that personal laptop of a dead employee because migrating stuff was too hard.
I told them I was busy.
I think they stole that laptop containing private correspondance and still use it today.
It’s a NGO you heard off. Running on most continents.
My take : IT and security are a distant thought in those places and you need strong top down directions and training to enforce basic hygiene
1 and 4 have an incentive not to keep your data, munch it into AI/ML, sell it to advertisers, governments, anyone who asks.
2 and 3 have absolutely no incentive not to lose your data. When was the last time any company got seriously hurt by a data breach? Hell, even password managers lose data and keep chugging on.
The teenager is now 38 and has moved states 3 time.
But still has the full set of credentials on his personal laptop.
Oh wait. He don’t anymore .
since he switched laptop and don’t care anymore, but weirdly nobody made backup because their is a sense that this once teenager ought to keep things running, somehow.
Wikipedia is still a centralized service. It is better than some others, but I can see countless examples of spooks editing the pages of important people or issues to tell the desired narrative. Many of us do not bother viewing or citing Wikipedia on some topics.
It's the "French Narator" from Spongebob Squarepants, a cartoon about a sponge. There were narrated time cards such as "2 hours later", or "Much much later", in the series.
when people actually leave, they don't announce it like a departure terminal announcement; they just... leave.
----
In more contemporary happening, people announcing leaving twitter are just signalling; they might pretend they like the environment of threads, but they thrive on the attention.
People actually leaving are those who just were waiting for a "text" Instagram, and are happy to find a tool that fits their needs.
Do I feel twitter will decline one day? Yes, though not because people are leaving, but because advertisers will leave and twitter will not have money to run, further degrading service.
725 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 317 ms ] threadPersonally, I came here to announce I'm leaving, then not leave.
I feel like the humour is quintessentially British (I doubt Harold Shipman is well known on the other side of the duckpond, let alone the cultural subtext of an OBE). Maybe it's not as funny in America.
EDIT: I guess this begs the question then, how do you break the cycle? Do you just stay trapped in one walled garden despite it getting much worse, or do decentralised platforms offer temporary/permanent respite?
Apparently the YC lawyers are convinced that the current mechanism is GDPR compliant, I'm not so sure about that.
If this forum had any kind of paid offerings this might differ, but what do you want, them to block the whole EU a la Threads/Bard?
As I understand it, this is due to the limitations of current (mod) tools, and justification just means you have to provide a human for some good reason to do -free work- for you. Like fearing being doxxed or whatever.
I dunno, I'm a happy member of this forum and I appreciate dang and how the moderation works here, it could be better and automated but this is a small niche tech forum after all and not some giant social media network
That's not how the GDPR works. The GDPR does not kick in when there is a commercial transaction, it kicks in when you're talking about data, specifically data provided by EU subjects.
YMMV
No countries are forced, just corporate entities in those countries that aim to transact with EU citizens. And that's perfectly fine, lots of countries have laws like that on their books and ways to enforce them. The only people that tend to object are those that are part of the group that wishes to trample on the rights of the people whose data they collect.
They will go even to great lengths to make European founders register as LLC's in Murica too, Investors security yadda yadda
I don't see how that translates to doing business in europe tbh
And so for you to want to utilise a finite resource (moderation time) for something that should benefit you, you better have a good reason for it?
Why should companies go above and beyond to comply with laws that don't affect their country or business doings?
The only reason a US company might comply with EU directives, is if they plan to do business in the EU, not if they're storing data or not from an European citizen
Still, here I am with a new account…
That’s what I did when I stopped using Facebook years ago. Deleted my account completely. All data gone. Profile gone.
If he had deleted his Twitter account then all followers would be gone and there wouldn’t be so much point in coming back.
In some cases even deleting your account is not enough. For example I recently deleted my Reddit account, but I still come back to check the posts on Reddit now and then.
I tried to run a Lemmy instance but got hit by a wave of bot accounts, so I turned off my Lemmy instance for now. When I have time to get it back up and running then hopefully I can get more real people to come join the instance and the I can stay active on my Lemmy instance instead of continuing to read posts on Reddit.
At least I have stopped posting to Reddit though. So I am not providing their business with free content anymore. But still providing them with my eyeballs for their ads for now.
In the case of Twitter, people who had a lot of followers and were frequently tweeting would probably be better able to leave if they deleted their accounts. And as a bonus thanks to recent changes if you delete your account you can’t even read Twitter anymore, since reading requires that you stay signed in. So in a way Twitter helps people when they want to leave, as long as people do their part and delete their accounts.
I thought this was interesting in that it could be profound in the minds of public individuals, whether conscious or not, particularly if they share a lack of an eternal life.
Pre-Christian Scandinavia is a rather long span of time.
Tangentially related to that: the urge to "be someone" is likely shared by all, but the "being" that follows from having your name in the paper (or on Twitter) seems likely a surrogate for one's impression of being remembered and appreciated by people that knows you well, or something that can compensate for a lack thereof.
Point in case: the large proportion of of petty criminals and social outcasts among terrorists and the like.
At least they get to be in the paper (and/or on TV/Twitter/Facebook/Threads/Youtube/Mastodon).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herostratus
For those who haven't seen it, the main character starts the film making a big point about how Nahunte is largely forgotten despite his efforts to be remembered, because he contributed nothing of value.
When you mention an interesting book/movie/any piece of media in a post, please include its name. There will always be someone interested in checking it out. I am.
I believe lots of Twitter users have the same problem. As long as they see a bit of engagement on their tweets/comments, even if they have 10 followers.
People who actually care for decentralization and the like over popularity, have long gone.
I moved to a different platform, left behind that community, and I feel a whole lot better for it. Barely anyone likes my posts any more, and I barely post. I feel great.
Non-commercial platforms have less pressure to drive engagement to pump DAUs, so I think they will always inherently start from a healthier base. Even if they do have algorthmic timelines, I think they can be done healthier because there's less incentive to send you engagement-bait and can instead just focus on sending you think you'll genuinely be interested in.
Depends on what you want. If you want reach, then you have to go where the eyeballs are.
If you don't want to deal with platform churn, then just build on a platform that you control (website).
For a select few, it's possible to do both at once.
Since I was never in it, it was very easy for me to stop posting to Twitter.
it's a dark forest
I see it more like a forum than a social media platform.
If the linking policy was the sole issue I think that tweet didn’t convey his meaning. However, I actually think that, like many people, he returned despite some remaining issues he had.
Also, I get it, social media is made to be addictive. Even more so when you have a following. My original point was that I think moving through a long chain of alternatives on moral grounds is not a common pattern.
What?
What seems to be "custom coded"?
What even is "custom coded"? Custom as in oppose to "standard coded"?
Why would you need to write any code to generate a frame for a video?
Few, maybe some, not lots. Unless you count using any piece of software as coding which seems silly.
* limited scope = geographically, culturally, interests, numbers of people. But this of course will never make a billion dollar business.
So until people give up on the idea of the global app and return to "local" communities I don't think we're going to have decent social media.
EDIT: by local I don't mean subreddits, discord servers, etc, but the entire site/app to be local. Not a global with local divisions.
If the app NextDoor is any indication, going local doesn’t seem to help either, its as negative and fractious as any other online community.
At some point, one gets the feeling “the medium is the message” and it’s a flaw inherent to all online social media.
1) it gets dominated by whoever shouts the loudest/who can spend most time on social media
2) You only get one local community really, and if you aren't in it, you aren't in it. I can join one of thousands of gaming discords, if any of them get too toxic for me I can just join another one. I can't do that with my local community, so you don't have the stick of "if you continue being toxic assholes I'm going to go somewhere else". You can of course stop using it but that's not "taking your business somewhere else".
In my experience, it was generally much worse, not only for the negativity, but the fact that these toxic people lived nearby.
So basically Reddit before they declared war on their volunteer mod teams.
The only social media I've ever seen that was really nice was back in the USENET days, or later some things like Yahoo groups, where there was a small group/forum dedicated to a very niche topic, with a decent moderator who wasn't on a power trip, and a fairly small group of subscribers. Of course, this was no guarantee of quality of lack of drama, but it's the best I've ever seen. The larger and more general the forum, the worse it's likely to be.
We get it, VC funded social networks become worse over time so you have to periodically jump ship to something new, which will quickly let you down again once it gains critical mass.
Repetitive is the point, because we repeat ourselves, but in time periods long enough that we forget and don't notice. This is our stupidity, compressed.
Stop chasing "VC funded social networks". Let's look at the indieweb for a sustainable model. Let's patronize separate, small, independent service providers to keep the servers running.
That's all that it takes to fix this mess.
That's a fantasy solution. Person A can send you abuse, so you block them. Person B though is free to send you abuse, and so can the next 10,000 people. They might be a minority but even if you block them all, you've still received 10,000 hate messages and you have to spend a lot of time doing your own policing.
And then everyone else still has to wade through all this crap, or see "blocked message" everywhere.
Moderation is essential for most online communities. And then those 10,000 people can do the same to everyone else.
That's a completely fantastical example. A normal person will never have close to unmanageably many replies. This is at most a problem for celebrities, which can be granted other solutions, e.g. only people they follow can reply, which solves the problem.
> Moderation is essential for most online communities.
There is a big difference between forums and social media, where you choose your own filter bubble anyway.
Yeah, it's a trick question.
I'm not a fan of the moderation policies from some in the more popular servers and I certainly don't like the idea of some overzealous moderator blocking whole instances, but this has nothing to do with (system-wide) censorship.
If each instance is a home, we should expect to follow their owner's rules when we are there. No owner is forced to give you a soapbox in their home for you to talk. If you want to have your own space, with your own rules, you are free to do so. You can invite whoever you want to your home and no one is going to come after you for the things you say in your home.
It has a lot to do with system wide censorship, as in the end the effect is approximately similar.
> If each instance is a home
That analogy is bad, as you could equally say that each social network "is a home" and therefore can censor everyone without mercy. You could even say that each country is "a home", and if you don't like state censorship, just emigrate etc.
And that would be perfectly justifiable. None of the big social media networks are forced to provide service to a customer that they don't want. It's not an utility, it should not be treated as such.
> if you don't like state censorship, just emigrate etc.
- The cost of creating a Mastodon instance for yourself is negligible compared to the cost of moving to a different country
- To "emigrate" to a different country implies having to abandon your original home country. In some cases, it even means having to renounce your original citizenship. Online, you can have different digital identities.
All that is being asked of you is to respect the rules of the home you are in. If this is difficult for you to understand, it's not a problem of your social peers.
The effect of big social media sites blocking free speech are not much different from the state doing it. It's like saying: "You are perfectly allowed to state your opinions! (but only at home, where nobody hears them)" This wouldn't be functionally different from the situation in China.
> The cost of creating a Mastodon instance for yourself
Doesn't solve the problem, as free speech instances get blocked by the other big instances.
Sorry, this is complete bullshit.
> but only at home, where nobody hears them
You can still invite people to your own home. If nobody is hearing it, it's because they are not interested to join you.
That's false. On social media, everyone is free to follow just the people they want to follow. Muting is also an option.
Your problem is that you hate free speech. You don't want to just choose what you see yourself, you want also censor what other people are allowed see.
> You can still invite people to your own home.
Yes, that's possible in China as well. According to you, this justifies state censorship. After all, you are only censored in public on social media.
This right here shows why you don´t understand why instance-wide blocking might be needed.
I can give you one clear example: my instance is running in Germany. As such, I need to comply with German laws. Now, if anyone from my instance follows someone from a "free speech extremist" instance and my server ends up with Nazi propaganda, guess who will be under investigation?
Substitute "Nazi propaganda" for "instances for sex-workers who might be victims of people trafficking" if you prefer.
> Yes, that's possible in China as well.
No, it's not. The Chinese police will come after you if you try to organize any type of opposition and they will have the power to hurt you without a fair trial.
Eugen is not going to do anything with you if you go talk shit about him on your instance. I know because I did it. ;)
Of course no admin can do anything about the law. That's in fact what Elon Musk said: The platform should only censor as much as is required by the law. But in practice on Mastodon much more is censored than on Twitter.
> The Chinese police will come after you if you try to organize any type of opposition
The Chinese police will certainly not come if you utter your opinions in your own home, precisely because nobody will hear them. Restricting free speech only to areas where it can't be heared isn't free speech.
> Restricting free speech only to areas where it can't be heared (sic) isn't free speech.
You missed the part where I said you can invite others and use that space to organize opposition. Was that intentional?
Also, I can't believe that you are making me say it:
- There is no global/universal definition of what is Free Speech.
- You don't get to decide what is or not "Free Speech".
- Even in the US, "Protection of Free Speech" is only about avoid persecution from the Government, not about being able to say whatever crap you want without consequences.
God, even for a conservative like me, this shit is tiring...
The same thing could be said to you when your political opinions get censored. But it seems you can't imagine that.
Let me try again: can you give one example of something you said that got you in trouble in any social network?
Shit, has it never occurred to them? Are you telling me that the overwhelming majority of the right wing influencers sees themselves as beholden to Big Tech that much? Wouldn't you at least consider the possibility that all this talk about "censorship" is just a lame excuse to rile up gullible people into a "fight" that doesn't really benefit anyone but themselves?
And yes, countries do indeed also get to choose their own laws through their own government process. I'm happy to live in a country where our laws forbid government restrictions on speech but allow private "homes" to make their own rules. I think that's the right balance. But I don't get to tell other nations what their laws should be.
Not really if you censor speech that challenge the status quo.
And if the major social networks are doing it, wouldn't that also be bad?
I was initially inclined to invite you to my instance as well, but I'm starting to get the feeling that you are more interested in not being called out for any BS you put out than in a healthy social discourse.
- Why doesn't Jordan Peterson (which I bought the book, watched the videos and love to rewatch destroying Cathy Newman) take his thinkspot.com platform and make a Mastodon version out of it?
- Why no popular conservative figurehead left Twitter to create their own server on the Fediverse?
Some more questions for you to ponder:
- why hasn't the right wing got out of Twitter when it was dominated by the left?
- why was Mastodon popular for the woke leftist crowd since, I don't know, 2020?
- Jordan Peterson is still complaining about YouTube censoring/blocking/demonetizing his videos. Why doesn't he make his own Peertube?
2) I don't think Mastodon was more than a rounding error before Musk bought Twitter.
Why couldn't other right-wing influencers get together and do something similar? Perhaps because there never was actual censorship?
Perhaps they just attracted more suckers to support them by bitching and moaning about "censorship" and "deplatforming" than if they went on and actually took control of their own social media presence.
No one worries about censorship of mainstream opinions, and that’s the Mastodon mainstream
And yes, every mainstream social media network absolutely does remove toxic radical posts across the spectrum, left right and neither. And toxic radicals across the spectrum all complain that it is only they who are being "censored", while the rest of us roll our eyes.
This is a uniquely internet-era phenomenon, where people feel they are entitled not just to speak, but to be heard.
Nobody ever argued about whether the Wall Street Journal has an obligation to publish any article sent to them by anyone, or whether CBS is required to broadcast any television programming sent to them. It's an absurd idea.
However, these messes are of a much smaller scale, have less long-lasting effects and are easier to work around.
Either you are a generous person who is paying out of his pocket to host a platform, or you require people to pay for usage (or your platform it truly p2p but good luck with people having the means to self-host nodes).
Fact is, most people are freeloaders so this is not sustainable either way.
Let's just say it like it is: most web communities are not worth the price it would take to keep them afloat. If I had $20 to spend I'd rather buy a bunch of books instead of 4 months of whatever mastodon server would ask me to pay for.
Usenet days, in which you paid a single amount to a single provider and all the boards were populated by technical people, are over. There is absolutely no single place on the web where you can interact with knowledgeable people in every field all clumped together (except sci-hub + email heh)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36674034
Maybe this is more a problem with how we've structured the web and less a problem with the type of app or our expectation of it.
99% of what I view on the web doesn't have to be absolutely up to date. I can tolerate some latency. If we dropped the whole request-response thing in favor of pub-sub, and just had the servers wake up for one minute every hour to propagate state changes, we'd only need to pay for 1/60th of the uptime that we currently are--the cicada approach.
I realize that this would be very inconvenient for advertisers who are trying to create a controlled experience re: which material I see when. They would absolutely hate it if the default mode of consumption happened in an offline-friendly way. But given that I don't give a damn about what they want, I think it would be ok.
If you really need something larger, the text could be an IPFS CID. Sure, you have to pin the data, so maybe that's a few more pennies, but IPFS has nice scalability features that would keep this overhead fairly low.
We may have to wait for the solar flare that knocks out the internet. Then point-to-point stuff like SSB will be the only thing that's working... between the seventeen people that were using it in the first place.
Ask random people on the street whether they care about their data or privacy, and if they care enough about it to boycott a popular web service, and you'll likely get blank stares or be laughed at for making such a proposition.
Most people don't care. Which is why this cycle of service hopping will never[1] be broken, and only privacy and tech enthusiasts will keep using privacy-respecting services. All this technobabble about privacy falls on deaf ears.
[1] Service hopping will still exist, but the only way privacy-respecting services will catch on in the mainstream is if they also offer a clear user experience advantage, and if they gain enough momentum for everyone else to want to use them. This is unlikely to happen with the modern indieweb movement, which is focused on the wrong things.
It's about ad-funded internet that can makes content creators prioritize quantity over quality.
It's about the destruction of healthy civic debate by having media channels that increasingly polarize public opinion, because it's easier to sell sensationalism than good reporting.
It's about how unsustainable the current model is.
They also worked back in the starting days of telephony (imagine everybody being forced on the same telephone network because telephone numbers were unrelated between networks, that would be pretty shitty, so ... we did something about it! [1])
[1] http://som.csudh.edu/cis/471/hout/telecomhistory/
If that is the case then it is because we just let it happen.
That would be amazing, by the way. Make it look like a video, and then the progress bar just slows and stops, and you're still there looking at new silly names and dumb stunts, hours later…
BlueSky creation of a separate protocol is an obvious attempt to create a platform where they get to become the gatekeepers of content distribution. The fact that they haven't opened up yet for other nodes makes it clear.
> The fact that they haven't opened up yet for other nodes makes it clear.
That's far too cynical. A federated social network is a really difficult project and there's many good reasons you might want to start with a single node.
And yet, Nostr is growing just nicely, with a perfectly reasonable decentralized model.
I was a bit involved with Bluesky early discussions. It became clear from the get-go that they were not willing to give a chance to AP. They wanted to have something they can control, top-down. Even if that means reinventing all the different wheels they are doing.
It's not disguised, it's the whole point.
:-)
Some revealed preferences there for sure
*https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-requests-stay-order-that-re...
(Also, you might want to check on the concept of "multiple people" which may, surprisingly, hold different opinions and express them at different times or events. Noone in this world owes you consistency to other people.)
incorrect, it's called hypocrisy
Another, more general fallacy is the computation that two moral wrongs can somehow make a right. They never do.
These are not moral opinions, by the way. These points are codified into law and common jurisdiction. You cannot defend yourself in court by pointing out that others have broken the law, too.
That's literally a fallacy, too. Look, you can attempt to frame it as you like, accusing others of hypocrisy is deviating from the original argument and fallacious. It's an invalid ad hominem attack to distract from the topic. The only exception is when the accusation is that the arguer does not really mean the argument sincerely, but that's another type of argument and not under discussion here.
Likewise, to re-iterate this point, two wrongs never make a right, yet in nearly all cases of blaming someone for being a hypocrite that type of fallacious argument is exactly the motivation behind the accusation. It certainly is in the above discussion.
As a typical example, Russian propaganda sources have replied to accusation of Russian war crimes in Ukraine with "The US has invaded Iraq and committed countless war crimes." This is not only fallacious, because US war crimes have no bearing on Russian war crimes, it's also hypocritical and logically inconsistent. It's hypocritical because the accusation would only work (from the perspective of the arguer) if they recognized war crimes and argued against them, but the rhetorical goal is the opposite. It's logically inconsistent because the desired inference is that what Russia does is not bad but the argument schema rests on the accusation that what the US in the past did was bad.
That fallacious scheme is very common. You can observe it nearly everywhere, especially in political discussions, despite the fact that it makes no sense whatsoever on a closer look.
The original example under discussion has a similar structure but also differs in an important detail. Somebody argued "what about previous tech billionaires who did some other nefarious things." The correct conclusion from this would be that previous tech billionaires (distraction topic) and current tech billionaires (real topic) did some nefarious things, if the claims are true. But that's not what the arguer had in mind. The arguer wanted to relativize the arguments against tech billionaires in the real topic. In this case, the accusation of hypocrisy against whataboutism is made in bad faith because the arguer knows that the two topics do not have anything to do with each other. Understanding the context of what previous tech billionaires did does not help you evaluating the morality of the real topic in this case. It does not provide any context needed because the contexts barely have anything in common (different times, different tech billionaires, etc.).
That's in my experience another common case when people argue against pointing out whataboutism. The people who do that have rhetorical goals, of course, but they are not arguing correctly. Whataboutism is practically always a fallacy. I believe there are cases you describe where pointing out a hypocrisy can lead to a better understanding of the subject matter, but these are very rare and even then they still distract from the question under discussion.
I believe the reason why you're so keen on insisting that you're right and that whataboutism is often wrong is mostly psychological. People want to set themselves apart and it's normal to come up with contrarian opinions about perceived wisdom. I have strong tendency do that myself.
Sorry for the lengthy post. I just wanted to make it very clear that you did not convince me at all. The topic is important to me for various reasons, both professionally and personally.
Sure, and if someone only called out Russian war crimes you shouldn't take them as "a person who dislikes war crimes" but "a person who dislikes Russia", and expect them to produce information on that basis. This is not fallacious, it's vital information to understand what they're saying: when they say "Russia has committed a war crime", it does not imply that this is an uncommon crime to have committed. Other nations could be committing that war crime all the time and that person wouldn't raise it to your attention, because they're focused on Russia. The knowledge of their stance is necessary to understand what they're saying at all. And that's even before accounting for positive bias, where you're not mentioning American war crimes despite knowing of them because you have positive feelings about America. (The same thing happens, of course, in reverse.) You can't have a discussion only in the positive space of what is actually said; words simply don't work like that. Every concretization in a message implies information by means of generalizations you didn't make. If I say "jews murder thousands of people every year", then I imply that this number lies above the baserate of murders; if it in fact doesn't or is less than the baseline, then I've been (possibly intentionally) deceptive without ever saying a false word. (Base rate fallacy!) This is not a rare corner case, it's extremely widespread.
> The arguer wanted to relativize the arguments against tech billionaires in the real topic.
Correct, and this is a valid argumentative technique. Why wouldn't it be? That's just a framing/categorization debate. They're a proxy for causal-structure debates for people who don't know the term "causal structure". "Is Elon Musk an usual or unusual member of the category of billionaire social network owners" is material to the article.
As I said in my initial post, the moral independence of actions is codified in law and common practice. The "others did it too" defense does not work in criminal court, and I can assure you that it will also not work for Russia.
> Correct, and this is a valid argumentative technique.
It's provably a fallacy. On a side note, framing has nothing to do with making fallacious arguments, it only pertains to how you express arguments. "The glass is half full" vs "The glass is half empty" -- that's framing. Two different arguments about the same topic -- that's not framing. It also has nothing to do with the baserate fallacy. If someone commits a baserate fallacy, you simply point out that they've committed a baserate fallacy. This only makes sense for statistical arguments. Framing and categorization are also two totally different terms for different application domains. Framing does not concern the categories and population you choose when making statistical inferences. I don't know why people misuse the term all the time, it's not hard to understand if you look at the original literature in experimental psychology. Framing is also not related in any obvious way with causal structure/causal models. Moreover, your example about Elon Musk is not about causal structure, it concerns a statistical property; at least, I cannot see how a causal model can be used to support "usual" vs. "unusual" attributions. However, I grant you that maybe it could be spelled out in causal modeling terms, for example in Judea Pearl's approach, but it's not obvious how to do that.
Anyway, for me this discussion is closed. You're not very persuasive because you're using the wrong terminology. As I said, I'm interested in this topic also from a professional perspective. I know what I'm talking about (whether you believe me or not). I'll keep it at that and close this conversation.
Getting to the original point: What about the previous generation of tech billionaire? I think Zuck is an awful person and I will not sign up for Threads. I also think that Musk is an awful person and I will not sign up for Twitter. Where is the hypocrisy in this stance?
If 20 of your friend's are using Whatsapp to communicate just fine, and you demand they change their mode of communication to suit your needs.
I'm starting to see why the trope of techies are anti social is so prevalent. Some of you really are absolutely socially inept.
> Some of you really are absolutely socially inept.
So if someone tells you "I'm sorry, I am not available at this channel, can we arrange some other method?" and you refuse to accomodate you take the other as socially inept?
It seems like you are projecting. Hard.
There exist systems which may violate your privacy, and you think that a possible demand to use them from any third party would be "fair", aproblematic?!
Good normalcy is that if some acquaintance put as a condition any controversial constraint, such as destructive behaviour ("binge drinking" etc.), irresponsible behaviour, degrading behaviour (that spyware is part of this latter) - the reply is simply "No".
And that would be antisocial behaviour, "No, I will not get tattooed (etc.) just because you would like that"?!
Children have replaced Men in this world.
Edit: oh, and by the way: behaviour that would stick to the framework of proper Society would be «[anti-]social»?!?!?! That is a dire reversal terms, and it shows the (satanic) perversity these """societies""" have reached.
It's not so weird to expect that your friends will acquiesce to your demand that they wear a seatbelt in your car, for instance.
But hey, I draw a line in the sand at the instant messenger! :-)))
And your reply remains "No", right?
Your post seems to be assumptions loaded. It sounds as if you were accusing strawmen of expecting people to behave rationally, wisely etc. That image has been superseded even in the theoretical grounds in which it had been used historically as a premise (e.g. Economics).
- They still collect things like your location, your call history, etc. In Brazil it's quite common for people to use WhatsApp to call their doctors. This means that Facebook can know what type of health issues you have just by checking if you are calling/texting a specialist.
- They are still owned by Facebook and they take whatever data they can to feed the Borg.
- I can not prove it, but I am convinced that they scan the video stream in the device.
You can't prove it, alright. But do you mind sharing why you are convinced they scan the video stream?
It's nothing really embarrassing or wrong, but I worry that it might be taken out of context.
Lots of people are currently willing to make that trade, at least until a competitor comes along that offers something better.
> at least until a competitor comes along that offers something better.
Next year, the EU is going to force all messenger platforms to interoperate. Then we will be able to really compare.
Previously I used Matrix/Element but never got it to work reliably with my friends (decryption issues, session verification obsession). And Signal has no web app. So WhatsApp it is for now.
Because my opinion is that my friends willingness (or preference) to use a non secure messaging app owned by a giant tech corp has very very very low correlation with whether I'd like them to be a friend.
I'd also point out that this is exactly how bubbles occur. "Everyone I know hates WhatsApp/Facebook/whatever" says the person who refuses to communicate via those platforms.
No it isn't. You'd be surprised in the variety of people that you meet when you don't use algorithmic systems to do so. Just because you only maintain relationships with people who are not so glued to WhatsApp that they won't communicate through any other means, does not mean you have created a bubble for yourself.
They might do something when they get there and talk to people who are doing the same thing (or who just happen to be there).
I'm sure that is true. I was suggesting alternative ideas to calling random phone numbers as a means of getting out of one's "bubble".
It isn't. Nor did I say it was. The person I replied to said that not using WhatsApp is how social bubbles are formed. It isn't. That's what I was refuting.
It's true you are always able to avoid bubbles, and nothing I say precludes that ability.
However, information bubbles are a function of friction and defaults. If communication lessens with a people who don't share a particular view (ie, that Whatsapp has to be avoided) then that friction lessens exposure to that viewpoint, forming a bubble.
> you meet when you don't use algorithmic systems to do so.
AFAIK there is no algorithmic system on Whatsapp to meet people.
Which I guess is a useful filter if you want to be surrounded by techies and ideologues.
Like you, the choice of messaging app is quite beside the point (except FB Messenger being out of the question for reasons I'll explain). So, I still use a combination of WhatsApp, Signal and Skype.
If a friendship depended on me having a Twitter/FB/TikTok/Instagram profile though, I'm more likely to let that fade away. Similarly with dating: it'd be a dealbreaker to have to maintain a social media presence or find someone solely through Tinder or Bumble or whatever. I enjoy life more without social media in it, and without tech companies gatekeeping human connection through a mobile app. Some things just have to stay offline for the sake of me and my mental health.
I just say "can we use Signal? It's super secure." And people generally are fine to use Signal. They don't use SMS because it's expensive and many that own an iPhone in countries where Android dominate don't use iMessage because, well, few around them use iPhone and the interface (i.e., the phone number) doesn't really tell them that they won't get charged for a text message.
I've posted up in many countries, and it's rarely a show stopper.
Mine are annoying too, but I keep them because they also keep me in the loop.
If they are really your only option, you can use whatever insane platform they are on long enough to forge a couple friendships, explain your stance and then quit.
If they are your friends they will understand, if not it wasn't worth the effort to begin with.
My life is so annoying as a result of you, now I have to buy and maintain another phone, and then remember to check it, for your app.
Maybe, you could use something we agree on, like <insert plethora of choices>".
Most people will not, in fact, understand why you are so picky about the chat platforms you are willing to use, and they will think (correctly, I would say) that you care more about your social media stances than you care about their friendship. So you will think they were not worth the effort to begin with, and they will think the same in return, but ultimately they are not restricting their potential friend pool nearly as much as you are. If it works out well for you, great, otherwise you have to be a bit more pragmatic.
Poor reasoning. "We should go do hard drugs together, we're friends, right?", "You should just let me have sex with you, we're friends right?".
Using friendship as a cudgel is disgusting, and quite frankly, unfriendly. The above examples are extreme, but there is a cost to everything.
Pragmatic-ism cuts both ways.
It is perfectly fine to value certain things over friendship. You just have to be conscious of the friction that your convictions will cause and ask yourself whether it's worth it for you. Health is worth it. Chat apps? I don't know. If you ask me to use Signal, that seems reasonable enough and I'll do it, but if we're a group of 10 coordinating over Whatsapp and you want me to tell you whenever plans are being made, it's like, OK, but I'm doing the effort for our personal convos, can't you meet me halfway or something? That's the kind of friction you're going to deal with. Up to you.
If the content is compelling enough you will chat where you both agree to. If not it is like telling someone the only way you will talk is in the park by the chess tables.
Sure maybe you talk to them by chess tables sometimes, but if they won't meet you for coffee then they aren't your friends, just chess table acquaitances.
Real example: My friend group has a hiking group on WhatsApp and there is one friend who is not on it. One person will propose a hike, and will keep messaging the group with information about it. Someone then has to message that other friend and tell them about it, every time there is a slight adjustment to plans.
Let's say you are my friend, and Bob is arranging a hike for 10am on Saturday. You usually come on the hike so I let you know. Even though all the details are on the group, you ask me all the questions and I have to fill you in. Then on the morning of the hike Darcy's car breaks down and the time gets rearranged from 10am to 11am, so then I have to tell you that as well because you aren't on the group chat, and suddenly I feel like I am becoming your PA (and if I forget to tell you the time has changed then suddenly it's my fault - even though i'm not arranging the damn hike and you could have been on the group in the first place you just refuse).
Ugh, I might but it's annoying for me (your friend) to be your personal messenger whenever there is something you might be interested in on the group chat.
Why is it on me to keep you in the loop? It's why we created the group chat, Dave.
Particularly that time when you got all annoyed at me for not being invited camping - I didn't even organise the trip in the first place, it's not my job to tell you about every event on the group chat just because you won't download WhatsApp.
Absolutely increases it's stickiness.
It's not perfect: when you connect with people they can easily associate your WhatsApp account with your identity (add contact) and also share info/pics/etc about you that you wouldn't want shared. They can do this even if you're not on WhatsApp, and Meta can use face recognition and other techniques to create a profile for you, then associate that profile with the other days and profile they have for you. It's trivial to narrow the down to a few million users then match on photo etc. Unclear if they bother, given that 99% of users just give away their privacy.
Also, Whatsapp verification uses SMS. If they'd used a verification URL, they could've (bounced through) Facebook.com, Instagram.com, etc and associated the account via (first party) cookies. I'm guessing they don't because 99% of users happily give the app all the permissions it needs and SMS is more universal.
In countries where WhatsApp is ubiquitous, it is used for more than just messaging friends.
For example, many childcare places will send updates through WhatsApp groups. So you have to convince the business and all their clients to switch to signal or do without notifications for your child's childcare.
MMS still don't work reliably for me (lost a message just last week that someone swear to have sent). And for a long time they were not free as well.
The difference is that MMS/SMS is standardized and agnostic to the client interface. While WhatsApp is proprietary and monopolizes the client.
We could easily have had a "internet direct message" standard implementing most of WhatsApps features. (Wait... Isn't that SMTP?)
Maybe I'm just ignorant, but what does WhatsApp bring that let's say email++ does not have?
... actually that's still the case in varying degrees and locations. And once you've got great market penetration in an area, there's little to no reason to switch unless the competition is noticeably better, which MMS really has no claim to.
Open standards hadn't.
Or if you're referring to MMS: insane user cost and insane unreliability, standards mean nothing if the implementations are all trash.
Not saying it should have, just that I don't really see the difference in functionality.
[1] https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/850:_World_Accord...
PS: I met a guy in Mali once, d'ya know them? [2] /s
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOValSt7YOY
Here I was expecting something from Tanzania or Kenya and we're back in Northern Mali!
I'm a bit old - I travelled extensively about the globe when I was younger doing geophysicsl survey work and ground truthing the transition from many paper map systems to WGS84.
Africa has some fantastic musicians.
All I can offer in return is some Australians and their collaborations ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjDlbCfybbE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr3iI8gg2fo
English x Yolngu Matha x Bemba:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrM8Ly17lw4
Why not:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTmGpJJsQEU
Here's some Kenyan fare for you, an odd mix of things:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ig9DHit6K8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or2sMfOcTtw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb0k0LuJFw8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlMw5uOFyaU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0Jwf-Y1uww
Tjamuku Ngurra is beautiful. I don't think I've listened to Aboriginal fusion (there's all sorts of interesting things happening there) before. My consumption of Australian music has mostly been limited to Tame Impala, whom I love, but this is special. Thank you so much for sharing.
Australian music is surprisingly broad for such a small (population wise, physically it's the same land area as mainland USofA (and together the US + Australia are less than the area of Africa ..)) .. "aboriginal fusion" (that works) is also broader than many might imagine.
To barely scratch the surface:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMqG_LyD9s4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdpoWcma4HE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLQ4by3lUJo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBAv36KM4rI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myKF9mxAJ70 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gw-AgvUEVm4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7XevQAVoBI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VMcnKM09w0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqfyHzL0G-o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHJFfSmnCnY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWibGemExd0
(I can go on forever here)
Meanwhile, 'back in Africa' (well, perhaps, out of Adrica)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGomSuDPeSU
https://youtu.be/tvY31eN3gtE?t=38
To be honest I never used Uber and never saw a taxi with stickers telling otherwise.
Likewise arranging trips with the local tourist agencies.
Here's what I find baffling. You had a single, curated, extremely limited travel experience, in (I'm guessing) a handful of places, in one country, over a limited time period. You extrapolated from that experience to making a bold, sweeping claim about an odd 1.2 billion people living in 54 countries. And with an air of worldly confidence, to boot. What you said of Africa is not even generally true of the city of Dar es Salaam, let alone all of Tanzania. How could it possibly be true for a whole continent? I'm genuinely in awe of both the audacity it takes to make such a claim, and the thought process that leads to it. I do feel a bit bad for singling you out (but only a little bad) since it's sadly not unusual for people to choose to talk about places in this way when they don't expect to be challenged.
Alas, for group conversations or bad connection situations (e.g. at a festival), everyone uses WA. Not sure why groups are always WA, but Signal (and actually any other messenger) sucks for bad connections.
I think there's something about key rotation and a default setting where it doesn't notify you if the keys change, or something like that, at one point.
We need to build and keep asking people whether they have Signal or would please get it.
Using an alternative sms app that sometimes upgrades messages to signal was nearly zero friction.
Keeping an alternative messaging app for one contact is borderline-charity.
I'd do it to help with network effects if I wanted to support the company, but the attempt at crypto integration already cost them my good will.
Crypto disposals are taxable in the UK and I believe in most other countries as well. So tax authorities have a legitimate reason to look into what's going on there. There is no right to privacy when it comes to buying and selling securities.
In a lot of the world, WhatsApp is free (I assume some kind of payment from Meta to the telecom). There's no way Signal will compete with something that is bundled with every phone contract for whatever reason.
Do you have separate charges for Signal and/or WhatsApp?
When you WhatsApp all day sending videos, gifs, messages, voice messages, pictures, documents..I can consume up to 12GB per month, this costing me an amount of my 20GB data plan. While a other provider I can choose has a 20GB data plan with a unlimited WhatsApp bundle. Sadly they don’t offer eSIM and 5G so it’s a no go for me.
But I'm not going to be delusional about it, if literally hundreds of millions of people are depending on social-media business for their social happiness, I can see that it works for them.
I want a secure, trustworthy, minimally-viable telecommunications channel for some contacts. I support Signal, it has characteristics that I trust, including being open source.[1]
I also have shown other people how to enable Google's RCS messaging.[2] It's better than SMS.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software)
[2] https://support.google.com/messages/answer/13508703
Meta Messenger, Skype, Whatsapp, Viber and Telegram? Tons of them.
Then, from A's perspective, it is just a small accommodation for B to communicate through alternative means. And from B's perspective, it is just a small accommodation for A to use $APP.
"Look, I am not letting Zuck suck up my personal data and watch ads if there is an alternative that's owned by a non-profit, does not show ads and end-to-end encrypts everything as a rule."
Asking to use Zucks apps anyway as a small accommodation would paint the one asking as an ignorant who is being unreasonable and does not take care of their digital hygiene properly. Sure, they might resent the other person for pointing their own failings out, but it's hard to actually argue.
Within their value system, they're not being ignorant. Rather, they're perfectly rational.
There is an incentive to converge to $APP, the tradeoffs are not collectively symmetric when one $APP is already globally dominant.
Few people understand "this messenger is slightly less privacy focused. It's owned by Meta. It's against my principles".
I am vegan so I would definitely break ties with friends that make mean "jokes" about veganism or myself. But I certainly would never let go of friends because they want me to use WhatsApp.
Similarly, I live sans messaging for the simple reason that I never upgraded to a smartphone. In the 2000s this solicited reactions of amazed befuddlement and surprise, occasionally mirth. Nowadays, in my experience, most people intuitively understand the decision.
Demanding all your friends switch or kill their messaging apps is quite another matter, and an eccentric one at that.
You don't just have friends and non-friends. It's a spectrum. By raising the bar for reaching you some people no longer cared to be your acquaintances, and others remained connected but talked to you less frequently. And so you lose some of the contact that you had with other people because of your own actions, no one else's.
At the "far end of friendship spectrum", that is the closest form of friendship, there's no one there. Given enough obstacles that you yourself put up eventually you'll lose absolutely everyone.
This is completely ass-backwards thinking. We don't have apps growing out of us and we are not doing things to ourselves "because of our own actions".
Leaving a bad app is a bit like leaving a country where a dangerous tyrannical dictator has set up shop. You didn't decide to rape murder and pillage your neighbors, the corrupt leader did. Getting the hell out of dodge is an extremely reasonable thing to do, and you are not cutting yourself off from your acquaintances, the evil dictator is.
Besides, app messaging is completely backwards anyways, we invented protocols because they are the best way to reliably communicate.
As an adult, how do you make the strong bonds that lead to people going out of their way to remember to invite you to things? Maybe you meet someone and click immediately, more likely it's someone you know from work, and commonly it's acquaintances from seemingly superficial activities that become close friends after you're mingled and mixed with enough folks to find your tribe.
"everyone complains about group chats being noisy" but there's a good reason they're still in there (obviously a big part of it is fomo but it's not obvious to me that everyone's lives would be better rejecting them. Human social dynamics are messy and not efficient).
But like, the world is going in a direction sadly where meaningful human friendships are disappearing, being replaced with endless acquittances who do not care about you, and you do not care about them either. Which I find really sad.
Most of organising problems are btw due to the lack of effort, not a true lack of time. "I am busy" is usually just a convenient excuse to why you don't want to do something together, not that you don't actually have time. (You do have time binging netflix, do ya?)
Yeah, the internet has been a blessing in the past in terms of socialisation, but nowadays, it has made it even worse than before. IRL activities are dying because everyone is on social media - but not spending any time with each other, just scrolling alone. I find it very sad.
With that being said, if you want to chat, I'd be happy to :)
I caved in during the pandemic. Lots of dear friends and family members, especially elderlies who couldn’t be bothered with anything else, and volunteer work to help the medical emergencies.
It felt ridiculous to ask people to use other means of communications under such circumstances. My noble ideologies felt very small and I said fuck it. I’m glad I did.
It’s the only Meta service I use, but I’m a heavy user. There’s no turning back.
But fair; if in the same country you can call. ( and if not, you can go thought a service allowing you to call abroad. Like the now senile Skype )
This is such a sad perspective.
Coincidentally, just like not covering the nose with a mask in protest, this half-measure only makes the problem worse.
The only way to affect this is to pull up the mask. Stop the spread. Quit using such an app with explanations, offer alternatives to people seeking to contact you, support legislation that breaks shady business models like that, etc. Sadly, few people have courage to look weird, boring or slightly crazy in this way. (Not unlike people who are afraid to be thought of as ugly if they wear the mask.)
(I have no such problems with WhatsApp, but I’m guilty of the same with regards to Telegram. It’s built intentionally insecure by default: I have literally no contacts who use E2EE chats now, because those are opt-in and so half-assedly implemented—I used to have a couple of “secret chats” but one vanished and another broke so nothing is delivered anymore; we switched to plaintext and I keep postponing quitting the app.)
If enough people join you, it's a win. If not, you've wasted your effort / money / vote / time.
Sometimes it's hard to discern if that critical mass exists.
How did it start? Some people adopted it, then their friends adopted it, etc. How does it stop? The same way!
If people are made aware and meet resistance (e.g., a person they really want to keep in touch with who doesn’t use that app), things change.
A boycott that does not drive the company out of business is not automatically unsuccessful: more people learn about the issue, some stores might start stocking competitor’s goods, etc. In a functioning system, if a bunch of people voted for the loser the winner would feel the pressure to adjust policies (vs. if no one did and the winner feels righteous enacting the extreme version of the policies you disagree with), and if not well next time more people may support the losing party.
Chat programs are not stores in any typical sense of the word.
Chat programs are effectively clubhouses. Convincing a person that they’ve joined the wrong club, invested time and effort in the wrong club, and should make better and more informed choices in clubs…
Lol. Have you MET a human before?
Good luck and don’t hold your breath.
Chat programs are also not clubs. There is no associated identity. No hardcore WhatsAppers it Telegrammers.
In fact, if you regularly meet actual humans, you might find out that most of them simply don’t care.
You dislike WhatsApp? Give them something equally convenient but that cares about privacy and they will just use it. Refuse to add them on WhatsApp and if you are an interesting person they will install whatever you use, even Signal, to stay in touch.
Please keep it polite. I don't see how you can know that commentator's intent.
I also think that WhatsApp is evil, but that doesn't change the fact that a lot of communication takes place via this medium. Doing without it altogether has real opportunity costs. In this respect, it's up to each individual to decide whether and how to use it. It's similar to criticism of consumption and capitalism: in the end, you still have to buy your food somewhere and pay for it with money.
There's some opportunity cost you just can't accept. If your only two options are a) don't use Whatsapp or b) use Whatsapp to help your elderly neighbors, I'm going to think you're not a good person if you stick to your ideology in this specific case. You can't really start arguing 'what-ifs' because you don't know the details of their situation and the decisions they made, so we should take them at their word that those are the two options they considered.
All to say, the world isn't as black and white as sticking to your guns no matter what. People that want true change would do well to remember that, since a majority of folks do not think along these lines and act with much more simple motivators.
That's a terrible comparison. One is a selfish moron, the other idealistic.
The way I read it was “hmm that’s nice, people are now able to see the lunacy of that period in such a way as to make an off hand comment like that.”
The masks did nothing positive. It was the law of the land in public health that they were useless at preventing respiratory infections before people in positions of power wanted to scare people into compliance with massive overreach of their authority, then it became “mask up.” And once everybody “masked up,” all we got was yet more confirmation that yeah they are pointless in trying to prevent respiratory viral spread. Even if they kinda, sorta worked for that, which they don’t, the costs are still far too high.
All the masks contributed to was oxygen deprivation, micro plastic inhalation, and the degradation of the fabric of society. Think about it, it was bad enough for adults trying interact with faces wrapped up and concealed, “think of the children!”(actual legitimate usage of the phrase, btw) much worse for them having to do the same. People were harassed, assaulted, tased, arrested, for not wearing a “mask,” it was insanity.
Stop being a creepy mask person.
I received a response. Three months later. They said “please send more money and we’ll ship your item”. Very helpful. I’d guess they check that email inbox once every few months based on this.
I could use any existing XMPP server, or even start one, and be able to contact directly with any of my both Google and Facebook contacts
It was wonderful glimpse of what it could be if greed and drive to herd consumers into their own walled gardens wasn't the main driving factors.
Think of it this way: why doesn't Gmail just close their SMTP gateways and defederate from e-mail? Because there's shittons of systems that expect to be able to send mail this way. They'd have to spend loads of time and energy corralling people out of open standards and into a proprietary Gmail API for no externally-visible benefit.
That doesn't apply to XMPP. It was an entirely new protocol with only two very large adopters federating with one another. Legitimate automated systems that needed to send messages didn't really exist yet, so there was no legacy cruft holding people to the open standard. But there were plenty of spammers who realized that they could get into literally every Gmail and Facebook screen with it.
In e-mail, we have a complicated setup of blocklists, heuristics, and domain authentication to handle spam. This inherently costs more time and money to set up than just having a closed messaging system with sign-ups that are controlled by one entity. But the big e-mail providers deal with it because open[0] federation is an iron rule of the e-mail system.
[0] Ok it's more like "open if you spend enough time getting an originating IP that isn't on every blocklist, setting up SPF/DKIM, getting your recipients to add you to contacts and check the spam filter, and so on"
Can you tell us a bit more of the benefits/upsides of your decision?
And then seeing him in non phone review videos reading stuff constantly from... his iPhone :-)
Unfortunately I cannot just walk away from it because of this.
And we can all thank the EU that it will be forced to open the API to other chat applications!
You made an effort to reach out by other means, and they ignored you? This is an odd definition of a "friend".
I don’t use any of these social media sites, don’t use WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, or whatever else is out there, and still manage to have a robust social life and actual friends. They know my phone number if they want to talk, and I know their numbers. It doesn’t have to be complicated or mediated by some megacorp.
We've all lost touch with friends. That's how things happen in life. We move on and what not. If you're using one app to talk to all your buddies and one person messages you on a different app. It's very easy to not even notice the other app especially if they don't have it installed or don't get notifications and only go in and check messages once a day and go through the list so they don't get constantly distracted.
Those people were not your friends
You don't have to take everything Musk says seriously. He speaks like people would speak in 2000.
On Twitter everyone has his own page. There is no reason why anyone should feel associated with political content from others. I would not feel associated with Ahmadinejad (who was uncensored all the time) any more than with a purported far right poster.
The whole thing is a storm in a teacup by people who want government censorship and cannot tolerate different speech on pages other than their own.
How about leaving all .com domains because there are a couple of right wing ones, too?
It is not about Gen-X people. If you pay attention what he has promised and failed to deliver on. He promised to get rid of bots on Twitter and all that he has done is to make the problem worse and saying that he owns the contents of the tweets so AI companies needs to pay for access to create more sophisticated bots.
Now, if people can't view tweets without being logged in to Twitter, there's absolutely no reason to share them at all (i.e. this has led to r/worldnews switching to Mastodon links to share Ukraine war news, which in turn is a convoluted path of telegram and cross-posting from various sources).
The attempt to monetize the blue checkmarks showed very fundamentally he has absolutely no idea what Twitter's value actually was.
If things continue to improve this way I may just buy a blue check. Not because I need it but because I think the platform is actually going in a good direction.
- Democracy is important because boomers: as soon as they turned 18 they were the majority, ergo huge boost of democratic decision-making everywher
- Boomers are fading and only the US has adequate young voters to support their democracy. You will see a turn towards centralized government everywhere , most of it powered by AI and tech moguls
- The free media are not important in non-democracy, quite the opposite
Ergo, you are fuming over something that won't be important in a decade
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This is especially dangerous combined with the trend of people becoming more and more narrow-minded (see how "association by guilt" is a major thing now) so they demand more and more censorship everywhere to deplatform people who they don't like.
Google will not scan your mails, will not scan your drive. Microsoft will not scan you drive. Apple will not process your pictures. Twitter will not control your speech. NSA will not see if you were at a protest, or went to a medical facility to perform a surgery of any kind.
"But does it matter if NSA sees me at a protest?" asks somebody. We will see. We will see. Maybe in a year. Maybe in two. Maybe never. Let's hope so.
Most of things you can self host. Probably the biggest problem is to selfhost videos, as they are heavy.
"But it is difficult to self host, and dangerous" says somebody. Yes it is. Yes it is.
"But I will not be able to talk with my friends" complains somebody. Let's wait how it all pans out. Maybe corporations and governments will not see and control everything we do. Maybe they will.
They have all the money they want. They can make all the money they want.
They have a machine, they can make all the money. It's not about money.
It's about control, it's about their vision of how they wanna see the world.
You can self host. It helps. Won't help you if major ISPs decide your self hosted ip shouldn't exist online.
If you're worried about getting the same treatment as KiwiFarms...maybe don't spread hate or dox and stalk people??
Governments make the same arguments. If you want encryption you are either a terrorist, or extremist. Everybody should be able to self host, and nobody should be looked down upon for selfhosting.
It is not a bad thing that somebody wants not to rely on any centralized government or corporate system, or want their data to be private.
Centralized bodies are prone to abuse power. We should work towards decentralized systems, and towards self hosting.
If the ability to self-host came, without exception, at the cost of being able to prevent groups like KiwiFarms from bullying, harassing and abusing people, then it would not be worth it.
Fortunately, that's not the case! We can have a middle ground, where people who treat each other with respect and dignity can self-host without fear, and people who abuse the system to actively harm others can be taken offline.
This is a feature, not a bug.
Right now I am using a set or solutions:
* email * [2]
* files * using NextCloud
* blog * using Hugo
* news * using my own RSS reader
* pihole * to filter things
What I consider to use in the future
* pictures * using photoprism
* citadel * I found some sort of suites like citadel. Not sure if that works, if it is good, or if it fits my needs at all [3]. At the first glance seems like a fun project.
Links:
[1] https://specbranch.com/posts/one-big-server/
[2] https://github.com/LukeSmithxyz/emailwiz
[3] https://www.citadel.org/
All in all it is time consuming to setup up, and update regularly.
unattended-upgrade does the security upgrades and I occasionally upgrade the rss reader (as it is not packaged)
mail was pretty much fire-and-forget postfix+dovecot on file config, no DB for list of accounts + some catchalls.
If I had to pay say $5 for each of those services vs pay myself to manage that it would more less come out the same, minus ability to fix any little annoyances I had directly vs hoping cloud provider gives an option for it.
I do use syncthing for file sync so no annoying dealings with PHP apps
They can't or won't.
...and the ones that do are an insignificant drop in the bucket in terms of numbers. Unless "self-hosting" one's digital infrastructure can become easy and off-the-shelf for non-tech folks (or even tech folks that value their time and effort), it just not going to happen.
I think you might have meant distributed and decentralized systems in general. But the answer has nothing to do with technology. We have all the decentralized technology we need (long before blockchain by the way), even e-mail is somewhat decentralized (well, at least distributed), yet it doesn't solve the problem by itself.
Even if you’re scared of Linux and writing exim.conf, there are more or less turnkey docker containers out there and whatnot too. I can’t recommend one because I think docker is pointless for a single host running a few applications.
The reason I do it is that E-mail is often the only identity on other services I use (it’s often the only way to reset your passwords), and I feel it is too risky to be dependent on a megacorp for my identity, a megacorp who may decide out of the blue to suspend my account for no reason.
I’m dependent on my VPS provider, but I have backups and can take my Debian config with me to a different one. Or bare metal if I have to.
I’m dependent on my DNS registrar and haven’t figured out a good way to mitigate that risk.
Besides that, that’s it.
That plus the fact that the receiver on almost all my emails would be storing them on one of the few big providers and it just never felt worth it.
I have very, very rare deliverability problems, maybe once every two years AT&T decides to block mails from my domain but I resolve it through their easy process.
I have the advantage of having done this for 15 or so years so my IP has some good reputation, but I don’t think IP reputation is really that huge or necessary. The first rule of self hosting Email is “never spam—not even once.” Follow that and you’re in good shape.
However, you do need proof that you 'own' the IP address by means of a reverse IP address. ISPs generally don't allow their customers to set a reverse-DNS record for the IP address, because you do not own the IP. Since most spam originates from botnets from consumer IP addresses, adding the reverse-DNS requirement resulted in a huge reduction in spam.
The email service providers didn't ruin email, spammers did.
What if you could self host on all your devices and they were all seamlessly connected to each other like a single distributed OS without any kind of server in the middle? Then when your data is abused you have nobody to blame but yourself and all your data is always available so long as your devices are connected. No ads, no weaponized personal data, no spam, no extra expenses. Its just your hardware, your internet connection, and just the right software solution.
The reason why networks used to be symmetric is because ISPs believed users downloaded far more frequently than they uploaded and therefore a greater percentage of the pipe was dedicated to download channels. That increases QOS on bandwidth constrained pipes but comes at a traffic management cost. Now IPS figure if the network is already fast and the user wants it to be even faster then they can just pay for a larger pipe and everybody's happy.
Except the ones you send to people using Google...
But I think this basically exists and is called indieweb?
1. Self-hosted by me
2. Stored by a for-profit company I am paying
3. Stored by a megacorp
4. Stored by a non-profit
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2 and 3 have an economic incentive not to lose my data, and have money to pay for decent engineers. 4 is basically having my data stored on a crappy Core2 Duo server under a staircase, managed by a teenager
> 4 is basically having my data stored on a crappy Core2 Duo server under a staircase, managed by a teenager
... isn't 1 the same then ? Aside from teenager part
A last one : I was ask to pry open the personal windows of a freshly dead employee because apparently a bunch of critical informations were stored on it ( payroll, bunch of passwords to Linux boxes running stuff )
I refused, then asked to get permission of family.
Then I learned that the plan was to basically reclaim that personal laptop of a dead employee because migrating stuff was too hard.
I told them I was busy.
I think they stole that laptop containing private correspondance and still use it today.
It’s a NGO you heard off. Running on most continents.
My take : IT and security are a distant thought in those places and you need strong top down directions and training to enforce basic hygiene
2 and 3 have absolutely no incentive not to lose your data. When was the last time any company got seriously hurt by a data breach? Hell, even password managers lose data and keep chugging on.
Oh wait. He don’t anymore .
since he switched laptop and don’t care anymore, but weirdly nobody made backup because their is a sense that this once teenager ought to keep things running, somehow.
( inspired by real life even. )
Facebook et al are the Philip Morris of tech
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In more contemporary happening, people announcing leaving twitter are just signalling; they might pretend they like the environment of threads, but they thrive on the attention.
People actually leaving are those who just were waiting for a "text" Instagram, and are happy to find a tool that fits their needs.
Do I feel twitter will decline one day? Yes, though not because people are leaving, but because advertisers will leave and twitter will not have money to run, further degrading service.