Finally deleted my LinkedIn account!
After putting my account into “hibernation” for the past few weeks, I finally closed it. But I’m still looking for work. Thankfully I can still find positions (SRE and software dev) by just going directly to the company’s site and finding a Jobs page.
Good luck to everyone else out there looking for work!
Federated means democratic. We‘re on lemmy because free association. Its obvious that all other social media, including work related, should be federated, in fact it should be outlawed to have anything public-non-federated. We need to destroy all walled gardens.
On the other topic of personal data: the critical data like real name, home address, phone number, email address, former employers etc. should absolutely not be federated, thats a need to know basis.
The public profiles are the same as mastodon and don’t constitute personal data in my book: your skills, the industries and length of employment.
The important part is that you can put your personal data on an instance (which might or might not be your own) and encrypt it so nobody except you can read it and if you get an offer, the future employer gets an encypted view of your data which could also be on auto delete if the job falls through.
Federation isn’t the magic bullet you make it out to be. In fact I disagree with pretty much everything you said, but we probably agree on some fundamental concepts. I just believe federation isn’t democratic, not even a little bit, it’s just silos of control.
I think we need distributed platforms where data is owned through encryption and signatures. Think gossip protocol with PGP encryption and web of trust based moderation. It’s still not democratic, but it puts control in the hands of individual users, not instance admins.
Similar to what Churchill said of democracy, Lemmy/ActivityPub is the worst form of social media, except for all the others. Federation isn’t the goal imo, decentralization is. It just turns out that a ActivityPub and Lemmy are available today, which is why I’m here. Reddit was the best option before now (open source frontend, friendly API, etc), but that changed so now I’m here.
So no, don’t enshrine a particular solution into law, focus on the principles of privacy and decentralization.
Yeah, there we really have to agree to disagree.
You will always have silos of control and that is a good thing. The fact that makes it democratic is that you have access to it. If you dont like the rules of the instance, you move or spin up your own.
What you‘re saying is just everyone for themselves, diverting the already thinly stretched attention of fedi-capable folks even more.
Again, I think its okay to disagree. I‘m just saying „but i want“ is not a valid reason to reinvent the wheel imo.
Our problem is not a system, it is certain behavior of certain people corrupting the system until itself becomes the problem. The solution is not bringing down the system but outlawing the behavior (the dark triad) because although I consider myself a leftist and close to anarchism, I recognize that we have a lot of narcissists and psychopaths in that space as well. Those who are willing to take any measure to bring the current people in power down to take power themselves. Bullying people into submission is no different than being rich and paying them for it.
I’m not suggesting that at all. What I want is the next logical step after federation, which is basically data being distributed.
Basically, I want BitTorrent, but for social media. So there would be no instances, only communities (so no community@instance, just community). Right now, if lemmy.ml goes down, all of the communities hosted there go down and people would need to migrate elsewhere. With a distributed system, if someone drops out, the community goes on because it doesn’t live on any one system. Lemmy could mitigate that with a feature to move a community, but you still have the fragmentation issue.
The tricky part is moderation, but I’m thinking that could be done through votes and reports/blocks. Basically, if you vote the same way as someone consistently, you’ll start to trust their votes, reports, and blocks more than other uses, and you could enable automatic moderation to hide stuff based on someone else’s moderation.
So you would no longer need to rely on a centralized set of mods for a community, you’d instead pick mods yourself based on who you agree with. So you and I could have a separate set of “mods” for the same content. At any time, you could inspect the moderation to see if you agree with it, and your account would learn what you like and don’t like. This kills the “power hungry mods” issue that kills so many communities (i.e. I’ve left subreddits purely because of mods), though I’m a little worried it’ll push people even more into echo chambers.
The important thing, though, is that it puts the control directly into the hands of the users, with a set of tools to customize it. And there could be multiple competing clients to handle the moderation differently. I think it’s a bit more democratic than what Lemmy provides.
I absolutely agree.
My point is that I see federation as a stopgap to something better, not the destination, and it’s totally reasonable to disagree. I just think federation will have similar problems as centralized services, and that it’s inevitable once it grows to a certain size.
I agree. Federation isnt the end. But right now, we have to build this up and abolish the old, not abolish the new imo. Thats why I say federation everywhere now, concentrate everything on making this work and worry about the next thing afterward.
The reason I say this is also because I founded a couple of very successful businesses because my autistic brain has a very significant advantage: intense focus. Focusing your efforts on one thing is insanely important and the only way to really get somewhere.
Have you ever wondered why there are better systems, fairer systems but they never take hold? The reason imo isnt (only) because the 1% actively fight them and lead the rest to fight them as well but because the anarchists and leftists cant agree on a goal to pursue.
They burn themselves out without much to show for it. Constantly shaming each other for not being leftist enough, voting, not voting, etc. Thats the only reason why autocracy works. Right wingers have one enemy: leftists. Leftists have hundreds because they’re all different shades of left.
If we actually for some reason got the idea to ask what our smallest common denominator is, we would actually het somewhere. But the little narcissist in most of us doesnt want that because their idea was „better“. Its the old curse of „too smart for your own good“.
Maybe you’re just using this as an example, IDK, but I’ve seen a lot of people here on lemmy seem to conflate technology and political ideology. Technology can be a means to a political end, but equating the two just encourages dogmatic loyalty, and discourages diversity of thought.
But maybe I’m projecting here, IDK.
And yeah, I totally get the concern over splitting the community with too many different ideas (i.e. the Standards XKCD). My concern is that federation won’t scale. Users have demonstrated that they’ll largely join a handful of big instances, and those instances are poorly funded (often run by some generous benefactor) and fairly expensive to run. And that’s with just 50k or so monthly active users, imagine what’s going to happen if it ever gets to Reddit scale…
So that’s why I’m interested in distributed social networks, they scale really well with lots of users, in fact, they can work even better the more users they get (e.g. BitTorrent). So if we’re looking for a grassroots tech stack, it should be distributed. I’d really like someone else to build it (hence why I bring it up, to hopefully get someone to do it), but I’ll hack on it in the meantime because I find it fun.
That said, lemmy is good enough for now, hence why I’m here. I just don’t see it as a long term solution.
Thats a very insightful and well formulated comment. Thank you for this. It was very easy to read ans touched a pot of points.
The standards xkcd is pretty iconic, ngl.
My point with mixing politics in is that most of us have common goals but we dont talk about them. I‘d imagine most of us want to be free from (corporate) control, which isnt by design political but in fact only really lived by the highly progressive and so on. But yes, I used politics as an example for splitting effort.
The idea of distributed spcial networks in itself isnt bad but saying it will work when we have no signs for it kinda is. Bittorrent is great and all but it works to overcome many problems that normal downloads at the time had and doesnt have any of the limitations what social media has (need for moderation, need for linked actions, etc)
Finally, the reason I think we have large instances is that running a social network is no joke. I have my own instance with just a handful of friends and there are technical, legal and moderation issues. These wont go away. People wont learn to host a server and open source wont make it dead easy tomorrow. It will take years until a next lemmy is easily deployable.
And the reason that lemmy isnt easily deployable is that making a social network is no joke either. the devs get a lot of hate for things that arent their fault. I donated a (for me) large chunk of money to them for their efforts because I am the change I want to see.
So, I agree, we will need to evolve further and further but we arent evolving in anything (it feels like) except the fediverse. So instead of pushing the one fhing that is actually progressive to break itself, I‘d use my energy to push voting to become federated, to push banking to become federated (as in think about a successor to crypto or get a standard to form that is clearly superior).
I hope my intension is clear here. I‘m pushing hard for the fediverse to succeed and see big scares along the way (corpo intervention for example) and I know how burnout and attention spread work against us so although I agree that progress is important, many people who havent lived through burnout dont get the need for nuance.
Have a good one.
I’m actually working on a proof-of-concept, but I honestly would prefer to not head the project. I don’t think I can commit long term to a project like that, I hate being the center of attention, and honestly I think someone else would do a better job pushing it forward. But I’m intrigued by the tech, so I’m trying my hand at building it.
If I have something to show, I’ll post it here. But at least from the initial work I’ve done, I think it should scale nicely. I’ll probably get tired of it before “finishing,” but I guess time to tell.
I do like lemmy and the fediverse, I just want to be prepared for it falling apart. I think it’s seeing some uptake issues because of fundamentals of the fediverse (needing to understand federation just to join communities, for example), and that will limit its mainstream appeal. But I’ll keep using it until there’s a credible alternative.
What exactly do you mean by this?
Honestly, I think crypto is fine, and I’m particularly interested in privacy coins like Monero. The main issue they have is speculation, but honestly, that happens with fiat currencies as well, and if people start using something like Monero regularly that speculation will likely end up in the noise.
That said, I wouldn’t say no to something like GNU Taler getting picked up by a privacy-friendly organization. I’d love to see Mozilla integrate it so I could use Taler for payments to various online services.
You too!
Its good to hear that someone does something besides talking, I‘ll give you that.
But imagine, you‘d do so much good making PRs for the existing fedi and not having the attention and pressure while working on the now.
If we prepare for it falling apart before it even matured, we‘re dooming it. You could instead make a pr for a new search function (because its insanely easy to search through all dederated servers on your server, we just need it to be the default) and by working on something different with no momentum while depriving the thing that has momentum is a bad idea imo. Sorry.
Voting, as in you vote for something to happen. Democracy. We should federate it so everyone can do it, probably cryptographically or some other way.
Now you‘re contradicting yourself. You‘re making an alternative to the fediverse because of issues you cant be bothered to solve but speculation isnt worth to call crypto worthy of a successor. Do you see how that is illogical? Also, reinventing the wheel is why we have corporate control. We need to work on one thing and make it good.
Wait till you hear about yellow pages and white pages!