Facebook are evil

[editor]

The home of your local hate groups and the leading global spreader of dangerous misinformation have shown their commitment to upholding standards again:

“We’re a small team run with small donations,” Quran told Gizmodo. “If we can spot this stuff, a multi-billion dollar company with tens of thousands of employees focused on the election and disinformation most certainly can. We are tired of doing their job for them.”

Steve Bannon Caught Running a Network of Misinformation Pages on Facebook

Steve Bannon has been outed for his involvement in running a network of misinformation pages on Facebook. Who could have possibly seen this coming.

gizmodo.com

 

[Pickman's model]

They are committed to their standards

Sadly they're shitty standards

 

[On Fire]

I've never liked Nick Clegg.

 

[Hearse Pileup]

Yeah, I've written at length about the evils of social media as part of a longer screed on the importance of 'biodiversity' (cultural as well as literal). This is why the GDPR won't work; big networks like this can just absorb the cost and change their term of service to just keep doing the same evil shit they were doing before. The whole thing needs to go down the pan imo, but I don't know how that's going to happen.

 

[On Fire]

Have you seen The Social Dilemma on Netflix?

 

[Hearse Pileup]

I saw its' predecessor about the CA scandal, social dilemma is on my to-watch list though.

 

[editor]

Yup.

 

[mao]

 

[Hearse Pileup]

Yup.

This is perfection

 

[Hearse Pileup]

I'm about halfway through this and it's really great. A lot of it is stuff I was semi aware of, but it's good to hear a thorough discussion of it. I didn't realise Niantic was a google company - though it makes an incredible amount of sense!

Most of all I think it's a really good analysis of how the evils of centralised big tech isn't all about showing ads to you and getting clickthroughs.

 

[Jay Park]

Yup.

do you want us to watch all of that?

 

[editor]

do you want us to watch all of that?

It's only 2.35 minutes long and no one is asking you to do anything.

 

[Jay Park]

It's only 2.35 minutes long and no one is asking you to do anything.

it was just a bit boring

 

[editor]

it was just a bit boring

Not half as boring as your pointless posts in this thread, and infinitely more interesting than the deluge of whining PMs you've been bothering me with recently. Now please fuck off out of my face.

 

[Jay Park]

Not half as boring as your pointless posts in this thread, and infinitely more interesting than the deluge of whining PMs you've been bothering me with recently. Now please fuck off out of my face.

who do I report this to?

 

[editor]

who do I report this to?

Right under your last pointless, disruptive post, you'll see a link to 'report' a post. But you knew that anyway. Please don't disrupt this thread any more.

 

[Doodler]

Social media has definitely drawn attention and activity away from web forums, blogs and the older generation of hobbyist and special interest sites (which usually limited interactivity to a guestbook page). I don't think it's been a change for the better on the whole, YouTube excepted.

 

[Roadkill]

Social media has definitely drawn attention and activity away from web forums, blogs and the older generation of hobbyist and special interest sites (which usually limited interactivity to a guestbook page). I don't think it's been a change for the better on the whole, YouTube excepted.

I agree, and you can see the impact here on u75 up to a point. When I joined back in 2001 I was in my early 20s, and there were quite a lot of posters around of the same age or younger. We've not done a 'how old are you thread' for some time, as far as I can see, but I'd be prepared to bet that if we had one now the average age would be substantially older than it was back in those pre-social media days.

 

[Hearse Pileup]

Social media has definitely drawn attention and activity away from web forums, blogs and the older generation of hobbyist and special interest sites (which usually limited interactivity to a guestbook page). I don't think it's been a change for the better on the whole, YouTube excepted.

Nah, youtube is evil too. In fact in some ways it's one of the most insidieous as it's able to quite accurately profile who you are and what your tastes are.

And yet I still use it.

Though I've taken to not signing into the platform and using newpipe/invideous where possible. Peertube is better, but like Mastodon and ScuttleButt they really still need to take off.

I wonde whether Urban75 would consider running its' own masto instance? I'm guessing the sorts of discussions are more suited to forums so quite possibly not.

 

[editor]

eed to take off.

I wonde whether Urban75 would consider running its' own masto instance? I'm guessing the sorts of discussions are more suited to forums so quite possibly not.

What's a 'masto instance'?

*Looks it up. Still not entirely sure

Mastodon instances

instances.social

 

[Hearse Pileup]

What's a 'masto instance'?

Oh boy now you got me started, lol

Mastodon is an implementation of the ActivityPub social web standard. This means that unlike there being just 'facebook' or 'twitter', Mastodon, as well as other implementations like pixelfed, pleroma, lemmy and more are all part of a big decentralised social network - which is referred to as the fediverse. It's kind of like email - I can have an account on one fediverse server, and I can talk to anyone on any other instance. There are some limitations as to who I can talk to and what I can say, depending on the server I set my account up on. Each one has its own code of conduct and admins etc.

For instance the service 'Gab' is an activitypub implementation that is primarily used by free speech fundamentalists and white supremacists, so most instance administrators block Gab instances by default. You also have this control at the account level. For instance I block switter - a fedivers instance for sex workers. Not because I hate sex workers, but their solicitious messages are very well tagged and can end up in your feed very easily, if your instance is federated with them. (Though that's not a problem since I moved from mastodon.social to a.nti.social)

TL;DR It's like a self-hosted twitter, if you run an instance you control your own small community whilst still being able to interact to a larger network of communities. It's better than facebook or twitter because no ads or data monetisation, however it's not in very common usage so that can be a barrier to entry (why join a network if no-one is there?)

 

[danny la rouge]

Is there a summary of the tl;dr bit?

 

[Hearse Pileup]

Is there a summary of the tl;dr bit?

It's twitter but better, but with small user base.

 

[Hearse Pileup]

I also did an interview for rantbox.tv about why decentralised social media is good and cetralised social media is bad if you want to hear me talk about it for 40 minutes, despite having laryngitis. This whole area is kind of a big deal for me. It's also one of the main reasons I came here in the first place!

 

[Roadkill]

Mastodon is mainly porn, isn't it?

 

[Hearse Pileup]

Mastodon is mainly porn, isn't it?

It really depends on where you hang out. Where I tend to chill now it's mainly anarchists and LGBT people. And a lot of tech heads.

 

[Roadkill]

It really depends on where you hang out. Where I tend to chill now it's mainly anarchists and LGBT people. And a lot of tech heads.

I've probably come across the wrong bits.

So to speak.

 

[danny la rouge]

I've probably come across the wrong bits.

So to speak.

That’s a matter of preference.

 

[editor]

It's twitter but better, but with small user base.

And what benefits would it offer users here?

 

[Hearse Pileup]

And what benefits would it offer users here?

Interesting point. It's why I said it seems to me Urban is more suited to the threaded forum format.

This is ultimately the problem that the fediverse faces - it's not really 'useful' until your mates are on it.

Pushing back on that (lightly), with regard to the topic of this thread, the 'use' is the fact that it's not facebook or any other centralised platform. The value of that is down to how much the community values it really. I value anything that takes us one step closer to these datamining platforms having to shut their servers down for good. Though the real outcome of that is probably some kind of post-internet over ham radio, as systemically the internet is now designed around selling user data.