Hopefully this time around it will be a more radical approach.
But first some non-technical issues have to be solved.
Anything that has a 'center' shall be censored and regulated sooner or
later, no matter what the current operators say. Having the most
benevolent hand holding your balls is always a bad idea. Usually the
'alternative' center-full systems are left to operate as long as their
membership is low. The moment they become popular the game is over.
Whether the 'center' is material (ie. servers at known locations) or
just administrative CCC (ie. Silk Road via onion) does not make much
difference.
The center-full alternatives that do survive with limited popularity
tend to become isolated islands, and usually end up with invitation-only
memberships (because some dick 'knows' who to invite.) Great if you are
into incest but suck otherwise (the islands.) There is something magic
about 'public', the possibility of random connection and unintended
consequences.
Technically, center-less platforms embodied exclusively on the edge are
a solved problem.
The non-technical problems are how to manage general non-moderated
access, and how to make it popular without exclusivity and known honchos
in charge. For illustrative history, research the tragedy of Usenet.
The wrong way to think about these solutions is to assume that machines
will somehow naturally liberate the society and enable everyone to have
the say, even those with IQ in teens.
The right way is to deploy tried and tested real-world mechanisms for
selection and throttling. People participating in traditional discourse
today have means to come to cities, or they already live there, so they
have money and access (hillbillies don't come to conferences.) Money is
a functional moderator. Early Usenet was great because only those with
access to computers and networks could participate, and that was a
select elite from academia, industry and individual tinkerers (modems
used to cost a fortune.) Education and club memberships are great
moderators.
Along these lines, we need an electronic system that's neither cheap nor
simple to access. Never forget that 'user friendly' concept is a
sinister ideological instrument to ensure impotency of the medium. Yes,
that's hard to digest, but it's true.
Then we need to make it popular.
I don't have a solution for the latter, but the former can be easily
done by requiring costly PoW to participate, resulting in very material
electricity bills, and likely a reserved piece of equipment that is used
exclusively for the purpose of participation. Anyone willing to pay and
set it up can participate. It would be like going to expensive night
club: mostly nice people there, with only few scattered gangsters. The
cost can be adjusted (via geolocating) to match the GDP of the locality.
Don't even THINK about liberating anyone - it's a guaranteed
self-defeating concept - even the dumbest open access
computers-as-democracy-enablers activist should have it figured out by now.
Jitsi is great, BTW. 100% edge-based and end-to-end encrypted. Use the
'jitsi desktop', not the other stuff (which is all center-full,) and
download the source, as they will soon end the support. It takes some
effort to convince others to use it though, and then the idiots start to
complain that Skype has better quality.
Everything else mentioned is center-full.
On 4/28/19, 09:50, Geert Lovink wrote:
Dear nettime, as the world slowly moves towards regulation of Facebook
and Google, the question of social media alternatives seems nowhere near
to be resolved. Or is there some progress? For a while I have been
compiling link lists related to the social media question for the Unlike
Us email list and I am happy to share some of the ones from March/April
with you here. What do you use? How about telegram, signal, duckduckgo,
mastedon, jitsi, protonmail, openstreetmap, cryptpad.fr
<http://cryptpad.fr>, deepl translator? Are there ways to create a
critical mass within your own networks and communities? Best, Geert
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