Doing a presentation soon for a group of progressive/lefty types at my college on the topic of enshittification and the internet more broadly.

The audience is non-technical, and I have no interest in convincing them to learn anything new, or make them switch their tech (real change requires collective organizing, not just consumption choices).

Any specific topics or ideas I should make a point about emphasizing? I'm thinking of going over
- network effects
- walled gardens
- surveillance pricing
- lack of privacy laws
- anti-trust

I've basically got the go ahead to talk about anything computer + political really, though. Anything else yall feel like the non-technical audience really ought to be hearing more of?

#enshittification #leftism #askFedi

So would anybody be able to explain to me what Usenet actually is, and how it differs from forums/BBS's?

I'm trying to learn and play with more of the old internet things from before the great Facebookification of everything occurred.

I wonder if it would be easier to explain federation to users if the service literally gave you an email address (like with an inbox and everything).

Like. Nobody is confused about how to share google documents with other users, even if the email address is different (e.g. @organization.com instead of @gmail.com).

Put it in that mental context, I think a lot of people would suddenly be way more comfortable thinking about account handles, like if it literally was an email address.

Or maybe not?

I'm fairly young and I remember having a weird little email address that was hosted by a small local business in my town. I bet a lot of people subconsciously understand how email works when you change the ending after the @ symbol.

Maybe not useful for like a social media network, but if we want to eventually start federating other online services, it sure would make a lot more sense to the users, wouldn't it?

Marginalia Search seems to be doing this to some extent¹, but it's of course not quite perfect. It's incredible what it's able to do, but at the same time, I still often have to dig around quite a bit longer before finding anything particularly useful.

I wonder if a Duckduckgo-style approach to this kind of "indie search index" might prove useful? Somebody could prop up a service that compiles together the results of Marginalia alongside the bigger results from the Google, Bing, or Yandex indexers.

I'm really just spitballing here. I wonder if anyone has been doing any thinking about this topic, particularly the way forward for indie search engines, and whether or not it would be possible for them to be an actually competitive alternative to our existing options.

Feel free to link any blogs on the topic, or share your own ideas in the comments. I think this is an idea I'd like to explore some more...

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¹ note: I don't actually know what the set of websites/pages Marginalia is operating on. My (W - M) example was of course overly reductive, so I would doubt it's doing all of that. My own experience is that it has some list of whitelisted domains that it crawls, and that's it. I don't know how in particular it adds new domains, but I know you can request to add your own site through a form -- which is a thing that I did in the last year or so with my own site.

It's been discussed at length the extent to which Big Tech search engines/indexers are basically garbage at this point. Even using a wrapper like Duckduckgo, which re-arranges the results from a Google + Bing search, the usefulness of these tools is really in decline compared to how well they *used to work* (that is to say, we know for a fact that a better quality is possible on a technical level!)

It's been of course noted that the feasibility of running your own web indexer is simply too high of a bar for typical folks to clear. The web is literally just too big. There's too many links, too many pages, and all too much text to store in a cache. Not even to mention the work required to keep it up to date by doing regular crawling.

So, what about a search engine that only aims at a portion of the web? When we remove all of the big players like social media (Reddit, Twitter, etc), large forums (StackOverflow, etc), major wikis (Wikipedia, fandom wiki, etc), and large news outlets (The New York Times, AP News, etc) -- what's left?

Say we let W be the set of all pages on the web. We know that len(W) is too big to store on something that isn't a giant datacenter. What about storing (W - M), the set of all pages *minus* all the pages from major web domains (as discussed above)? How big is len(W - M)? Is it reasonable, or would you have to truncate even further, taking only a subset of (W - M)?

🧵️ (1/2)

#webSearch #search #web #indieWeb #smallWeb #marginalia #google #bing #yandex #openSource

Hey so is there any practical reason why a federated social network (i.e. the Social Web) wouldn't want to be composed of sub-networks that are largely isolated from each other?

Like, look, I get it. Within the vaguely progressive spaces of what Mastodon is currently, it makes sense that we want to hold on to a unified network. But like, suppose 85% of some major social media were to (over time) join the Social Web. A lot of those folks simply do not have the same culture as we do over here. *Every* social platform has a different culture. Once the Social Web starts to get that big, would it be a problem if it kind of became a lot more "fractured", so long as individual users still had the ability to connect to any other user if they intentionally search them up?

I don't know. I don't want to see crazy harsh fracturing of the network, but I also think it would be cool to see smaller communities where it doesn't feel like you're yelling in the one big auditorium that everyone else is part of. Making smaller little "rooms" where people can post to, that aren't so visible to people in other "rooms". Kind of like the analog of people on Tumblr and Twitter being mostly disconnected from each other -- except in this case, you could still search up and follow people from other "rooms", you just wouldn't naturally discover their account unless you made an explicit point to do so.

Is my thinking off? I feel like before this place can really take off, it would need a way to prevent the mono-culture.

Hypothetical that I'd like to explore:

If a person were to try to create some piece of fiction that took place in, say, Gotham City, or on Gallifrey, or Tatooine, they'd have their asses sued off by DC, or the BBC, or Star Wars/Disney, because those locations come from movies that are copyrighted. You can't use those settings until the copyright expires.

With the release of the recent _Backrooms_ (2016) movie, we have this interesting piece of commercial media that is based on a culturally owned story. The Backrooms as a concept is not copyrighted, because Kane Parsons (the director) didn't invent it. The concept comes from a collection of several unnamed nobodies, who made stuff, put it on the internet, and then it entered into the shared folklore.

If somebody wanted to write a companion film, say, "The Backrooms: Revisited", set within the same setting, and using many of the same tropes as were established within the Kane Parsons film -- the backrooms being a "copy of a copy", memories of the past, passing through walls to enter the backrooms, gateways appearing all across the world suddenly, etc -- what copyright rules might stop them?

Elements which existed within the folklore already surely would be seen as fair game. What about elements that are natural extensions of the existing lore? (it seems the place being a "copy of a copy" of the real world is new, but it doesn't seem a big stretch from the existing folklore)

Sure, we couldn't include Clark or his furniture shop. That's obvious. We couldn't tell their stories.

But it's very curious. To see a piece of fiction so commercially successful despite drawing so heavily from a contemporary piece of collectively constructed folklore, no?

It seems to me that this kind of work almost puts into plain view the contradiction between the creative energy of the folk tradition and the restrictive powers of our rigid copyright system.

Thoughts?

#folklore #storytelling #backrooms #theBackrooms #copyright #copyleft #creativeCommons

So in the last 20 years, has anyone in open source actually figured out a good way to do cryptography in a way that doesn't involve the terminal or interacting directly with files? Or is it still just a privilege that the tech-illiterate folks aren't allowed to enjoy?

I know there are a few GUI programs that are like wrappers for OpenPGP and such. Are those any good for people who aren't technical?

I wanna mess around with various options. Any recommendations?

#techSupport #askFedi #crypto #notThatCrypto #encryption #cryptography #security

I was immediately reminded of @catsalad

You guys remember when Netflix was like $9/month, and it got you unlimited ad-free streaming of basically everything. And then 20 years later there's 12 different streaming services that all cost $20/month so you can watch 3 back-to-back ads at the beginning of every episode?

And you guys remember when Facebook used to be like "hey advertisers and publishers! Come to Facebook. Just post a little preview to your article or product, and then a link. We'll show it off to people. If you buy an ad, we'll make sure it gets seen by the right people and you get your money's worth! And if you post an article and pay a small fee to boost it, we'll make sure it gets in front of the eyes that want to learn about it!" and then 20 years later Facebook is committing mass ad-fraud, and has manufactured a situation where it's basically impossible for publishers to post links to their articles that actually get clicked on by users?

Anyways, I'm sure this whole AI thing is gonna be just fine, where 3 companies all say "hey, we've got these models that are so massive that it's impossible to run them on your own computer. But don't worry, we're just gonna give out free access to them to you from our massive servers :) Why don't you go ahead and just learn how to use all of this and integrate it into your daily work habits, and make it crucial infrastructure for your business. This situation is going to stay the same forever. We wouldn't change the rules on you or anything..."

In his book "Fahrenheit 451," Ray Bradbury presents us with an imagined future world that is entirely engorged in media -- not any media, however. They are invested in the easy media of the television, and have been taught to fear the difficult media that is books and literature, to the point where books have been outlawed, and are systemically being destroyed, for fear of what their knowledge could do to somebody.

The people in this world become so consumed by their own little lives, their easy media, that they become entirely oblivious to the news and wars going on around them. It's just become accepted that the planes fly overhead every day. But nobody is actually paying attention to the news.

Well, what happens when we've landed in a similar world to that? Where everyone pays attention to the news, but their outlet of choice is some random 26 year old sitting in their car, who is somewhat accurately reciting what they read in a CNN or AP News article³? What if this is the only way most people get their news? What if the only time people consume this news is when they're in this state of eternal boredom, when their brain has shut off.

Is it normal that people are consuming news while in this state of mindless scrolling? Where authority of reputable sources means so little?

I don't know, I'm not here to make some proclamation about what needs to be done -- although, we could try cutting Mark Zuckerberg's head off, just to see if that fixes it -- but it worries me. I just think there's too many people who *aren't* worried about this.

It used to be that there would be massive moral panics around how much we watch TV. Now, it's a struggle for people to even do that. Do you hear me? The television has become a high-attention span activity for some people. We are so fucked right now. And it feels like everyone is collectively in denial about it. Is it because they themselves aren't struggling with it? Or are they scrolling through this stuff too, but they're just comfortable losing their attention span to this media environment?

Like, I feel like we should all be freaking out about this latest version of social media -- the version that popped out of the Covid era -- and thinking about how this is ruining our ability to engage properly with the world around us. Am I alone here? I feel like a crazy person screaming into the void. Who else is worried about this?

(3/3)

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³ Or god forbid, they didn't read anything. They've ingested *other people's* videos. Those videos might be factual, but they might just misinformation. Now it's getting shared around and watched by thousands of people who likely will not question it -- especially those who grew up on this stuff, and thus didn't develop strong media literacy skills.

The rise of the internet promised a world where creators could meet viewers without needing to go through traditional gatekeepers like publishers or TV stations. They just upload their video, and interested viewers could click and watch². At the time, a lot of what was shared was creative stuff -- art, in some sense of the term.

How is it that we've landed on this arrangement where so many people are creating what amounts to largely mundane content? It's all just so performative, so... plastic? I don't know, how else do I describe it? It's the media equivalent of a conveyor belt of just greasy potato chips. It's boring, it's uninteresting, and half of the time, the chips aren't even appealing when you *haven't* already been gobbing down handful after handful.

Look, I don't know. We all know that social media companies are evil, but the question is, what's the end result of a society that endlessly looks into this void of eternal mundane? Of half-baked political commentary, or personal accounts of how somebody at work slighted them in some way -- all pressed together to fit into a 30 second video. What do we become?

(2/3)

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² This also applies to other mediums as well, like writing, music, or whatever else that can be shared across an internet connection.

Does anyone else find it weird just how much non-fiction media we're suddenly consuming, what with the rise of short-form social media content?

Not really non-fiction in the sense of documentaries or prose books or anything. I mean, all of the different TikTok apps are littered with videos a person looking into their phone, and talking about... something?

A lot of the time, it's just genuinely not important stuff. On the more mundane end of the spectrum, they talk about some encounter they had at the store, or what a customer said to them at work. Or on the more interesting end, they might be talking about politics and the news. And like, it's a 2 minute video or less, not exactly comprehensive political educational content or anything.

Look, humans have been engaging with 'non-fiction' in this sense for forever. Cable TV always ran news stations. And the newspaper has been around since before television. But doesn't it kind of irk you? Maybe not necessarily the fact we're engaging with non-fiction, but with just how *much* of it we're consuming?

Maybe I'm an outlier here¹, but I'm spending *hours* on this stuff. To the point that I don't feel like I even watch actual media with a plot that often anymore. I feel like my attention span is so fried, I have to fight myself to just actually watch a movie instead of YouTube or scrolling Instagram.

(1/3)

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¹ I don't think I am, ask anyone under 25 years old to show you their phone's screen time, you'll see it's quite common

#Tech #BigTech #DigitalMinimalism #SocialMedia #Instagram #TikTok #MediaLiteracy

> Been struggling to get stuff done all day.
> Decide to hide my phone, so it won't distract me any further.
> Close all tabs for social media that would distract me.

> Finally get to work
> I need my phone to login to the 2FA for literally all of my tasks
> I know for a fact that if I grab that phone, there will be a notification or something, and I'm going to do more than just use 2FA

Why did we design our society like this, so that literally everything is locked away inside the same damn device? I just want to check my bank balance, why do I need to see notifications for my email and social media and texts in order to accomplish that?

Hm, random thought.

StackOverflow content is licensed under a CC-BY license, yeah? Would there be legal challenges if somebody wanted to scrape the site for historical posts and set up a federated alternative to it?

Like, import all the old stuff, then allow new users to ask and answer questions. So you get both the old stuff but then you maintain the community. Cuz there's talk that StackOverflow -- being a for-profit corporation and so relying on growth and such -- is kind of hitting a point where it might start cannibalizing itself out of lack of new questions.

Would copying it and moving it to a non-profit type style save the resource? Or maybe StackOverflow is fine and I've been lied to idk.

I need more project ideas tbh. Maybe something fun related to #IRC or some federated chat thing like #XMPP or #Matrix? Perhaps I could run a bot or something, plug it into something, and allow commands (from me? from anyone? idk) to actually do something on the server it's on.

Unless maybe I can think of anything else fun to do on a cheap little VPS that I'm thinking of renting.

#tech #projectIdeas #linux

I lowkey feel like I'm in git submodule hell with this thing lol

It's already a big project with like 3 different parts. The web app frontend has a markdown editor that's a git submodule of something I forked. The API handles login security with the SLIM C++ library I wrote. Since I can't call C++ directly from Python, I used the SLIM-cli project I made, which basically just converts all the functions into callable things from the command line.

Spent some hours working on my Mycelium website editor project. It's now got proper functionality for handling users, including logging in and signing up.

And in general everything is fairly functional. The only really important thing left is I need a better solution for actually hosting the outputted websites for all the various users. Currently, it can only host 1 site at a time.

Really excited to show this thing off once it's properly ready. I'm considering hosting it on a VPS or something when I get it ready.

while we're at it, if you're following me, feel free to drop below and say hi!

What kinda stuff do you like? Any hobbies, favorite media, or other cool things you do?

I believe I may need to go to sleep now, but I promise I will go through and look at all of these notifications in the morning. Very appreciative of how much attention this request has gotten :blobcathearthug: :ablobcathyper: :honk_pride:

I feel like I should put tags on this, but I don't think #genz and #trans are particularly well followed by genz or trans folks. Oh well.

#queer #college #transfem #transmasc