Opinion: Facebook and Google's growing power has spurred calls to decentralize the web.
Bennett Tomlin (Bennett's Blog)Social media often sucks. The social internet is a magical place full of rich relationships, new connections, intriguing ideas, and true community. What do I mean when I say the social internet? It…
The simple reason is that the dynamics of most social media are very different from the dynamics of other social internet applications. For one there seems to be a fundamental push vs pull difference in the way that you normally come to view the content.
The internet was on demand, instead of demanding.
Nitasha Tiku (WIRED)As unease with Big Tech grows, some prescribe a slower, less viral online existence. "Eat independent sites, mostly not Facebook."
Nitasha Tiku (WIRED)To put our toxic relationship with Big Tech into perspective, critics have compared social media to a lot of bad things. Tobacco. Crystal meth. Pollution. Cars before seat belts. Chemicals before Superfund sites. But the most enduring metaphor is junk food: convenient but empty; engineered to be addictive; makes humans unhealthy and corporations rich. ❧
Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)So this is where some older paths-not-taken, such as Ted Nelson’s original many-to-many, multidirectional model for hypertext, and some more recent potential paths, such as Herbert van de Sompel’s decentralized, distributed vision for scholarly communication, might come in. ❧
Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)I imagine that the first part of this project will focus on how it got to be this way, what got missed or ignored in some of the early warnings about what was happening online and how those warnings were swamped by the hype depicting the Internet as a space of radical democratization. ❧
Some broad initial bibliography from the top of my head:
Larry Sanger (co-founder of Wikipedia)
Some useful history/timelines:
I’m curious if you’d publicly share your current blbliography/reading list?
It’s not a gender thing.
App Review’s previous stated rationale for rejecting the Gab app was that the service didn’t do a good enough job of moderating the user-generated content. Gab claimed that they try their best to do this but that Apple’s requirements are impossible to meet. Clearly, Twitter and other social networks don’t always meet them, either. But Twitter is too-big-to-reject, and Gab has a reputation for offensive content, attracting a community of users that were banned or had their posts deleted from Twitter.
Ton Zijlstra (Interdependent Thoughts)Lurking, although the word seems to imply a negative connotation, has usefull aspects nonetheless. It is a way of determining rules of behaviour for new comers to a group.
The most obvious characteristic of a lurker is that he’s at the fringe of a group, listening and observing. Being at the fringe may seem like a bad place from the core, but in fact is a good position to build bridges to other groups, and be aware of other groups in the vicinity. In a face to face setting like a pub or a meeting of some kind, a lurker is visible, often shortly introduced after which the focus of attention shifts to the established group members again.
In on-line settings things are different. In some fora lurkers are encouraged to introduce themselves and then adviced to lurk, i.e. observe and learn for a while. But at all times there is no way of knowing how many lurkers are there that you are unaware of.
As lurkers are possible bridges to other groups, I as a blogger, would like to know:
- How many lurkers I have, who read my blog but don’t comment or post.
- Who they are
Serverlogs can give some clues, and I keep a close watch on them. Dave Winer’s RSS-tool also brings new info to light.
A decentralized video hosting network, based on free/libre software
Since version 1.0 has been released last November, we went on improving PeerTube, day after day. These improvements on PeerTube go well beyond the objectives fixed during the crowdfunding. They have been funded by the Framasoft non-profit, which develops the software (and lives only through your donations). Here is a small retrospective of the end of 2018/beginning of 2019:
Aaron Davis (Read Write Respond)Many argue that something is not right with social media as it currently stands. This post explores what it might mean to make Twitter great again? Responding to Jack Dorsey’s call for suggestions on how to improve Twitter, Dave Winer put forward two suggestions: preventing trolling and making cha...
When former Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes penned a New York Times op-ed calling for the breakup of the platform, he was lauded by anti-corporate politicians and the press. Then came a series of hard questions: how exactly would breaking up Facebook, which owns WhatsApp and Instagram, address free speech concerns? Or help stifle the spread of propaganda on the platform? And how would American regulations affect the majority of Facebook users, who live in the global south? According to Michael Lwin, an American-born antitrust lawyer living in Yangon, Myanmar, US regulators should tread lightly. He and Bob speak about how calls to break up Facebook could have wide ranging unintended consequences, especially outside of the US.
Ben Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)Three weeks ago, I decided to go dark on social media. No convoluted account deletion process; no backups. I just logged out everywhere, and deleted all my apps. It's one of the best things I've ever done. I thought I'd check in with a quick breakdown: what worked, and what didn't. Here we go. Wh...
Ben Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)For a host of reasons, I've decided to go dark on social media for the remainder of 2018. If my experiment is successful beyond that time, I'll just keep it going. Originally, I'd intended to do this just for the month of December, but as I sat around the Thanksgiving dinner table yesteryday, surrou...
