People overall want to have a single website or app where they can access everything interesting to them.
Like, I remember being a teenager 15 years ago and regularly clicking through three, four, five different forums. I don’t have time for that anymore. The Lemmy concept allows us to have the best of both worlds: no single point of failure, but also no need to remember to click through many different websites.
Why should I take that piece of AI detection software at its word? I looked at that user’s comment history and, while admitting I am not an expert on it, do not see any obvious signs of AI. If that’s AI, mission fucking accomplished.
Of course. I find “social media” a suboptimal term anyway. A good term for the concept is the “participatory Internet”.
But if we are going to use it, then it’s just media that is produced by society at large as opposed to paid journalists or authors. Meaning Usenet is social media.
How is the fediverse different from traditional social media?
The fediverse is a decentralized network of social media platforms that freely interact, unlike traditional social media.
I have a bit of a problem with the term “traditional social media”.
The earliest popular form of social media was Usenet. The first one I ever used was web forums (run on phpBB or similar software). Those have a lot more “tradition” than Facebook or Twitter or TikTok, so why are they calling the latter three (deviations from the decentralized “tradition” of the Internet) “traditional social media”?! Is it just that they’re the first form of social media that the authors of that article ever used?
The opposite of “tearing our societies apart” would be “uniting our societies”.
I come from a country (Austria) that once tried a political system where all of society was forced to unite behind a strong leader. That didn’t go very well.
So I refuse to think of “tearing our societies apart”, without further qualification, as an inherently bad thing. Better that than enforced unity of all of society where no dissent outside the Overton window is ever allowed.
combined with the algorithm
Agreed that that’s a major problem with today’s Internet. When I started to use it, the main way to publicly communicate online was web forums where threads were sorted by topic and then chronologically by when they were last posted in, i.e. with no recommendation algorithms. At the time, I was a preteen and dreamed of a world where that was a mainstream thing and way more people would be posting on forums like that.
Way more people use the Internet now, but it’s not structured that way at all anymore, and I do not understand what was so wrong with it that it needed to be replaced with algorithmic recommendations. Did that concept just not have a functioning business model, or what?
We all know that the EU wants age verification for the web.
Yes, and it needs to be fought politically.
But the idea that everyone on social media is a verified human beeing could also have a lot of positive effects.
No. No, it could not. I grew up with the idea of the Internet being a mostly separate space from real life, one where our identities do not matter as much, and want that to be the case as much as possible. “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
How do you think reference material and news gets written and distributed?
Reference material is often wikis or git repositories, which legally and technically are social media, so if you want those to exist, you want social media to exist.
News isn’t by itself social media, but social media helps significantly with following and discovering it. I get most of mine through Mastodon and Lemmy.
I hope we can elect politicians who don’t hate the Internet at some point, so that we don’t have to hope it will be unenforceable.
I’ve been a very regular user of the Internet for more than 20 years, and 20 years ago I thought that surely in 20 years, the Internet will have become established and governments will no longer be trying to attack it, instead we will be living in a utopia of free international communication. That has turned out to be false. :(
This kind of thing has much less tradition in the EU than the US. First of all, European Union legislative texts are actually properly called “directives” or “regulations” (this in particular is a proposed regulation), putting “Act” in their titles is a very recent trend. And then, naming laws with these kinds of acronyms has so far not been common in the EU at all, that is clearly an imitation of US bills.
I’m not yet even close to 40, yet I still believe I am one of the “people who built the World Wide Web”, in the sense that I’ve been posting to it for more than 20 years (there are still old forum posts online that I wrote at the age of 10), i.e. before it was something the general public did a lot.
I’m on the one hand proud of how much it has grown and how much more popular it has become; and on the other hand, worried that this has caused governments around the world to pay a lot more attention to it and limit our freedom on it through age verification laws and similar…
I would not do that without first looking into applicable laws regarding legal liability for content and requirements to remove things. Depending on where in the world you are, this can be a minefield.
Is this the same UK with the Online Safety Act whose main purpose (in the sense of “the purpose of a system is what it does”) is to legislate all forums and platforms not run by big tech companies out of existence? I somehow don’t think that country in particular will do that, but best of luck to the ORG!