While I applaud fascist hate being de-platformed, I think ceding the control of what is in the marketplace of ideas to corporations is going to come back and bite us in the ass.
I suppose it has always been there - those who own the printing press and all that. But the internet was supposed to flatten that. I really don’t want to give up on that idea yet.
It saddens me that the flip-side of having the worlds knowledge and expertise at our fingertips is that we have to navigate the guttural screams of the basest human impulses.
Does this mean the successor to Parler will be some kind of fully-distributed system with all the smarts at the end-nodes of the network, a la Diaspora?
Assuming alt-right douchebros have the technical chops to implement that without screwing it up, which may be an overgenerous assumption.
Remember that there are signs of hate speech, fake news and libel since clay tablets. Internet and private “social networks” have made the distribution faster.
The base is culture and teaching: bad schools generate bad people incapable to do anything useful for the society and the nation.
Problem is that these platforms are thriving not on cultural content but on the most trashy things that are present, on divisive and bad content.
And of course they are too big and have to be split in parts, because a thing worsts of a state monopoly is a private monopoly.
Or they could go back to older methods like USENET or BBS. The main difference is that these systems weren’t designed and not capable to be use as an ad platform. So they aren’t made to be eyeball catching like private centralized systems.
NNTP clients are normally not push but olnly pull and I never tried them on smartphones, but is a system better suited to be used on a regular computer, even on an 80x25 green screen.
Russian companies would still be wary of taking on Parler even with Putin’s blessing, because he could have prosecutors throw the book at them if one day he decided that it was no longer useful. It would have to be an instruction from the Kremlin to host Parler rather than merely a green light.
Nothing would prevent anyone from using NNTP as a transport for more visually appealing content, especially in a semi-private environment where one controls the client that people use.
“Push” and “pull” aren’t entirely meaningful terms in NNTP. NNTP is designed to “flood” a network of servers with copies of a posting such that every server gets it eventually but the overall effort is minimised. IOW, server A offers a new posting to servers B and C and they get it from A if they haven’t seen it already. Server B may then pass it on to server D, and if C offers it to D again later then D will decline because it has already received it from B. Most NNTP servers talk to a limited number of other NNTP servers periodically to pass new material back and forth.
It says something about me that I read that and said to myself, “Wow, i thought I understood Canadian better than that! Nope, totally foreign.” I’m sure same response occurs when I start speaking medicalese, though.
ETA: As I finish the thread, I realize I know nothing in this realm. Damn, I feel dumb.
This is what I’ve been wondering this whole time. Pulling new downloads from the App Store is a good move, but I’d assume that 99.9% of any potential users are already set up. Of course, web hosting is the Moby Dick here, so good on AWS (finally). Can someone smarter than me explain whether Apple and Google’s actions will actually have an impact on users? Will they effectively remove the apps from devices?
Google won’t remove apps from users devices. It’s unclear even if they have that direct ability in their services. Historically even when they have found wilfully malicious apps they have removed them from their app store and notified users of their maliciousness, giving them a link to remove them, but they don’t tend to pull apps themselves.
Apple will and has revoked developer certs before which does result in the app becoming untrusted by the device. Untrusted apps cannot be run on ios.
And a device that allows you to legally install apps. Mind, there’s jailbreaking IOS, but if you have a company explicitly instructing users to do that to install their apps, Apple will sue them into oblivion and win.
The republicans are in a tough spot here. They’ve argued for big businesses and against net neutrality and put judges in position that support those things. They wanted big autocratic companies executing near monopoly control over industries and have worked to deregulate everything everywhere. So now we have an oligopoly among internet providers and if your voice isn’t wanted, it’s a very small number of people with the power to make that happen. This has long been a point of worry for the left, and we were told “Shh, shut up, the free market works.”
Well, now that THEY don’t like it, suddenly they want to turn the ship around. Good luck with that.
It already has, just from the other side. If for instance we say that twitter was right to ban Donald Trump because of the risk of him inciting more violence, we are also saying that in their years of not banning Donald Trump twitter helped enable the coup attempt, among many other things. In other words, the level of damage is being decided in part by twitter executives. I don’t know that makes anyone that comfortable.
I’m certainly not against this, but it has to give me a moment to pause and consider the recent screed from Cory about the pseudo feudalism that IS Apple and it’s ability to do this.
It’s good when we like and and bad when we don’t.
This a a dangerous game Professor Falken. Wouldn’t you prefer a game of tic-tak-toe?
Yes well I’m pretty sure “source code and a toolchain” is not going to result, 20 years later, in a mass movement that will overthrow democracy and install a fascist president-for-life, so I guess that’s fine
No, tech alone certainly won’t cut it and certainly not with sociopathic CEOs running the biggest tech monopolies but i absolutely believe it’s the foundation on which we fight the good fight and why we need to protect decentralised platforms because one day it’ll be those on our side who are silenced. It’s why i have mixed feelings about this that people like Cory manage to articulate what i can’t put into words -
But we have a duopoly of mobile platforms, an oligopoly of cloud providers, a small conspiracy of payment processors. Their choices about who make speak are hugely consequential, and concerted effort by all of them could make some points of view effectively vanish.
In this instance though, de-platforming actual fascists is something i think most of us should get behind.
ETA: This is an interesting read from someone explaining why this isn’t without precedent, not by a long way, but too many US pundits don’t seem to look beyond US borders.
Gab already tried that by forking Mastodon’s code base and putting basic features behind a paywall in an attempt to generate revenue. The rest of the Fediverse that isn’t full of alt-right dipshits defederated from them basically overnight, and most of the Mastodon apps for both platforms now actively block people from signing into those instances. They still exist, but their reach is extremely limited.
