Anarchy, Not Decentralization.

2022-01-30

The defining feature of the modern internet is its unprecidented centralisation. Most people spend most of their time in a small handful of websites and apps owned by the same handful of megacorps. Those who own and run these platforms have almost no accountability to the people who use the platforms, since each is essentially a monopoly on their own domain, and are "too big to fail". When youtube removed dislikes from their platform to save face for their other megacorp friends, they had no reason to even consider that people would simply stop using youtube. After all, where are you going to go, bitchute? Alternative sevices often lack propper moderation, which means the first people to settle in places like bitchute are the users who were so toxic that they don't have anywhere else to go (remember this principle, it will come back later). This is why if you go to almost any other platform which markets itsef as a youtube alternative, you'll be instantly bombarded with anti-vax conspiracy videos and right wing propaganda. All the better for youtube. The backlash to youtube removing dislikes was maybe the biggest in the sites long history of unpopular changes. The main complaint was that dislikes help people to make a judgement about the quality of the video they are about to watch, and to avoid dissinformation or poor quality content. Now sure this is of course one of the major uses of public dislike counts, but I would argue that the true root of why so many people have such a problem with this change is disempowerment. Users once had the power to make their opinions known on a video, and express their collective power against media giants in a small way. The opportunity to embarass a company like disney or ubisoft speaks to people's natural dislike of these companies. Now, they no longer have that power.

Disempowering the people who use your website is a running trend among the centralized internet. Twitter users are completely at the mercy of the site's arbitrary moderation standards, which often dissproportionately punishes marginalised groups, activists, sex workers and artists, while verified "bluechecks" enjoy special treatment. The vast majority of bluechecks are those who are already wealthy, famous, and/or friends or financially involved with twitter insiders. The structure of twitter actively centralises power and disempowers everyone else. Those in charge of twitter and all the other central platforms on the internet are completely unacountable to their users, including places like youtube and tik tok where even those who relly on these platforms as a job have no say in how it is run, and have little to no protections from abuses of power from those in charge.

But fear not user, a saviour is here to rescue us all! It's name? Federation. Or at least that's what some people would like you to think. Im going to be giving a quick rundown on some terminology here, so that we all know what we're talking about. Then, I will talk about what the fediverse gets right, what I see as the fundamental flaws in the system as it exists (focusing on twitter-likes mastadon and pleroma), and finally I will offer a better answer to questions of authority and empowerment on the internet.

And yes I will just be copy pasting from wikipedia here.

ActivityPub: An open, decentralized social networking protocol

The Fediverse: An ensemble of federated (i.e. interconnected) servers that are used for web publishing (i.e. social networking, microblogging, blogging, or websites) and file hosting, but which, while independently hosted, can communicate with each other

Pleroma: Software for running federated social networking sites based around the structure of twitter.

In case you don't quite get that overly jargon filled explaination of the fediverse, the idea is that anyone can host their own instance of, let's say pleroma, on their own server. Then, they get to set the rules however they like. Other people can then join their instance, and use it much like twitter. The key is that while each instance may be run by different people, they all have the ability to communicate with one another. You are probably familiar with this concept if you use email, I might be xyz@gmail.com, you might be zyx@hotmail.com, or someone else might set up their own email server and be yzx@yzx.com, but we are all using the same protocol so we can all talk to each other seamlessly. Pleroma is the same way, although your account may be on any particular instance, you can still see and interact with posts and accounts from accross the fediverse. That's federation and that's decentralisation. Now, rather than having to abide by the particular rules of twitter, you can browse through the list of available instances, and pick one with rules and themes that suit you. Or if you don't find any you like, you can host your own instance with and run it as you see fit.

the first problem this solves is one that has been plaguing those wishing to compete with the big players in social media, money. It takes a lot of money to host a platform with as much activity and data as twitter or youtube. A prohibitive amount of money which makes it hard for new sites to get off the ground. With federation, each instance only takes a fraction of the load, meaning they are easily affordable for amateurs and hobbiests to run. Of course the main advantage here is decentralisation. If you don't like the rules on twitter, tough luck. If you dont like the way any particular instance of pleroma is being run, you are free to simply find another one. In some sense, the possibility of free Exit incentivises those in charge to run their instance in the interests of its users, or risk having their entire userbase jump ship. Now there's not that much at stake here of course if the users do decide to leave, but the social incentive is generally strong enough to keep out the worst. Another advantage of decentralisation is resiliance. Say twitter's servers suffer some technical malfunction, well, all of twitter is now gone. All that data and infrastructure has a single point of failure. With federation, even if one instance goes down, the network as a whole is fine. Finally, instances tend to be quite small, with many even restricting membership on an invite only basis to keep themselves small on purpose. Because of this, members of each instance are less alienated from one another, and from the leadership of that instance. Communities tend to be tighter knit and more focused, which does a lot to aleviate toxicity and once again empower people.

So that's the good, now the bad. There is one feature of pleroma and (as far as i know) every other fediverse service, instances can block other instances. This obviously seems like a good thing at first, especially when you remember that the right wing social media platform Gab is run on mastadon. Immediately, almost every other instance blocked Gab, which I think is fairly reasonable. However, this is where the problems start. Instances are preasured to increase moderation and control of their userbase at risk of ending up on blocklists. The fact that instances are so small means that older members who are well known often have dissproportionate authority due to friendship with mods or owners, not to mention that those mods and owners have unchecked authority of their own. Instances go from moderating legitimate hate speech to censoring any opinions they disagree with, or just people they don't particularly like. Twitter is so large that as a small account you will almost never have to interact with any twitter authority, even if you decide to post about problems you have with twitter or its management, you'll go unnoticed. On pleroma, you are constantly and actively surveilled at all times by the moderation team, and they are under no obligation not to simply ban you for criticising them. Legitimate criticism of authorities or even other users can often reasult in bans, with the appeals process up to the arbitrary discression of the mods. Owners and moderators of various instances are often friends or at least in communication, meaning the "decentralised" nature of the platform is undercut by the "ruling class" protecting each other. All of this leads to mass polarisation. Instances tend towards "toxic possitivity", where members are afraid to speak negatively for fear of being kicked from the community, or on the other end, the handful of "free speech" centric instances, which are incredibly toxic and full of far right propaganda. If you don't fit into either of these group, tough luck, that's all that's available. They haven't dismantled the power structures that make the centralised internet so problematic, they've simply distributed it. They've seen the authoritarian structures of existing social media platforms, and they just want to be the boot. Those in charge are under zero accountability, and this will inevitably lead to abuse of power.

Other problems arrise as a consequence of simply cloning existing popular social networks. Websites like twitter are designed to make money out of you by having you addicted. On the one hand, posts are always happening and all your friends are there, you have to keep checking twitter out of Fear Of Missing Out. Secondly, they drip feed you dopamine hits with likes, comments, retweets, they take the innate pleasure of socialising with your peers and gamify it into an addictive loop. There is constant preasure to make the number go up, follower count, likes, etc. Pleroma addresses none of the fundamental problems with the structure of social media and the impact that can have on users mental wellbeing. Even beyond the mental health impact, it is a structure which exists to generate low quality content, posts which have the least to say and appeal to the broadest number of people do the best, this is particularly evident on reddit and its federated equivelant lemmy, due to the upvote system. The only reason the fediverse has decent post quality right now is that it's small and hard to find. The only people who post there are people who have already gone through the effort to figure it out and get an account, it's currently a built in filter selecting for a particular kind of person. That's why you'll find that the entire userbase has a heavy leaning towards technology discussion, the only people who end up there are already tech enthusiasts. As the network continues to grow beyond hobbiests, it will no longer have that good will to fall back on, and I do not think it has the structure or tools to deal with this.

So in conclusion, the fediverse is a good start, but does nothing to address the authority structure, user empowerment or design problems of traditional social media. For now, the problem is small because the fediverse is small, but as twitter have been actively looking into joining into the fediverse, and already there are bigger and bigger social networks like the aformentioned Gab and the japanese social network Pawoo are both very popular. It's just a new face for an old boot.

At it's core, the fundamental problem with the internet is really the client-server architecture. At the end of the day, one person owns the server, and one person is just connecting to it. Whoever owns the server has all the power. And they can own the server because they own (or rent) the physical hardware the server runs on. There is no software sollution that can overcome the problem of this dynamic while still being client-server based. There are alternatives, specifically p2p and mesh networks, and I think as an end goal those are the ideal, however I am unueducated on the specifics here so I won't speak too much on them.

My first proposed sollution for restructuring social interaction on the internet is Anonymity By Default. Instead of making an account, having a psuedomym and collecting virtual points in the form of likes, follows etc, every post is anonymous. You talk because you have something to say, and you participate in discussion based on your ideas, not your identity. This is an easy fix to the problems around the harmful structure of social media. You are no longer preasured to upkeep a digital appearence, there is no longer social preasure around what you are expected to not mention, you are less likely to be ostracised for speaking out, there are no likes, dislikes, no accounts to follow, you just talk for the sake of talking. This is a proven formula, accross various anonymous imageboards, textboards and BBSs. Sites like 1chan, an imageboard for train enthusiasts which has been going strong since 2003. Or RAL, a "neoforum" textboard. All social websites need some way to make sure you are seeing the content you want to see, and not seeing the stuff you don't want to see. Reddit does this by allowing you to follow various subreddits for whatever subject's you're interested in, then within those subs it assumes that you will want to see what the most other people have voted is good. Twitter currates content by having a timeline of only people you follow, and assumes that you share a taste with those you follow so you want to also see their likes and retweets. Anonymous boards in my opinion have the best system, because the user is the most empowered. Like reddit, the overall site is split into various topics or boards, say you want to talk music, then go to the music board and so on. Then within each board you have a thread, where the OP sets the topic for discussion, with maybe some sort of prompt, and the thread itself is the content. This is where it differs from reddit, where the OP is the main content. There are no accounts, likes or dislikes, threads are "bumped" to the top of the board when a new post is made. This means threads with the most active discussion rise to the top, and threads where no one is talking fall off the end. This encourage disscussion and communication, well really conversation. On an anonymous imageboard, you are not simply replying to a post, you are participating and contributing to an active discussion, and that's the fun of it all. This solves many of the problems with social media's harmful effects on mental health. Of course it brings its own problems, the biggest one being that they are notoriously hard to moderate at scale. For this reason I do not necisarily advocate for anonymous imageboards as a drop in replacement for social media, but I do think that there are some really good design features and lessons to be learned which can help with creating a better internet going forward.

What I actually do advocate as a replacement for social media is extremely simple and old-school. Personal websites and rss. Everything good about the fediverse is even better with personal websites + rss. Instead of having to hope that you don't piss off the mods of whatever instance you're on, well, you can just do whatever you want, it's your website after all. You own it. You can write whatever you want, design it however you want, obviously you are in complete control because it is yours! No longer are you a digital serf tilling the feilds making content for some other person to host, you just host yourself. Anyone can follow your rss feed, and they can use any particular rss feed reader they like (I use newsboat it you're interested) to keep up with all the people they're interested in. One advantage of pseudonymous social media over anonymous is that you can DM people. Guess what, the perfect DMing system already exists, it's called email. It's decentralised, you can host your own, it's free, it's open and best of all you don't have to convince people to install a new app on their phone or whatever, everyone already has it! I think it's beyond the scope of this post to talk about gemini and gopher, but if you already know what those are, they're even better than the web for doing this. Everyone should have a personal website, and everyone should use rss, there is no dissadvantage. And before you say "but it costs money to host a website", there are plenty of ways to host a simple static website for free, perfect for a blog. You're looking at one right now, neocities. I also recomend txti.es if you are looking to make your own static site. Actually, I will briefly go over gemini and gopher just for completeness' sake. In short, the modern web is extremely bloated, remember back to my first post and all that stuff about minimal software? Social media sites, and I'm actually surprised I haven't mentioned this yet, track you. They make money by selling your data to third parties. They're full of ads and trackers. Most websites are full of this crap, they're massive full of unnesicary javascript that mostly makes webpages worse, massive popups telling to accept cookies, sign up to their mailing list, pointless animations which load really slowly on bad internet and also make the site less usable, and they break on older browsers or those which block javascript for privacy and security reasons. I'm not saying javascript or cookies are always the devil, but when it's possible to abuse a system, it will be abused. Social media websites are some of the worst offenders for this. Just scrolling twitter can make my ram usage jump up to 50%, when it sits at a comfortable 2-5% on a static text based website. The answer here comes from alternative internet protocols. Not the web, but still the internet. Again, you are probably familiar with internet protocols other than http(s). Email, irc, and bittorrent are some of the most common. Each of these serves a specific use. Http(s) is too generalised and thus bloated (remember what I said in my first post about how programs should do one thing well). Gopher is an older internet protocol for serving documents. Just to really rub in the implications of this, bare in mind "The biggest con Silicon Valley ever pulled off was convincing us they’re masters of innovation. Netflix brought us digital movie distribution cries in Bittorrent. Apple introduced Music streaming to the world laughs in Napster. Facebook invented social media no they didn’t.Big tech might claim only businesses can innovate while profiting from software written by volunteers in their spare time on an Internet designed, built and funded with public money." [thedorkweb]

Gopher is much, much more limited than the web. You can't even do inline images. If you want to host an image, it has to be a link which will then download that image onto the person's computer where they can open it in whatever image viewer they like. Because gopher is only text, browsers now only have to do one job, render text. Your web browser probably has features that allow it to serve pdfs, audio files, video files, maybe even download torrents. I don't need my web browser to render video, I already have a video player on my computer. I don't want it to just do a worse job at the same things I have specialised programs for already. Gopher serves static text documents. And it does it really well. Then, there is gemini, which is heavier than gopher, but lighter than the web. It has some nice features like TLS encryption, but it's ultimately very similar, very lightweight, limited on purpose, extremely fast and extremely cool. I do plan to mirror this blog on gemini at some point. I would encourage you to head over to the gemini homepage, install a gemini browser and take a look around the Small Internet. Instead of clinging to the power structures of the centralised web like the fediverse does, let's create travel towards an anarchist pathwork of static websites, gopherholes and gemini capsules, all aggregated by our individual rss feeds where we have total control. You don't need to rely on someone else's "platform", fuck platforms, fuck content, fuck ads and trackers and making any money off this shit. Let's just do it because it's fun. Why bother with store-bought when home-made is cheaper, easier, and tastes better anyway.