The internet has always been my salvation.
As a socially underdeveloped kid, I’d spend my lunch hours in the high school library on those public desktop computers, reading fandom sites about my favorite video games. Computers always made sense to me. I even owe my entire career to them.
But the internet today feels wrong. Whatever the fuck kind of psychological warfare is happening right now with this Epstein stuff is too much for my mind to handle. I can’t do it anymore.
I will love. I will vote. I will support my community and continue to oppose this fucking nightmarish system we all find ourselves in. But I need to sign off.
Imagine the door closing sound effect when logging out of AIM.
Not if it’s set up right. This federation is the model, it just needs to be tweaked. Clear rules on instances that can talk between the lemmy and piefeds to the open source facebook and twatter and instagram type social medias. One account that can travel between them.
More than that, to have a clear set of rules for moderation, both in the instances and the general forums, and for violations to be appealable, and a final decision contested to end in a jury trial of users. To prevent the powerful from getting their hooks in, and to prevent the moderators and administrators being unjust. It’s the only way to get the critical mass we need to have a viable alternative to these silicon valley parasites that are in thrall to big business and government.
Also in addition we need new sort of organizations, ones where innumerable groups can cooperate on what they agree on on general forums, as they see fit. Privately and publicly, where we can pool knowledge, funding, create businesses where maximizing revenue isn’t the only concern in sectors where the private market isn’t providing needed outcomes, finding and grooming and electing political candidates, pooling votes and collectively using votes and other actions to force poliiticians to adopt our positions over those of monied interests.
Monied interests cooperate on what they agree on, and if we don’t do the same we can never counter-act them. We are stronger than the united greed of those interests, that is hurting itself long term to maximize it’s short term profit. We just need the forums to work together. Federated systems are that forum, to remove liability from he whole for one thing.
If what was meant when OP says ‘internet’ is the cesspool social media, then yes, we should totally ditch them.
However, the fact remains that the real definition of internet is simply a bunch of interconnected devices that run the internet protocol (IP), nothing more and nothing less.
Though I have my doubts, I’m not disagreeing with you or anything, just pointing out that there’s a lot of people confusing this term, and simple as it may be, it might be harmful.
I think I was just trying to say that it’s not doomed to enshitify if we set up new systems to work despite the malign forces at work. The idea behind open source and federation could work to set up systems that could be resistant to the enshittening.
We need a sort of federated social media as much as anything. While lemmy is a good start, we need to add more types of social medias that can interact together and improve their functioning, and also give a set of clear rules that can be appealed to a jury trial of users for serious infractions to get and keep the trust that would enable us to overcome the established silicon valley parasite companies that the government and big business has their hooks into and as such is a compromised forum we are doomed to lose the common good on.
Valid point.
What I would like to add to it is that we will need to defend it from time to time.
We’ve already seen an example when Meta’s Thread tried to federate.
Spammers have also been a nuisance, and thankfully our mods & admins have been handling them well.