In other news, water is wet

Because the world is full of contradictions

you do realize that people from other instances than beehaw can post here too? :D

I dislike the whole concept of “social media” in the Facebook sense.

I think the ideal form of “social media”, which was also popular in 2004, was the web forum. I want that back, not something where I have to follow people, but something where I can meet and find people with common interests and discuss those interests with them.

Apache isn’t copyleft, not sure why you thought it was

I remember reading once that in the very first years of the existence of the German Democratic Republic, television was the form of mass media that was most critical of the regime. It just wasn’t as influential yet as newspapers and radio, so they didn’t care about it as much; when it became more popular, it too came more under the control of the communist regime.

I certainly agree that the Internet should be by and for individuals; whether we can in the long term do completely without corporations, I am not sure, but the current “algorithmic curation” is definitely a problem.

I mean I agree with that in principle, but: before the Internet, of course big corporations influenced kids and adults! Before the internet only big corporations had the resources and practical ability to distribute any information to a lot of people.

The promise of the internet was that we would have a society where we could all have a say and the flow of information would be democratized. You are right that, because of “algorithms”, that promise hasn’t really been fulfilled.

No it wouldn’t, but people would only see them if they were part of a preexisting community where such things are posted or they specifically looked for them.

On the Internet, censorship happens by having too much information for our limited time and attention span, so going after recommendation algorithms will work.

It is supposed to believe that climate change is a … scam?!

You can believe that climate change is not real, but a “scam”, how does that even work?

I am too young to remember that. Of course browsers are now free (at least as in beer, many also as in speech) again and that is a good thing. In my childhood, computers were pretty much synonymous with Windows and the web was mostly unusable without Flash Player and it’s a good thing that that has changed. Still, we don’t live in the utopian society I imagined the Internet would lead to.

2004: The Internet is going to lead us into a utopian future of free communication where we exchange ideas with each other without corporate media being gatekeepers telling us what to read, write and think!

2024: Hi, I’m Meta and everyone gets their information from my platforms and I can decide what ideas to allow there. What do you mean we weren’t supposed to have that anymore by now, whoever told you that kind of nonsense.

I think the line is easy to draw: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moderation-is-different-from-censorship

I oppose most censorship, but I do not oppose moderation. If you don’t want to see certain people speaking freely, you shouldn’t have to, but you shouldn’t be allowed to keep them from speaking freely to each other.

Remember when reddit was a free speech platform where pretty much everything legal was ok except doxing?

What went wrong that we can’t have places like that on the Internet anymore?

2004: The Internet is going to lead us into a utopian future of free communication and access to information! No government will ever be able to censor information anymore because they will lack legal reach to censor everything!

2024:

Could Bluesky not just implement ActivityPub too? Is there a reason why they are not doing that?

I think the history is such that a “PC” is a computer compatible with the “IBM PC” which Macs were historically not and modern ones aren’t either.

But I still like “Windows computer”, we can abbreviate that to “WC”.

Matrix really is 21st-century IRC.

Current government right now? I don’t remember any time when French politicians were friendly to the free and open Internet. Used to be that copyright was the main concern, nowadays not anymore.

oh, so that isn’t how it is supposed to be? I was wondering how to search for communities, this is the only Lemmy instance I have ever used, maybe I should pick a different one?