this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2025
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

If they really, really want to fix 99.8% of the problems with hate speech (and many other issues), each user needs to agree to have their real name, home address, email address, and phone number available to the public, in their profile. While what I've just said is completely absurd, for almost everyone, it's the anonymity that empowers people to say the absolute worst things.

Why don't most people in the checkout line (queue) at the grocery store act the same way they do in a traffic jam on a roadway? Because they're much more likely to be held personally accountable for their conduct. I wonder how much traffic would change, if our name, address and telephone numbers were required to be posted on all sides of our vehicles?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

it’s the anonymity that empowers people to say the absolute worst things.

humans behave badly when they perceive they have social license to do so. anonymity has little to do with it

  • exhibit A: public robberies of German Jews in the 1930s
  • exhibit B: rwandan genocide
  • exhibit C: any public confrontation video shot during the Covid pandemic

your second paragraph makes you sound like Larry Ellison. all you're arguing for is the extension of the capacity of corporations to constrain and coerce invidiual behaviour, which is gross

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

I think anonymity has a lot to do with it, but you certainly point out that there's more than anonymity to factor in. I also agree that, especially in our problemed data sharing environment, having our data on public display would be troublesome (understatement of the year). My comments weren't so much of a "we should do this," as much as a point of the cost of fixing the problem. Fixing the problem would be worse than the problem itself, but not by much, since all of our data is collected anyway. I personally believe that social media should mostly be outlawed - but I'm old enough to remember a better world before it existed.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I didn't read what you said but I like it, everyone gets a license plate on bluesky.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago

Figured they would go down this route. Don't use it anyway

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 month ago

I can't believe the guy who originally administered the creation of Twitter would do all the exact same things that originally made him billions of dollars selling the company to Elon Musk.

There's no way he's just speed-running what he did last time in hopes of another $44B buyout.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Any system built on anonymous accounts is going to have the exact same problems. Lemmy is not “less bad” than Reddit because it’s decentralized. Blue checks isn’t the problem with twitter, and neither is Elong

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Not sure where you're going with that, but it's a perverse incentive, just like the engagement algorithm.

Elon is a problem because he can literally force himself into everyone's feeds, but also because he always posts polarizing/enraging things these days.

Healthy social media design/UI is all about incentivizing good, healthy communities and posts. Lemmy is not perfect, but simply not designing for engagement/profit because Lemmy is "self hosted" instead of commercial is massive.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago (2 children)

you don't kill a cow for a scratch on her leg (I hope the saying is understandable for everybody since it doesn't come from English).
I'm on mastodon and bluesky: the first is even less populated than here and a big part of the interesting content comes from bot reposting popular accounts from x or reddit, while the second is far from being THE solution but it's nowadays a -not wildly populated- compromise. I don't condone (while I understand) the Turkish bans and I'm not interested in a verification system: if I'd like one, I'd use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EIDAS.
I hope bluesky will correct its approach for what they can (the "good old" twitterin the golden era was banned in Turkey)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I don't understand - do you think mastodon (or the fediverse in general) is sparsely populated? That's not my impression at all!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That's exactly what I meant: very few people, only on main niches, and some political and lifestyle ideas are common to 90% of the userbase (ie: anti-Trump, pro-Palestine, pro-Foss, etc).
I'm not complaining, just reporting what I see

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It seems that you don't curate your followers much and/or don't follow many people. The timeline is what you make it to be by following a variety of people as there isn't an algoritm to curate it for you. There's plenty of interesting content circling around and it's wholly up to you wether it makes it to your timeline or not.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

I get it, but I don't want to curate my followers, I'm not a news media, I just follow users I totally like, I usually look for content I don't see in my timeline, do a lot of surfing, but in the end it's not that big as today

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I believe the equivalent saying would be "don't let perfect be the enemy of good".

I couldn't give a single shit about these twitter alternatives, because the whole concept is stupid.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

the whole concept is stupid.

+1

Being that algorithmic just makes any Twitter-like design too easy to abuse.

Again, Lemmy (and Reddit) is far from perfect, but fundamentally, grouping posts and feeds by niche is way better. It incentivizes little communities that are concerned about their own health, while users have zero control over that shouting into the Twitter maw.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

yea lemmy/reddit definitely seems like more of a sweet spot. with twitter/mastodon or anything that has a "say something" text box right in your face on every page, you are going to end up with a lot of noise, because most people just dont have interesting things to say most of the time

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 month ago (2 children)

The checkmark is the wrong approach. You should never trust accounts, because accounts get hacked. We should instead use cryptographic signatures on individual posts, and clients can warn when that signature doesn't match the account's public key, or if that key changed recently. The private key would never live on the server, and ideally live outside the app.

This doesn't verify identity, it just proves the key didn't change. To establish identity, the person needs to use the same key in multiple places, such as posting it on a personal website or something. If a service wants to add their own stamp of approval, they can sign these public keys and embed them into the apl for clients to use (e.g. show a blue checkmark if Bluesky can verify the public key outside its system).

If the private key is compromised, repeat the process, potentially signing the new key with both the old and new key to prove control of both (or start from scratch if needed). Repeat whenever they get hacked.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

It's also not new. GPG has been around for decades, and is pretty much this.

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