1951
Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.
(www-xataka-com.translate.goog)
this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
1951 points (99.1% liked)
Fediverse
32215 readers
736 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think this is an XY problem.
People keep trying to bring back the old internet ; This is an broken and outdated solution.
The root problem (in my opinion) is that we need to share critical information to the masses, but the masses introduce "tyranny of the majority". It's a really tricky problem to figure out, and I really really really want mathematicians working on this.
If you live in the states, the Electoral College exists because they were looking for a practical solution to this problem. Considering the outcomes, it did not work - but there is no shame in this, as I think this is actually a really hard problem to solve.
The only known solution is to not share information to the masses (a.k.a keeping the normies out). In essence, this is what the old internet was - and a large part of what made it great. But this is not correct as it does not meet the criteria of the problem. Nor does it translate well, since your neighbors are apart of the masses.
If anyone has any thoughts on this, please share. If you do math for a living, please gather your friends and make an open-thesis about this.
EDIT
After some discussion in the comments, I have a general hypothesis:
People must be able to distinguish the resource they are accessing - highly recommended this process be easy. This provides consistent "edges".
Looking at "tyranny of the majority" from a different perspective, one answer is to standardize how people communicate. This means no closed ecosystems nor convoluted protocols. This provides "standard weight" while preventing "infinite weight".
This eliminates every platform I know of. Servers should not be given any tools to prevent incoming nor outgoing data. People should handle moderation individually - sane UI can of course be made available (BlueSky block filters could be inspiration?). Blocking should only be handled by the "nodes", this also prevents "infinite weight".
I find it really funny that this conclusion kind of alludes to the early internet in a lot of ways. Maybe it wasn't the internet-forums, but the internet itself that has changed.
I think that we need to provide actual alternatives based on constructive discussion and learning instead of based on corporate profits. Institutions like the EU could develop and run something like that, especially with all the federated platforms.
I agree that we need solid alternatives, but this doesn't really tackle the tyranny of the majority problem. We need people to use the platforms for communication, otherwise it has not solved the problem.
For example, if you use Signal but every single one of your friends use WhatsApp and refuses to switch (which is common), then you are forced to use WhatsApp. This is why it is tyranny.
EU can facilitate thousands of platforms, but if the masses don't use them it's pointless.
Federated-platforms are kind of a step in the right direction, but they're extremely weak to internal bad actors. If lemmy.world gets one million normie users, then cuts off the entire federation - then Lemmy has effectively been hijacked and set back 10 years.