/tech/ - Technology

They were pretty much the final concession for platforms that made them necessary.

>>27991
they should have kept a lower profile but unfortunately nerds are physically incapable of keeping their mouth shut. and instances survive on donations so they have to publicize themselves but "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down" as they say. I think they failed to identify that, from the platform perspective it was basically piracy. you have to make an active effort to fly below the radar

the only real solution to the enshittification of all these big platforms under capitalism (besides overthrowing capitalism) is user driven federated networks like the fediverse using a common protocol like activitypub. it's been enfuriating seeing normies and many leftists reject them out of hand because it's "difficult" to understand and adopt (requires 4 instead of 2 clicks and a bit of reading). i've seen also many ridiculous objections to adopting these alternative platforms like: "but porn artists and pedophiles use them!", demonstrating how little they know about the platforms they already use and about the fundamental strcuture of activitypub platforms. bluesky will enshittify alarmingly quickly and everyone that migrated from twitter will be dumbfounded that they got hoodwinked by silicon valley techbro CEO types once again. the bluesky team has already made questionable admin decisions.

>>27993
On the other hand, these platforms would've been much further along in their death march if these frontends hadn't've allowed comfortable use of them for longer. Surely these platforms recognize that being pirated means being normalized.

what happens next? there are 3 options
1. you use the platforms as intended
2. you hang around for those brief moments when the devs find a way to circumvent the platform's restrictions
3. you switch to decentralized platforms that aren't hostile to the user
(2) and (3) are utopian wastes of time, (1) has everything in it's favor because they have a profit motive. actually your best hope is that the "data bubble", the idea that all the user data that these platforms collect has any value, finally bursts and most social media go broke or become terminally unprofitable

>>27996
>utopian
Decentralized works though. Federation and personal websites are having a boom right now.
Calling anything new utopian is reactionary. Sometimes new looks like old, but isn't. Change is change.

>>27996
that is so trvke. you are very trvke pilled. ur the trvkiest

>>27997
it is utopian because it is expected to be driven by ideals and nothing else. instances are maintained with donations from the users or the altruism of the host, they don't have a real business model, and there is no way they could scale the way commercial social media does. there is a limit of how many freeloaders the tech enthusiasts can support, if the platforms became popular the ratio of normal users to tech enthusiasts would plummet and the model wouldn't work anymore

if it was something else maybe the correct move would be to raise the entry bar, but the value of social networks is proportional to their size. the only option would be something like state-sponsored activitypub services, but why would bourgeois governments ever do that when the tech sector is maybe one of the biggest lobbies and economic engines in the west

"support le small business" of the tech world

>>27999
>they don't have a real business model
They aren't running buisnesses, they are ensuring communication for a friend group
>and there is no way they could scale the way commercial social media does.
The federation is the scalability model. Users are distributed into smaller instances with proportionally reasonable moderation, and outside the instance is moderated in bulk through permissioning, inter-instance moderation communication and defederation.
The only sites running into scalability issues are centralized sites.
>raise the entry bar
The entry bar is finding a good instance.
>enthusiast to freeloader ratio
Instances that get too big have moderation issues and get defederated, eventually pinataing. Also freeloaders become enthusiasts when availability of a thing they want runs low and they still want it.

>>27999
Also decentralization isn't just federation. Syndication and topic dedicated websites are decentralization too. Social media is just icing.

>>28003
cringe

DO NOT BELIEVE THE FUD!! THE FRONTENDS ARE NOT DEAD!!
>Invidious is forked by Fijxu
>Libreddit is superceded by Redlib
>Nitter is forked by unixfox (the creator of yewtu.be)
It'll take more than a few scratches to take the frontends down. You take one instance down, ten grow in its place. They cannot take us all, comrades. Forward!

>>28006
crínge

>>28006
What's more worth in the longrun tho? Playing whack-a-mole with corpos trying to keep a frontend up, or hosting content directly so people don't need to access the corpo's content anymore?

>>28006
Based

>>28008
>What's more worth in the longrun tho? Playing whack-a-mole with corpos trying to keep a frontend up, or hosting content directly so people don't need to access the corpo's content anymore?
Both.
>>28009
>Based
Thx.

>>28001
>They aren't running buisnesses
nor a political party or a union. they are giving out a product for free, which is unsustainable and will eventually lose to actual businesses - they have no economic incentive to grow beyond a hobbyist project

>The federation is the scalability model.
it doesn't matter, or rather, this makes things worse. how much would it cost to run twitter? lets assume it is an X amount. now, obviously, like all big social media twitter is a distributed system, so lets assume that there are 100 instances working with each other. the cost of each instance will be, on average, X/100. the cost is divided by instances, but the sum is still the same. now imagine that the instances weren't the property of twitter but of different entities: this doesn't change the overall costs (federation carries a technical overhead so the total cost would be higher, actually)

not to mention that computer stuff is an economy of scale, even if federation worked because of state sponsoring, it would be a necessary tragedy at most. the overhead of federation would be in that case a direct consequence of capitalism hindering progress (centralized and thus efficient and cheap social media)

>freeloaders become enthusiasts
no, most people don't care, and there is a limit on how many things you can keep in your head. this is like the libertarian thing when they tell you that you don't need FDA -type agencies because consumers will learn to avoid the food and drugs that sometimes kill people - and then do the same with every other consumer market sector, and keep tabs on the reputation of every single brand on the market. the consumer simply can't keep up with the organized effort of companies

the number of people interested and willing to host instances with no economic incentives has practically peaked, maybe an influx of users would bring a few more, but the ratio would shrink. the entry barrier is the proof that those tech enthusiast share this observation

on a technical side, I have developed stuff that uses as2 and activitypub, and federation, at least as implemented by those, is completely broken. there are no plans for cheap discoverability between instances, you can subscribe to accounts on other instances, but any algorithm capable of traversing the entire network to recommend you content like modern social media does would essentially DoS all the smaller instances. bluesky for example uses a different protocol that supports this feature, and because of that the minimum cost for hosting an entire instance is in the order of millions

>>27991
Advertising and data scraping for AI killed them. Every single foss/alternative frontend blocked ads and free api access necessary for these meant these sites weren't getting anything from AI companies.

>>28013
Social media is a hobby. The federated model makes that take the form of running an inexpensive server with friends. Doing this results in a more a convenient product because you don't have to keep migrating every time the big site you're depending on to host it shits itself trying to function as a buisness at increasingly fast intervals in a market where you'd have to be retarded to make a new for-profit social media site.
Personal computers won out over terminals even though theoretically having centralized cloud computing for everything would've been more sensible on economics of scale. This is a similar change: instead of the product being social media, the product is server hosting and people are doing their hobby of social media with those servers.

>>28017
Finally, someone said it
These companies aren't cracking down on alternative front ends. They're throwing up walls around data they want to start selling to AI companies

>>28006
Based

>>28008
Hosting content directly requires you to have millions of dollars of capital because hosting costs money and the more you host the more it costs. any alternative to these platforms is – necessarily – either not going to have enough content (and users) to be worth using for most people, or is going to recreate the rent-seeking dynamics of the original platform

>>27999
It's utopian if you think it's a magical solution, but beyond that it's either petite-bourg or political in the long run. It wouldn't be bad to do federation for political reasons though, would it? E.g. info sharing, education, news, etc.

>>27991
A quick comment on the content of the post:

Youtube, Twitch, Twitter and Tiktok are not aimed at making a profit. At least not "directly".
Sure it's true they push ads and are data hungry to make "a few bucks" but their goal isn't to turn a profit.

Youtube is Google's giant marketing compaign to push their real product: Google Chrome.
Twitch real product is Amazon.com and surely Jeff Bezos political influence.
Twitter used to be it's own product and tried (and probably failed) to turn a profit but it's now owned by venture capital firms, the saudi government and the richest man in the world ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/2a00ce74-6d58-4f8e-bc2c-1bb820ee4705.pdf?itid=lk_inline_manual_10 ), like the paper press it's now just a tool for political influence.
Tiktok is wildly known for being China's political influence tool.

They don't only aim at pushing ads just to make money, they are mainly collecting data to know "the people" better and influence them politically, to gain more power and with it, make -real- big money.

I'm also not sure the end of alternative frontends is a good sign like the author think it is.. most people don't react like we (the privacy conscious) do. If you force them to register an account to see the content, they'll most likely do it.
I personally think it's a really bad sign and the Internet as we know it (as shitty as it became), will become even more crappy for people like us. We are gonna be pushed into our own little space at the side, more than today, and slowly die.
I hope I'm wrong.

>>28081
>If you force them to register an account to see the content, they'll most likely do it.
Exactly, people aren't going to log off unless there is an EMP attack, lol