The emergence of social media has destroyed all the small communities to standardize communication and information.
It’s a bit of a digital version of rural exodus. And since 2017/2018, I’ve noticed that everything that, in my opinion, represented the internet has disappeared.
I’ve known Lemmy for a few hours and I feel like I’m back in the early spirit of the internet.
Everyone clustered on like 4 websites for convenience, and then browsing the internet started to feel like wandering around different sections of the same department store: sterile, corporate, advertiser-safe, and everything’s transactional. Plus, it made it incredibly easy for any party that wants to astroturf public opinion, because now they only have to set up shop on a few sites: botting comments, infiltrating moderator positions, abusing the algorithms.
We desperately need to break the internet’s monoculture, and I think federated social media like this is a great start.
The real problem - how do you deal with bots? Sure, we could start a new nerd movement to say, revive web rings and personal websites. But with LLMS and other AIs, how do you keep that whole ecosystem from just being flooded with AI content?
I honestly don’t know. It’s going to be a big problem. LLMs are capable of having this exact convo we’re having without giving away the game.
Some sort of personal vouching system? Ever changing “human tests”? I’m not sure it’ll be enough.