I was already posting on web forums (also wikis) before Facebook or Twitter became popular, when the Internet was not yet very established and posting things on it oneself was something only few people thought of doing.

I was outright excited when I saw “social media” becoming more mainstream. I thought at the time, at least more people are using the Internet, even if it’s “just” Facebook or Twitter (which I didn’t and still don’t see much value in), at least it’s the Internet, that’s a good thing because the Internet is a great and exciting thing for society and a wonderful source of entertainment!

Now we live in a world where the general public mostly only knows how to operate social media apps, otherwise has no tech proficiency at all, doesn’t even know what else is out there on the Internet, and doesn’t know or care how the social media apps they’re using are designed to manipulate them. And politicians are busy working to make it harder for good idealistic people to solve those problems. :(

From some things maybe. Plenty of recent “online safety” style laws around the world have no exceptions based on platform size.

This is precisely the point of literally all the recent new laws regulating online platforms, including this.

To kill smaller ones that can’t comply with those laws, so that only large ones remain (if at all) and it is easier to censor and surveil the users there.

I just hope that at some point, people will figure out how wrong politicians of the 2020s were to do all of this, and a new free and open Internet will rise from the ashes as long as any remain.

Mainly that I can clearly distinguish Il1 and 0O. I like DejaVu Sans Mono because it does that; if I’m limited to fonts preinstalled on Windows, Lucida Console works too.

At the time vi was originally developed, such keyboards did exist (on terminals). That’s the reason it works the way it does.

since interface has been designed to be as unfriendly as possible

No, it hasn’t.

It (well, vi, which vim is a clone of) has been designed to be a possible interface on a keyboard that doesn’t have arrow keys or other modifier keys than shift. There aren’t that many ways to program a visual text editor when those are your constraints.

That it’s more productive once you know it is a side-effect.

The regulatory gap has created uncertainty for big tech companies, because while scanning for harms on their platforms is now illegal, they still remain liable to remove any illegal content hosted on their platforms under a different law, the Digital Services Act.

That is plainly false. The DSA only requires that they remove illegal content when they become aware of it and specifically disallows general monitoring obligations. They do not scan means they aren’t aware of it means they aren’t liable to remove anything.

Finding employment is about the only thing I think it can be useful for. It’s the only thing I’ve ever used it for.

What’s your problem with it? I read parts of the documentation and it seemed like a very elegant language combining good features from many other languages.

There are many more examples of this here: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freedom-to-run.html

The problem is that “human freedom” and “human rights” are very general and somewhat vague terms and some people’s freedoms and rights are sometimes in conflict with each other. So it’s also often meaningless to say that you support “human freedom” and “human rights” without asking what freedoms and rights and for whom.

FOSS is a very specific subset of human freedom and human rights, it’s the right to control, modify and distribute the software one uses. All other parts of human freedom and human rights aren’t something that the free software movement necessarily has a position on. (Free software can certainly be used to, at least arguably, violate human rights, for example armed forces can use free software too, and should be able to!)

I think big tech has proven that it cannot be trusted. Their priorities are simply not in alignment with our own.

agreed

Legislation seems to be the only lever that can hope to rein them in (market forces are no longer strong enough).

I don’t agree. The Internet, at least when not regulated to death, allows new websites to rise and old ones to fall, this has happened many times and can happen again in the future.

At the same time, smaller networks do not have the resources to comply with government regulations to a T

agreed

and so they should be given a longer leash

Not easy to implement in terms of legislation.

Governments also do not have the resources to chase down

and you want to rely on governments not having resources to do things that laws say they could do?

algorithms are

Everything that happens on a computer is based on algorithms. Chronological sorting of everything you’re following is still an algorithm. But I get what you mean.

I agree with you that modern personalized recommendation algorithms like the big social media platforms are based on are not a good thing (for people of any age). They break the Internet’s original promise that it should be the general public who decides on what we exchange ideas about on the Internet. They turn social media operators into (essentially) media companies by picking winners with lots of reach and losers with little reach…

But none of that has anything to do with how old any users are.

u wot m8

The article simultaneously takes the positions:

• that it’s a good and acceptable thing that governments are banning social media for young people, prescribing how social media companies must design their platforms, that the recent court ruling on “social media addiction” was well decided. (in the section “How Governments Are Regulating Social Media”)
• that we should move to services independent from big tech companies, such as the fediverse. (in the section “How Social Media Platforms Could Be Redesigned”)

Do they not see that these are, at least in practice, contradictory positions? For big tech companies, it’s possible to comply with the kinds of government regulations described there, they have hordes of lawyers who can advise them how to do that. For fediverse instance admins meanwhile, it is a lot more difficult to do that. The future of the fediverse absolutely depends on governments staying out of the Internet as much as possible, especially from applying their laws to foreign website operators. All that government regulation does is make sure no one who doesn’t have a revenue from which they can pay any claims they are liable for can ever operate a website where users can participate.

This thread is from 3 days ago, the vote ended up against chat control. More recent thread: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/57284474

more national instances would probably solve that, i think, so you can just go to your local one.

That’s roughly how I chose my instance… I thought I’d choose an instance geographically close to me for latency reasons and such. I didn’t know anything about different Lemmy instances at the time and didn’t (for example) know that my instance actually hosts very few popular communities, so I’d be participating mostly in remote ones. :D

Yes, you did: OpenID.

I remember when I first read about it (late 2000s? not sure when), I thought it was an awesome idea and surely the web of the future would be full of “log in with OpenID” buttons.

Instead it is now full of “log in with Google”, “log in with Facebook”, “log in with Microsoft” buttons.

I doubt that because for example the Wikimedia wikis have been very successfully blocking Tor exit nodes from editing their wikis for a very long time; if they can do that, anyone can.

Honestly surprising that websites would block VPNs, but not Tor? Tor seems like it should be considered even less trustworthy from their perspective?

https://xkcd.com/810/ was oddly prophetic