Yeah. The only way things will really move forward (in terms of privacy, freedom of speech and general quality of discourse) is if people host their own stuff rather than relying on a bunch of large corporations aiming only to improve their own metrics and save their own sorry reputations.
Freedom of speech, sure. I don't know about privacy, though. Anything you post on your blog, or in the comments section of someone else's, will also end up getting scraped by robots and then aggregated and fed into the great Moloch idol of surveillance capitalism.
Savvy individuals could manage it themselves, by creating their own servers and encrypting the traffic and only granting access to trusted individuals. Most people, though, would have a hard time navigating that. A centralized (or perhaps semi-centralized, a la Mastodon) could help a lot on that front.
Perhaps something comparable to Google+'s Circles concept. I always thought that was a great idea which was unfortunately rendered completely unworkable by the unfortunate accident that it was implemented by Google.
I operate on the principle that the Web was invented for publishing information to the world, so I don't publish anything (blog posts, comments, etc.) that I don't want available to the world. Hence I'm fine for bots to scrape it, copy it, aggregate it, whatever (as long as it's not plagiarised, but that's a different discussion ;) ).
Spyware monitoring my browsing habits, down to the real-time location of my mouse pointer, is not something I want to be exfiltrated from my computer and correlated into a political or commercial profile.
> Freedom of speech, sure. I don't know about privacy, though. Anything you post on your blog, or in the comments section of someone else's, will also end up getting scraped by robots and then aggregated and fed into the great Moloch idol of surveillance capitalism.
You’re forgetting that they also currently monitor everything everyone is reading, not just writing.
That's always the problem. Minds that aren't aware of this become more predictable.
Until they are aware of this.
I still have to personally hold onto the belief that no one mind is ever intrisincally more strong than any other mind. That's the belief assumed to be axiomatic and foundational for all the studying of minds people do.
If I can predict how I believe you will think, I assume I'm mentally stronger, but that stuff is not something anyone can hold onto as a certainty. At least that's my belief, my own faith, my own boundary I believe in that must not be violated. Trying to intentionally control how people think is extremely violent, to me. Just because it doesn't look violent, doesn't mean it's not.
