I was looking at this before and went to https://open.tube/ to explore the content to see how the community looked. The front page had a video of extreme violence on it and I never returned. Looking now the front page is mostly political flamebait.
A real community growing on the back of this technology will require either YouTube screwing up royally or some sort of grassroots effort based on micro payments to content creators (as opposed to ads) I think.
I mean, you chose to browse an instance that describes it self as "a censorship-free Youtube alternative". What did you expect? Browse https://joinpeertube.org/instances and for the "Sensitive videos" option, choose "Hide". Assuming you may be interested in tech/science, https://tube.tchncs.de/ is quite a popular instance.
It wasn’t a conscious choice I think I came across it after clicking the “Sita Sings the Blues” link. Again like mastodon, the various instances are confusing to most people to be honest. But yeah I can see a grassroots instance around some hobby or interest being able to sustain itself.
History is littered with failures when competitors catering to ejected parts of a community try to make it work. You can't start a site based on the rejects.
These comments are basically equating Peertube to Gab, but I have to disagree with that comparison. Gab is a website, Peertube is software, and these are different things. Peertube doesn't need to be profitable to stay alive, it just needs people to keep using it. So I think it will have a longevity that "outcast" websites don't.
More accurately, if you start a site based on the rejects then it will only contain the content and community that was rejected in the first place. You can probably succeed if you brand it specifically for that crowd, but don't expect anyone else to switch.
Meanwhile, history also rewards communities who support and listen to the underserved in order to improve collective wellbeing. You can build a movement based on inclusion.
I agree, you can build a movement based on community and doing things for the love of it. Allowing everyone in comes later and is for mainly for growth and profitability and usually is when we see this earlier community fracturing. That's when these websites grow bigger and bigger and start to monetize because people will not cooperate freely for nothing anymore. Commerce replace community but a community comes first and is rewarded. Commerce rewards also, in more obvious material ways.
Thanks, that's a good observation of traditional (online?) community evolution.
It seems like software could potentially be a little different though, given zero-cost-of-copy, zero-cost-of-communication, and zero barriers (other than social inertia) to learning, inspection, modification and contribution of code.
Perhaps sufficiently-sized communities require fragmentation in order to function effectively (it certainly happens within large organizations) - that happens fairly naturally already with software projects too, though, so there may not necessarily be a scalability or community-size limit concern there.
Inclusion works to a point, and that point is when some of the included groups begin to exclude the other groups. By which I'm trying to refer to the paradox of tolerance: "[It] states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly paradoxical idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance."
If your movement is "based on inclusion" and the population that you strive to include contains Nazis, then your movement will be a Nazi movement sooner or later. Often sooner.
The story of how a bar becomes a Nazi bar applies to any community, not just bars. Karl Popper didn't stutter.
Not that anyone who touts him as an authority has read what he said:
"But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols."
So you don't even get to be violent with open racists as long as they aren't actively hurting people.
How is this different than including any other group who by their nature rejects others not in their group? Is the Nazi thing just to shut down any further contemplation?
> How is this different than including any other group who by their nature rejects others not in their group?
A social group of CPAs, an alumni group of university, and a French expat mom's group are all examples of groups, though exclusive, unlike neo-Nazis, do not reject the equal rights of others to enjoy the same bar.
It is an unambiguous goal of neo-Nazis (and their historical antecedents) to claim racially exclusive spaces, whether in bars entire societies. They have an entire rationale for this, connected to the original Nazi concept of Lebensraum ("living space"). They act it out against people of color (and their white friends) by intimidating them bars and restaurants. It's not hard to find someone who has been subject to this. I certainly have.
However, they aren't the only group to "claim" spaces exclusively for themselves through intimidation - the KKK, organized crime, and criminally associated biker gangs do it too, so you are right that one shouldn't point fingers exclusively at Nazis. But in the context of bars in particular neo-Nazis are the most widely culturally understood example of this behavior.
Strangely enough, Germany has had hate speech laws and struggled - to put it mildly - and continues to struggle with National Socialism attracting supporters.
Also strangely, the United States has such strong free speech and association protections that Nazis were protected enough to march through Skokie, and yet there has been no such struggle with Naziism - except to join the other Allies in smashing the Reich.
Yes, Popper didn't stutter, those who do not reject debate in favour of violence should be tolerated.
> Germany (..) continues to struggle with National Socialism attracting supporters.
Correct. But that's because fascism is the logical conclusion of capitalism. The State maintains a "social-liberal" republic which is nothing like a democracy but instead a hypocrisy reproducing systems of privileges.
We are stuck in a cognitive dissonance where we are told it's all about freedom & equality but all institutions around us do the exact opposite, and in parallel we're conditioned for being docile in the face of authority and extreme injustice. Both these conditions create a perfect ground for fascism to take root.
We have to remember fascism was born from "liberal" (= economic injustice) republics of the early 20th century and was based on myths distilled by public school systems and the media. Hitler did not invent racial hierarchies (they were common across all "democracies" of the time) and Mussolini did not invent state planning.
> United States has such strong free speech (...) there has been no such struggle with Naziism
Because in the US white supremacy is not called nazism, and may be more concerned with black/indigenous/latinx people rather than jews. In both cases, so-called "sexual deviancy" is also of concern to these people. Just because you don't see swastikas everywhere and Hitler is not the most popular figure in the USA doesn't erase the dozens of millions of people enslaved or killed due to their ethnicity, and the existence of white-supremacist discourse and militia across the country.
National-socialism is not the only variant of fascism. Mussolini famously said:
> Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power
Both US and UK have (or at least have had) a strong central government abusing power against its local population, laws based on racial hierarchies, a strong military-industrial complex, very close relations between industry leaders and politicians, pillaged/exploited/mass-murdered local and remote communities, maintained gender-based segregation and hierarchies, supported dictatorial/genocidal regimes across the planet in the name of fighting for "freedom" against communism and independent 3rd world countries... all of which are typical characteristics of fascist regimes.
But to be clear, i didn't mean that capitalism equates fascism (although the premises of both systems are uncomfortably-close), but rather that the atomization of capitalist society (in the form of private property, and everyone having to struggle against everyone else to survive) is a prerequisite to legitimize the absolute central power of fascism, under which hope and solidarity don't have a place.
I also mean that historically, in all countries - to my knowledge - where fascism has taken roots, the local bourgeoisie and industry were directly responsible for that. Hitler for example, had wide industry support (financial and logistical) for his campaign, as he was promising to do away with "judeo-bolshevism" and outlaw unions. There's an entire documentary about that called "Fascism Inc" that can be found on the Internet if learning about history is your thing (and of course, countless books on the topic).
> the atomization of capitalist society (in the form of private property, and everyone having to struggle against everyone else to survive) is a prerequisite to legitimize the absolute central power of fascism, under which hope and solidarity don't have a place.
Competition is a fact of life, and private property is a pre-requisite to freedom. Fascism is just one more form of collectivism that crushes individuality, and thus freedom and hope. I'm not interested in that kind of solidarity and the link you've provided is tenuous.
Regardless, freedom of speech is more effective than hate speech laws in staving off fascism, history, if not good sense, shows us that.
I know it was a bit of a snarky throwaway comment, but I would be interested to see how Australia succeeded given its penal colony history (I admittedly know nothing).
The crooks created mining, grazing, farming and other resource extraction companies and exported/are exporting everything they could/can get there grubby hands.
Now this entrenched power has formed poltical parties who reinforce their positons through policies. Ala Australias climate policy and rotating doors of ex-politicans joining boards of the companies they gave a leg up to while in office.
> I was looking at this before and went to https://open.tube/ to explore the content to see how the community looked
You do realize you picked an instance where the top videos have less than 10 views, don't you? Seems like you just went to cherry pick the worst and the least representative.
That's another problem. This particular platform actively promotes the worst video, even if it does not accurately represent the community. I must ask: who is accountable of this spectacular moderation failure?
I assure you it was due to random chance (i got there after clicking "sita sings the blues" on the main page) and I didn't cherry pick that site. Possibly the tiny number of views was why it was so memorable though as something not gaining traction.
With the exception of illegal content this is how it should be. “I don’t like this so I’m going to block it so I don’t have to look at it again” rather than “I don’t like this so nobody should be allowed to look at it”.
The problem with these decentralised platforms is that the first people to flock to them are the people who have been deplatformed by major services.
Some services try to capitalize on that (Gab, Trump's Twitter) while others ignore the problem and end up destined to be abandoned by normal people.
Large parts of the Mastodon network are filled with porn and alt-right accounts that got banned from Twitter. Youtube alternatives are quickly filled with conspiracy theories and other content even Youtube doesn't want its algorithm to push. Hell, even centralised services have this problem; DailyMotion is the last real Youtube alternative and these days it's mostly pirated content, from what I can tell.
Until some major content providers switch, which they won't, because they'll lose their income, there won't be a transition to free software. I fear the Fediverse came about 10 years too late to be successful.
The alt-right servers tend to get defederated rather quickly. The porn usually doesn't show up, but when it does, it does with a vengeance. There's a _lot_ of it, you usually just don't encounter it.
> The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
Which is why breaking away from the centralized web sucks.
Rumble, voat, parler, gab, even as I feel like the left has left me these days, these places still largely look like dumpster fires to me.
The centralized web is awful. Getting away from it is awful.
I don't know what's worse - the endless corporate censorship or the insanely explicit content, outright bigotry, and anti-science quacks who fill up spaces rebelling against it.
My ethics says the Corp censorship is far more problematic (when taking in the big picture) , but as someone wanting to participate in a free and constructive community it leaves one with no where to go.
Social media was a mistake. Allowing tech companies to become as big as they are were too.
It certainly polarizes people. The people in the middle who aren't that passionate about things tend to just scroll past, but the “passionate” ones just yell at each other and either keep doing that ad inifinitum or they form an echo chamber where they can call others snowflakes.
It's not just polarization. Polarization is a natural state of human societies and is a good thing as it enables things to move forward (in either direction).
Silicon Valley corporations, whether for profit or by ideology, have pushed nazi/conspirationist propaganda to everyone in the form of recommendations for many years. To be fair, so have traditional media outlets, neither of which is excusable in my view.
I think you summed it up quite well. At this moment, there does not seem to be a space between the corporate you-are-the-product mainstream and the weirdos with an agenda crowd at the edges for a person to just be, speak and think in a relatively free and neutral sense without ending up in some ulterior trap.
There is no such space because there can be no such space.
If you want a community without bad actors, bigots, cranks, etc, then it has to have rules and moderation, which means censorship. If you want free speech, you're going to get the bigots, cranks and bad actors. "Speak(ing) and think(ing) in a relatively free and neutral sense without ending up in some ulterior trap" requires curation and tone policing, which is censorship. Otherwise, the bigots and the cranks are also free to speak and think in the same way as everyone else, ruin the community and drive everyone else away.
You can't have your cake and eat it too, you have to pick one.
USENET more or less burned down in flames because killfiling the lunatics didn't actually stop them from taking over the asylum. Both Facebook and Twitter (especially Twitter) give users copious abilities to block users and filter content... and guess what? It's still considered censorship, and it doesn't work at scale.
The problem is the censors are also prone to being bad actors, flexing their agenda by bending and stretching rules far beyond their intention and turning them into another tool of our tribalism battles. It's used to squash dissent and often not enacted in good faith.
People are called bigots for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with bigotry. And it's done intentionally to weild power over wrong-thinkers.
The bad actors are at all levels and of all persuasions
The advantage of Federation is that this is largely solved by the nature of federation. You just join a server with not to much drama and a culture you agree with.
There are a number of problems with the model (including finding such a server). But censors flexing their agenda isn't a real problem in my experience.
I'm registered on a mastodon instance and I find it quite nice and not at all a dumpster fire.
If you're a conservative or so you will probably have a hard time finding an instace you feel at home at, but the defederation of mastodon instances from instances that allow hate speech, racism, homophobia, etc. are precisely what prevents it from being a dumpster fire.
The Fediverse is not without issues but I think it is an example of fuctioning decentralized social media.
We have so many techniques for extracting signal from noise (from reputation, to curation, to tags, scores, bayesian filtering, etc) which could be used to form a metastructure on top of sites like PeerTube and provide viable alternatives to both censorship and free-for-all high noise cess pools.
I looked on Rumble to see the videos on the front page.
Headline was:
A Vivafrei video on Trudeau rescinding Emergency Orders Act
Editors Picks were:
Mudroom Remodel + Vacuum Charging
Very old COFFE GRINDER restoration
This Is Why They Did It, by Russell Brand
Wife CHEATS, Wants CHILD SUPPORT For Illegitimate Daughter?
In the News Section:
Trudeau announces end of Emergencies Act
Shaffer: Biden Telegraphing Ukraine Moves
Trump: Biden's America is getting bum-rushed
Ukrainians express support for state of emergency
Viral
Puppy gets super excited when it's time to open presents
Mother cat adorably hugs & kisses her kitten
Tired man & his puppies fall asleep together for nap time
Woman hilariously struggles to fit balloons in her trunk
Podcasts
Freedom Fighters Forced Trudeau to Revoke The Emergency Powers Act
Pfizer Withdraws Application for Covid-19 Vaccine in India
Stand For Freedom: Why one gym owner pushed back against tyranny and now is running for Congress
Saagar Enjeti CAUGHT LYING About Russia & Ukraine On Breaking Points
The Dive With Jackson Hinkle
So, apart from seeing a few folks that got cancelled like Dan Bongino, looks like Vimeo or Youtube. Where are the awful dumpter fires?
Similar here. I'm no fan of the weird right wing self parody copycats, but Rumble seems to be less inundated and more generally acceptable than the others it generally gets associated with. Not sure if it'll last, but I've heard some of the podcasts and such I follow mention their Rumble alongside Facebook and Twitter in the general spiel. Gives me a little hope that an upstart is still possible.
Reddit has a outlet though, you can just make your own echo chamber there, and don't have to leave the platform unless you're a particularly ornery bunch like the gamergate stuff and subreddits where people start threatening and doxxing.
If a society is terrible because seven zillion witches live there, then how are witch-hunts wrong in this metaphor?
If these offshoot communities full of outcasts are as horrific as he admits, why shouldn't we ban the people that make it that way from our communities?
Why is he so willing to trust these same people when they say they're fighting for "fairness"?
How does he manage to identify some of the worst forces in conservatism, the ones that convinced me to become what many would call "far-left", and come to the conclusion that people are being too hard on them?
> If a society is terrible because seven zillion witches live there, then how are witch-hunts wrong in this metaphor?
Isn't the insight we're to take regarding witch hunts, as moderns able to look back across history, that the people accused of being witches weren't witches, and what was really happening (among other things) was violent intolerance for those with a different way of life, and the indiscriminate use of power?
That's what makes witch hunts wrong in any metaphor.
> How does he manage to identify some of the worst forces in conservatism, the ones that convinced me to become what many would call "far-left", and come to the conclusion that people are being too hard on them?
Because intolerance is wrong, certainly to the degree we see now. I'm sure you might feel like responding with "they started it" but not only has the author covered that, it's also no excuse.
In this metaphor, witches stand for openly racist trolls, flat-earthers, hardline anti-vaxxers, and self-confessed nazis. Terrible people that any decent community doesn't want. And the fact that there's a lot of them breaks the metaphor, since there weren't any witches in the actual witch hunts; it's not clear what the takeaway is supposed to be. The targeting of innocent people is what makes a metaphorical witch-hunt bad.
"Intolerance" without specifying what one is being intolerant against is just a bare negative connotation unassociated with any meaning. Some things ought to be tolerated, and some things absolutely must not be tolerated.
Well, hang on - there weren't any people who could literally turn you into a toad, but I'm sure there were as many witches (people who believed in that stuff) then as there are now.
>but I'm sure there were as many witches (people who believed in that stuff) then as there are now.
There weren't any witches the way witches were defined back then, which was people who entered into pacts with the devil to gain satanic powers to wage war against Christianity and undermine the community. It was a conspiracy theory not unlike the satanic panic of the 1980s or the red scare.
> "Intolerance" without specifying what one is being intolerant against is just a bare negative connotation unassociated with any meaning. Some things ought to be tolerated, and some things absolutely must not be tolerated.
I'm using Popper's definition provided in his short but often misquoted (certainly on HN) paradox of tolerance, that violence and other coercive means should not be used against those who are willing to debate and not use violence to further their arguments/goals. The content of those ideas is irrelevant.
> In this metaphor, witches stand for openly racist trolls, flat-earthers, hardline anti-vaxxers, and self-confessed nazis. Terrible people that any decent community doesn't want.
Who made you the moral arbiter? As J.S. Mill points out repeatedly in On Liberty, those who will judge what is right and wrong with such certainty that they would deny others the right to speak contrary to these "certainties" are only saying that they are certain of what they say, and they are not infallible.
> The targeting of innocent people is what makes a metaphorical witch-hunt bad.
The targeting of anyone based on disagreement or some misplaced certainty in a hierarchy of morality based on disagreement is what makes a witch hunt bad.
This is complete BS. Witches are a creation of a relgious zealots for a start. Its anti-science.
The problem with society is the promotion of the rat race and attempting to fit everyone into little categories. You cant.
I have been in many scenes including gaming, cars, mechanics, machining and i can find vibrant communites away from the big tech just as i can within it. Why do I have success yet you or others cant?
I find that the main problem with the internet is that people want to be entertained in their downtime. They want to be amused, occupied and interested. Whether that be to stalk others in the privacy of there own zone, or to create a fantasy to fill in time.
That personality trait is the problem and creates the situation for these viral communities to breath. Trolls gonna be trolls. It creates the awkward social dystopia we find ourselves in. Going to school, university, getting a job and becoming a contributing member of society is not equivalent to meaning and happiness. What happens when these people get home at night and realise their life is meaningless? This.
I think your comment is fair and relevant. Our society is so broken that it produces (and encourages) psychopaths at every level of power. Then some people wonder why Twitter/Facebook is a cesspit of evil. And if you ever had the chance to avoid how sociopathic capitalist mentality is, don't worry GAFAMs have plenty of recommended posts/videos full of neo-nazi conspirationists to redpill you.
Not sure what you criteria for "real community" is, but AFAIK there are already communities using this technology.
The micro-payment as opposed to ads model already exists on third party services such as utip, tipee, onlyfans, etc. and is the main source of revenue for most video content creators.
When peertube aware content creators explains why they choose youtube as their main platform the given answer is the large userbase and visibility a.k.a. The network effect and dominant position youtube has. Though twitch and tiktok seems to putting a serious dent as many youtubers turn to twitch for live content and interacting with their communities in a healthier way than youtube where toxicity prevails, and with tiktok for engaging with their communities with shorter videos requirient less effort and escaping the youtube algorithm.
What I find even weirder (kind of) is that the top recommendations are not only very polarizing and politically loaded (vaccines, convoy, "evil agenda", "journalistic hypocrisy" and police violence), 5/6 in the top row have literally 2 views. So it's not that they've generated engagement to end up there, the algorithm straight up defaults to promoting them.
And what's even more wild is that every single one of those videos has a click-bait title and thumbnail.
I think it's always telling which creatives are the first to 'defect' to a new platform and it seems like all of these 'open streaming alternatives' just attract the people who failed to gain traction on closed platforms (rather than people who actually care about the technology).
Yeah, no social media can (or should) scale massively without appropriate moderation. If the history of social media can give us some lessons, it should be that there must be someone who takes control of the social platform and should be accountable for its impacts on society.
That someone who takes control of moderation should be the user.
In the past, most USENET was small enough that people maintained their own individual blocklists of bad actors and ignored them. Today, we crowdsource a personal blocklist with EasyList and other lists that users opt into.
The only centralized or automated moderation any media needs is to stop bots and spam. If you went to opentube and you had the option to view only "family friendly" videos then even sensitive people could use the site without being offended.
The way Minds works is if you miscategorize offensive content as family friendly too many times then your whole account is made NSFW. Offensive videos are not censored, but you have to opt-in to seeing them. The choice is always with the user what type of content they want to see.
I disagree, I think o. the surface censorship is appealing but as someone who enjoyed the early days of high speed internet I prefer raw unmoderated content.
I’m an adult and can navigate away. The world is a tough place. Pretending that bad stuff doesn’t happen is akin to putting your head in the sand.
Should it be front and center? Probably not. But it shouldn’t be “banned”.
It’s a slippery slope, moderation can and will be abused. Just look at the reddit zealots.
It's compatible with mastodon which already has a fairly large community (you can follow peertube users and their videos will show up in your feed.)
I think this kind of social network absolutely is the future because of how incompatible people's ideas about what is acceptable and what isn't are. If you find an instance who's moderators share your ideals you're good to go. No need to learn a new technology or give up most of your social network even!
A real community growing on the back of this technology will require either YouTube screwing up royally or some sort of grassroots effort based on micro payments to content creators (as opposed to ads) I think.