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Zuckerberg’s Meta Takes Down No Kings Instagram During Massive Protest Day (meidasnews.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 145 points 2 weeks ago (33 children)

The coalition demanded answers, raising concerns about technology platforms’ influence over political organizing and speech.

They only have the influence you give them. Stop organising on corporate platforms.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 weeks ago (31 children)

    What platform would you organise on that can handle the load whilst not being subject to terms where they can take down your protest events?

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  • [–] 10 points 2 weeks ago (8 children)

    No platform. Just ActivityPub.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

    Even that would fall over presently at the scale of these protests with over 7 million active participants, and probably ten times that in online visitors

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  • [–] -3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (4 children)

    I don't think you understand how it works.

    E: For those of you who don't understand how the fediverse works, it's a distributed network of servers. I can host 100 users on a potato. Vested interests like Vivaldi can host 6300 users. Non-profit platforms like Mastodon can host a few million. Not that hard to match Meta's infrastructure when the resources required per individual are so much less, and is distributed across so much more.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 weeks ago* (3 children)

    There's roughly 1 million monthly active users across the entire fediverse, comprised of roughly 41000 servers

    How do you reckon it'd cope with a sudden 70m users, with no other changes, overnight? The fediverse has growth problems as it is

    Napkin math, we'd be talking about at least 35 new instances with about 1000 of the beefiest servers, but at that point the networking and federating falls on its face. One Lemmy maintainer estimates a postgres database for Lemmy could peak at barely over 1000 inserts per second, when you'd need 16.6k per second if the load was well distributed over time and much more if it varied by time

    You'd be looking at custom software just to handle this one distributed event planning problem. It's well beyond the capabilities and resources of protest organisers to build an entire technology stack to handle event planning

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  • [–] -4 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

    How do you reckon it'd cope with a sudden 70m users, with no other changes, overnight?

    You're just creating ridiculous hypotheticals. It wouldn't happen overnight and it wouldn't happen without any other changes.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    How is it a ridiculous hypothetical? The proposal made was that these people now need a platform to move to, if they're not going to use big tech, where do they go? Building a whole new architecture and platform is a bit out of scope. If your answer is that there is no other platform, then just say that.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 weeks ago

    There is none, that is the whole point. Who do you bank with if the government tells private banks not to serve you. Who reports your story if the news is owned by opposition forces. Who represents you if you don't have enough money to bribe/pay them. The system is designed to reward one thing, wealth.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 weeks ago (15 children)

    A personal website and email?

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  • [–] -2 points 2 weeks ago (14 children)

    A personal website to handle the organisation of over seven million boots on the ground? And probably more than ten times that in web visitors, without even counting bots and saboteurs? Bruh

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  • [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago (13 children)

    Ok...

    1. Are you suggesting that a Facebook group could handle that?

    2. Web forums exist (the kind that were completely ubiquitous 25 years ago). They're a great way to handle a large number of concurrent conversations.

    You can still use robust hosting solutions that can handle a lot of traffic, but the advantage of controlling the site yourself is that if wordpress decides to take it down, you can just host it somewhere else and have it back up the same day.

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  • [–] -3 points 2 weeks ago (12 children)

    Across all the no kings protest events on Facebook? Yes? How many concurrent users do you think they handle daily?

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  • [–] 0 points 2 weeks ago (11 children)

    Well if your hell bent on handing meta control, then great, do it that way.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago* (10 children)

    I'm asking for one existing single alternative that'll work that's not big tech

    You need it to scale to something like 70 million active user accounts

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  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago* (9 children)

    I gave you one, you ignored it. And it's not even complicated, it's a web site with a forum...

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  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago* (8 children)

    Please inform me which forum software scales to such a load? These are hand wavy suggestions that ignore the reality of the problem

    You're suggesting custom infrastructure, which doesn't exist today, that they'd have to build out themselves. It's okay to just say there is no ready or feasible alternative

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  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago (7 children)

    Brother, forums have been around for ages, they work because they are simple. You’re even saying this on the Fediverse of all places.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

    There's forums and then there's forums catering to 70 million people

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  • [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

    Not all 70 million people are going to be using it at the exact same time in fact typically only a small amout of people are doing any activity at any one time in groups otherwise it would be impossible for people to keep up not the systems especially one as simple as forums. Its not as hard as you think.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago (4 children)

    Of course they won't be using it at the same time. Maybe once a month even. But even then Lemmy+mastodon combined only have one million accounts active per month, we're talking 70x the fediverse as a conservative estimate

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  • [–] 0 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

    I have no idea how old you are, if you've ever really used web forums, but they can be quite robust. This is obviously, clearly the technology to use. I don't understand why you think there's some limit, some ceiling on the number of users it can handle. The only limits are bandwidth and storage space... And with 70 million activists (as if everyone would be active on the forums, but whatever) with that many people, there will be donation funds for supplying the necessary bandwidth.

    There's just no problem here.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

    No off the shelf forum software has ever been proven at that scale. There's far more at play than just "storage and bandwidth". At that scale every operation has to be carefully designed. A table or index scan on any remotely common function in this setting would cripple the entire DB server with even one row per user in the table.

    With 70m monthly active users, we're in stack overflow and reddit 2012 territory. Nothing off the shelf, build your system yourself, nothing ready to migrate to at present. Even just the reads become a challenge, you'd need a CDN, load balancing, all the modern bells and whistles.

    An off the shelf forum would be fine if it was just a few tens of thousands of users.

    The biggest phpbb forum ever, for example, was Gaia online which was a heavily customised and rewritten phpbb that capped out at 90000 concurrently online users and 26 million registered users in total.

    These protests are the largest in human history and just comprehending the scale is a struggle for most, normal systems just do not cut it.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    If you're so hung up on this being difficult, just limit your scope. Don't have a nationwide forum, have a Seattle forum, have a separate Chicago forum, etc. It doesn't change the fact that this is the obvious drop in solution. The idea that Facebook has some special sauce that is otherwise unachievable... Just ridiculous...

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  • [–] 4 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

    People managed just fine in the past. Word of mouth. Fliers. Set up a lightweight static website. You don't need 70k people to be able to press a 「いいね」 button or leave a comment. People can use text messages, IM, email, and their own facebook groups, twitter groups, or whatever to spread the word. You can keep physical ledgers of people you organise with.

    There's no reason that a group of 70k people couldn't be thousands of groups of handfuls of individuals all working for a similar cause.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    The No Kings Protest is the largest protest in US history and likely globally. We have not seen any protests of this scale organised via traditional means before (that's not to say it can't happen, but you know how Chinese whispers goes)

    For a point of reference, there were 8 million people present

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  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    Since you're such an expert, why don't you start organizing protests this way? See the many people you can reach in the modern world without using social media.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago

    Personally, I have been for years. IME physical flyers, wheatpasted signs, and generally networking in person has always gotten way more people to come out to political events than social media does. The main exception was twitter before they added algorithms in ~2012.

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