Goddammit, I think you just described my relationship with Lemmy.

with the constant AI slop propaganda as well.

it used to be just for nice social bubbles

now it's for political disinformation bubbles and the two cannot be untangled. users will not do it voluntarily

real identities and moderation in the form of fact checking are the only way on all social media

On the other hand, Stewarts is also right. An Instagram feed is not free speech, it's brain rot and propaganda and ruins society and lives. It needs to be regulated. Just letting then go on as they are while promoting alternatives misses the mark as to the threat posed by these platforms. Cohn seems to have a blind spot here.

I don't think so. She said she wants to make them unable to continue with their business like they did before, with regulations. Just not outright censorship, but instead go fight their data harvesting, decapitating their business strategy.

I think Mozilla's controversial "Deplatforming is not enough" lays out a better strategy for "the algorithm" problem to me.

Having big tech be able to work in secret to pick anf choose what content isnt allowed and then being super charged by the state to do it for them as well just doesnt sit well with me

Stewart errs on the side of intolerant liberal belief. He seems to things certain things should be banned from existence if he/liberals finds them offensive. He is also palpable ignorant about certain issues and biased toward mainstream definitions of things, than taking a more academic and broad view. He doesn't really acknowledge the problems or contractions in many liberal beliefs, the way someone like Maher makes a point of doing. He is not a social libertarian, and Cohn was definitely more of one.

As much as anyone may dislike it, it's a form of private journalism, private opinion, and private art, and almost all the content itself is free speech. You have to regulate the medium as harmful, very specifically described functionality. What is not protected is stuff like infinite scrolling, but something like comments and voting are likely also protected as speech.

Not just a spokesperson. Cindy Cohn is a warrior queen. She's retiring as Executive Director of the EFF this year after serving for over 10 years. She's a lawyer who has been fighting for our civil liberties for over 20 years. Maximum respect.

Pushing SSL was probably the last big tech effort/push that actually benefited users. Sure it made self hosting a little harder, and probably consolidated some tracking behind bigger players, but overall end users did benefit.

Most of what I see now is purely for their benefit and users don't benefit.

Wouldn't be surprised in the least.

We're well on our way to being something in between North Korea and Russia. Maybe Hungary would be a good comparison.

Living rurally, the main thing I hear is "but marketplace". It's a pretty crucial way of getting cheap goods.

The problem is addiction. Same as any other drug. It's no coincidence that Facebook and X were rolled out as free services, with free accounts, where you can interact with anyone for free.

Before the digital drug dealers running each changed that deal. Needing money, running ads, and restricting what you can do that all used to be free.

These companies got us addicted to using tech in place of human socialization and then monitized that addiction.

People can't leave because for some it's the only human contact they have. Even if it's artificial, they still want it to the point of it hurting themselves. Just like any other addiction.

it’s so hard for so many to just, not use them

Networking Effect is a bitch. It's like telling someone to stop using AT&T or United Airlines. These are the major arteries of communication for billions of people. Individuals can't abstain from using them without isolating themselves.

You can delete your account and I promise you won’t find yourself missing them.

Spoken like someone who doesn't have their entire extended family posting and chatting on the sites regularly. I get calls from extended family, asking me to weigh in on long conversations and exchanges and posting sprees. And then when I respond on the phone, I get a "No, you have to post it, I'm not going to just repeat it to everyone for you".

Tons of social pressure to just go where everyone else is.

I'm not that surprised that people can't quit Instagram, to be honest. I still miss the posts of some of the artists I like. Some of them really put me in a good mood. I can't for the life of me understand why they don't take 2 minutes a day to at least copy-paste their Insta posts to Pixelfed or literally anything in the fediverse. Hell, at least Bluesky. I'm not even talking about huge arena-filling bands that have someone handle their socials. I'm talking about indie bands that would genuinely benefit from small community building and would probably be embraced around here for going against the flow.

I don't think you'll find that the case. Most people have a problem. They are incapable of being even slightly bored.

If you take away twittler and Facebook, they'll readily replace them with BlueSky, YouTube and TikTok because they're easy and low effort.

It's harder to read a book, do a craft, go for a walk, or anything truly enriching.

My wife tried to exit TT when things got political. She lasted 2 weeks before she made a new non-political following account and went right back at it.

I left Facebook quite some time ago, but have to go back regularly for my HOA bs. I still peek in on my old friendships while i'm there, but don't engage and make sure to leave quickly.

Ditto reddit. I thought it would be this huge loss. It's the opposite.

Even without lemmy, there's so much more to the internet than these threads under a link aggregator.

I deleted my facebook in 2019 and havent been contacted by my friends since, that is, people i had known for a decade, before we were allnusing facebook

but i am maybe better off

Got a magic wand and can confirm, I spend a lot less time on my phone.

Thanks, Hitachi!

What's frustrating about this "Your consumer habits are wrong, you should make them better" is that Twitter was (ostensibly) the space for the liberal intelligencia to go for journalism and debate and organizing until Elon Musk bought it.

Does anything stop a billionaire from buying up or shutting down the next social media platform? We can wax poetic about Lemmy/Mastadon as a decentralized and indie-operated environment. But crazy to think Joe Biden/Donald Trump can squash TikTok with a few swipes of the pen, that Feds can play wack-a-mole with ZArchive and Anna's Archive and Wikileaks, etc, while insisting the main hosts for the most popular indie media sites are bulletproof.

Might as well tell people to stop using the internet entirely.

I guess they had the opposite development of Twitter, banning hateful content and trying to keep their house clean. Compared to Zuck and Musk whoever runs Reddit can probably be argued to be a great humanist.

Not saying it's a good platform. It's still a cesspool in my experience, and their approach to moderation produces a wild amount of false positives while bots are roaming free. It seems to me very far from a place for genuine human connection.

Nevertheless, for someone who sees social media as being Instagram, Facebook, X, TikTok, Reddit, and Snapchat, I can see how Reddit stands out as the better option.

It's too bad Cohn didn't get to talk more about Mastodon.

While Jon comes across as a white knight, and I really enjoy his satirical personna, I sometimes find his lukewarm condemnation of the Gaza genocide, and take on other subjects, a bit suspicious.

I guess age makes me more cautious.

as a long time daily show fan this is the very first time i got really confused by jon's apparent world view. what was it?

15yrs ago reddit was a mess. now it is welcoming to people

da fuq?! or maybe i am just a weirdo

I had a lot of hopes for Jon, and he's kind of letting me down here. Not the guy we need, he lacks the killer instinct we need. To take the nomination from the dems establishment and challenge the r's that is. He trusts the establishment too much.

He could win though, if he tried.

I never used Twitter in the first place, so I guess I'm not in the "addicted" category, but I did have an account, in November of 2024 I did actively cancel that X account. Google pushes me X links in my "news feed" I consistently tell Google "No more stories from ____ on X" (they won't let you block all of X, I wonder why....)

Seriously, folks, how hard is it to just walk away? I was on BlueSky for about 3-4 months, got a little invested/addicted to the platform and took a hard look at what value I was getting from it - on balance: negative. Cold turkey, do I miss it? No.

Facebook holds a (solitary) users group I occasionally want to talk with captive, they acknowledge it's a terrible platform but they're too lazy to leave, so I log in when I need to talk with them and that's it. Anybody "in there" I care about? Long distance phone calls are free these days, e-mail works, why should I be sharing stuff with people I don't know just to communicate with people I do know?

Same. I dropped FB and Twitter several years ago. It helped that I'm old and never kept in touch with family through FB to begin with. Also, I don't buy crap I don't need, so I never used their marketplace.

There are alternatives, but as long as FB doesn't remove features that people use, they won't leave. They can't see that they're being abused, just like every other abusive relationship.