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this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2024
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what about laws preventing social media companies and search engines coming up with algorithms, marketing strategies to maximize time spent in their websites (cough Google cough)
Okay, so, I agree with you in spirit, but this sounds like you're attempting to legislate that social media companies are not allowed to pursue user engagement of their product. Basically telling them that they're not allowed to seek profit. I don't actually know how you go about drafting a law that describes this correctly, or how you actually enforce it after it's in place. Basically every move these companies make would then have to be subject to scrutiny by a court of investigators to see if it falls outside of legal boundaries or not, and said court is statistically likely to be chock full of people that have less than zero idea of what they are actually looking at.
That particular genie is out of the bottle and I don't know how we put it back in short of banning social media and/or advertising altogether, which is basically a non starter, that's not realistically going to happen. I do support this goal but we need to cook this a little more to get an actual solution and not a leaky band-aid.
If a social media system can exist as a P2P network with distributed encrypted storage (similar to Freenet, but we only replicate what's in the communities we are subscribed to), which is sufficiently fast and functional, then such a system can exist without commercial companies that would be interested in user engagement.
Commercial products there may be:
content - this is what's supposed to be commercial in such a system, not various attention trap algorithms,
moderation - you may browse it unmoderated, or you may subscribe to some paid moderation provider, which would give you some collection of "delete" and "censor edit" technical messages posted by its moderators, or "confirm" messages if it's premoderation,
storage provided to users, not like some Mega subscription or some corporate cloud, but like additional cache,
access to a community, which may be similar to premoderation where only paying users' messages are seen in that community, or maybe there's some DRM (unique parts) in community content shared between well-behaving paying users, and it's encrypted, so that those leaking it can be excommunicated.
One common part is that architecture should not be owned by companies and infrastructure should not be defined by them.
Then the parts about user engagement can be frankly even made illegal. It won't be a problem since the ecosystem won't rely on them.
Social media combine a lot of how general Web and even Internet were used before them. So it makes sense that to undo this problem we need a new iteration of the same idea, but technically superior - with more transparently reliable storage, no stupid shit with PKI and CAs which get compromised often, no Chrome monoculture, no siloed services.
A-A-AND
after typing all this load of bullshit I've looked at the current list of Nostr NIPs, and like 80% is already described there. People here don't like Nostr for some kinds of people coming there, but with moderation would you care about the rest of it? https://satellite.earth
Well, in some sense Lemmy does that too (by its paradigm inherited from those). Because were it not similar, it would have even fewer users.
It's an evolutionary mechanic, that I don't know how to fix.