Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network

Usenet had spam filtering that was at least somewhat decentralized and that worked, though maybe not fully distributed. Some alt groups that didn't use it became unusable, and a few groups (sci.crypt) were intentionally destroyed by sporgery that was hard to stop by filters. There were also moderated groups that were hard to spam because of cryptographic signatures in the moderation approval. IIRC the signatures were 512 bit RSA, so maybe the keys can be cracked by now.

I think spam may have been less of an issue than the exploding size of binary newsgroups used for distributing warez and pr0n. That is a big reason ISP's gave up on it. Plus politicians like NY Gov Cuomo (not sure which Gov Cuomo, there were two that I know of) crusaded against it since OMG people could post anonymously.

I think Usenet with a few adjustments for velocity control is still a perfectly viable scheme. Every time I look at BBS software and think about how to do it better, the answer turns out to be Usenet.

If you read the novel "A Fire Upon The Deep" you might be amused to find that in it, Usenet still exists in an era of interstellar travel.

That's not a delusion.

Specifically, the mechanism by which customer support is communicating with customers on social networks provides a lot of value to the customers because companies cannot gaslight individual customers. This works a lot better than even if you had a lawyer on your side, willing to work for you w/o compensation because the company might just hire a better lawyer.

I've literally been in this situation before: I had intermittent connection problems and had to call ISP to look into the cabling. Once the technician finally came, he found that a squatter took over the entrance to the breaker room on the roof, so he could no longer get access to the switch the company installed there. Because he wasn't able to do anything w/o police intervening and breaking into squatter's illegal construction, he just left... I still had no Internet connection, so I decided to terminate my subscription early.

Well, the ISP wouldn't have it. I had to jump through a lot of hoops, including closing and opening a bank account just to prevent the ISP from charging me for service they did not provide. I did it on principle, even though it would've been cheaper to just pay them few months. Come the end of my contract period, I get a summons to a court because the ISP hired a lawyer to go over cases like mine and try to intimidate individual customers into settling the arguments by paying the ISP (of course, by that time they tried to scare me with a fine that was about ten times the money I'd owe them on the contract).

So, I had to search for lawyer organization which volunteered to provide customer protection, but due to them being an NGO, they had a requirement that they would only provide their services if I could show that my yearly income was below X, which, unfortunately, it wasn't, and so I had to pay a lawyer from my own money to deal with this case. In the end, the ISP backed off, but nobody compensated me even for the lawyer I had to hire. Needless to say that it's not possible to compensate the time spent on this.

This was before social networks were popular enough to do this:

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I had a very similar situation, which was simply due to me moving into another apartment which didn't have a coaxial outlet, so, I couldn't continue my contract with the ISP. They decided to pull the same trick. It was a single post on their Facebook page describing the situation that got me a phone call from their customer support department and my contract was terminated. Without charge.

There's nothing exclusive about social media in this regard. Any Web application that could do that, tried to do that. Web search engines? -- didn't they try to tailor search results to your profile (or paid advertisement)? Retailers? -- didn't they try to suggest related goods based on your profile (or paid advertisement)?

Everyone on the Web who used ads wanted to know your profile and wanted to manipulate the contents they provided to you based on it (and the wishes of those who pay for the ads).

Again, the problem is not the social media. The problem is the Web.

I didn’t mean natural in that sense. Smart-phone-social-media would be unnatural in the same sense that the wheel is unnatural. (In that it wasn’t present for most 99% of our evolution.)

Humans didn’t evolve with access to semiconductors, but the social dynamics in social networks have always been there. They’ve just been augmented by semiconductors.

I doubt anyone here would disagree with me that it’s better having more ways to communicate with relatives overseas. That’s all I’m really saying. These new methods of communication come with serious baggage, but they’re still inherently positive I think.

Humans demand connectedness. There's something to be said for participating in seven independent communities with seven independent accounts, but when you see something from Community A and want to share it with Community B, a system that doesn't allow either account to make that connection is going to frustrate people, and get outcompeted at the system level by something that does.