I see this kind of thing over and over. It’s a symptom of a larger problem: We are building communities on closed platforms that we don’t control. We need to move from Feudalism to a Free Market: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ When you choose where to host your Wordpress or whatever, you don’t worry about someone shutting off the API keys. On this page is a video explaining how that would w…
> We are building communities on closed platforms that we don’t control. We need to move from Feudalism to a Free Market A free market literally overrun by Nazis is what that means in the end. It's best seen on all the Twitter clone attempts that marketed themselves as "free speech" alternatives - most notably Parler, Gab and Truth Social: they all ended up being echo chambers of Nazis, where no one but them would wa…
First of all — if you are so worried about being overrun by nazis, you should worry about being overrun by bots, who could gradually astruturf any ideology including nazism or 4chan QAnon or recruiting of incels into jihadism or something as simple as “let’s go to war against China”. (And furthermore, Carthage delendum est.) It is far more insidious because it would be done as a coordinated, long-term swarm attack. A persistent advanced threat, in all communities, available to anyone to deploy. All open communities would turn into a dark forest and you’ll cry out to Zuck and Elon to save you, and trust them even more.
That is why we will soon all be moving to private communities where we — not Zuck or Elon’s algorithms — select who we hear from, and where membership is grandfathered in and/or depends on actually showing up to events in person once in a while and interacting (gasp, you mean like, BEFORE the Internet? When people had fulfilling social lives?)
Rather than preventing people from forming their own communities, you should support open source tools that give them access to their own infrastructure. If they want to label Nagorno-Karabakh on their copy of OpenStreetMap “Armenia” or “Azerbaijan”, they can, and don’t have to kill each other in the name of The State flags.
How about if we each have our own private keychains to sign what we say, rather than Facebook and Google’s “real names” policy (which Google apologized for) or their centralized sign-in which basicallly controls your identity? Or CBDCs and National IDs from The State which are coming? Or even worse, scanning your eyeballs by “Worldcoin” founded by the same OpenAI guys who promised to be open nonprofit and later became closed for-profit?
Tell me, when you are jacked into a metaverse for 10 hours a day (eg for work and some fun), would you want it to be owned by a corporation, their world and you just live in it? Are you preferring to trust Facebook, a company that has surreptitiously spied on your audio and your camera every chance they got until they got caught?
We have perfectly good Web2 solutions like Verified Claims and certificate chains, for many of these things, and you can watch my interviews with the technologists who actually roll it out, such as:
Private Keys and Civic Participation: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GRzVj2W9WGM
Founder of Freenet, the first decentralized encrypted file sharing platform: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ