In the old days, a few motivated nerds could write a browser. Now all you can realistically do is take a browser engine and build some user interface around it. That what most “alternative browsers” do - tweaking or repackaging.

These days, a browser is like it’s own operating system with sandboxing, various Interfaces to periphery devices, hardware acceleration for GPU and all the bells and whistles taken for granted now.

I’d say that imagining it to be on a scale similar to working on the Linux Kernel is more right than wrong.

So we definitely very much want Firefox to survive, or it will be much worse than the Linux/Mac/Windows trilemma. Microsoft Edge is chromium under the hood too. Any many desktop “apps”.

Sounds like the teaser for “CommieNet: The Nerds Strike Back”, but on a serious note, I think you are right.

In some sense, digital resources are non-scarce resources, they can be copied and multiplied. There is no capitalistic pressure innate to information, not in the way we consider other resources to be scarce.

But such a digital utopia still would have costs for hosting the content and it would need to stay afloat in the profit-oriented world with finite resources and hard costs for running servers. So it would have to be donation based, or subscription based. Ironically, inside it would have to be strict about prohibiting anything that is effectively monetizing anything that happens inside.

And someone would get the money earned from these subscriptions or fees and this would necessarily end up being some non-profit organization which would have to be somehow community driven, and would decide what is accepted in the space it has to take care of.

But this sounds like a kind of internal governance, like a whole state, a body of rules, that exists within the community of everyone participating in that special network. This council would have responsibility to prevent corruption on the network and at the same time prevent it’s own corruption.

I could go on, but I guess it’s pretty clear that creating a uncorruptible social space is exactly the same problem as creating an uncorruptible truly democratic society. If you figure this out for an internet platform, you have figured it out for the real world.

So I guess it’s not gonna happen ever. It goes always like this - something nice grows, at some point it starts to rot, implodes, from the ashes something new can emerge, rinse and repeat. Just humans being humans.

Totally agree on the pre-2010 internet being more human. Now not only the platforms are centralized, half of the blogs you find are now AI generated incoherent garbage.

There is still good stuff, but now you have to work really hard to find it among AI slop, Ads, paywalls etc.

I hope the fediverse can establish a new form of the old internet. Lemmy instances are now the self hosted phpBB forums of this decade. And even on the corporate platforms there are some thriving niche communities.

Maybe it was just that the pre-2010 internet was driven primarily by nerds of some form. With the smartphone it went fully mainstream, and that broke it. It got streamlined and commodified and monetized to turn any kind of “engagement” into profits, instead of, well, just being a place where many random quirky people are doing their thing and sharing cool stuff.

Remember when “Homepage” was still a concept? Now I guess for most people it’s their Instagram profile, or something like that.

A truly free society maximizes relative freedom for as many as possible, not absolute freedom for some at the cost of freedom of others.

And yes, this is exactly the line drawn by the paradox of tolerance.

The difference between left and right wing, non - economically, is still about distribution of power. But not only monetary power, but also the power granted by the positive and negative freedoms we have in a social system. Only that in our societies, freedom and wealth are heavily entangled, and increasingly so.

Fair enough. I’m sure NixOS is a great tool, like Haskell is a great programming language (in fact my previously favorite language with a special place in my heart that taught me most about properly structuring and thinking about code).

I just wanted to put it into perspective, because not everybody wants to go into THAT deep end. But anyway, it’s all good.

On a side note, your first sentence is something that I have never seen being said ever by anyone on Reddit. Yeah respectfully agreeing to disagree is also a perfectly fine option.

How is that useful to OP who asked for something “without terminals”? Unless that was a joke.

Because I’ve been using Arch Linux for 15 years and live in the terminal, but even though I like the idea of NixOS, it’s not only scary because it is alien and I have neither motivation nor enough free time to learn a parallel world and gain non-transferable skills for a niche solution. And that with being interested in what NixOS is doing.

I would say it is horrible advice to a novice, unless you want to scare people away from learning terminals and configs and managing an operating system without GUI tools.

Yep 100% agree, and it’s not just the US. I don’t want to even say that this is necessarily some kind of capitalist-fascist conscious conspiracy (in the early stages), but in a capitalist society there always is the push to strip the state to the minimum, lower taxes, privatize infrastructure and well, stripping education to the minimum needed to produce workers that perform just well enough for “the market” so they are not too qualified and do not have to be paid too much and are quickly and cheaply available.

Instead of focusing on developing well rounded human beings, education is reduced to a factory of cheap labor. With that comes the intellectual decline. German public schooling is facing a growing crisis as well and soon will get to the abysmal level of what one hears about the US.

Well and if you do that for a generation or two, society is too dumb to vote in their own interests or see through bullshit (which requires a certain foundation with respect to natural and social sciences). And NOW you have opened the door to the really bad actors who abuse the shit out of the weakened society. Which is the point where we are now.

And here we go, we got political from an initially non political discussion… Well, I guess there is some truth to the saying that everything is political, and right now it looks like most of the big problems have the same political cause.

I wonder how much it was manufactured and how much is just the worst of human nature self amplifying. Probably bit of both. It’s just easier to spread hate and fear than make people chill the fuck out and respect each other.

Any human community that tolarates bad behavior and does not sanction it appropriately will eventually fail and degenerate into a pile of shit, i.e. simply implode. The paradox of tolerance. Good social spaces are like gardens, they need to be maintained and weeds need to be removed. Otherwise it happens what happens.

Well I mostly never used any kind of social media for political things until very recently. Just read news on the respective newspaper websites. Maybe that did the trick.

And just wow. Yeah well, some people are just always trying to pick up a useless tribal fight or stir up some drama, or just mess with others i.e. troll…

That’s why good mods are worth their weight in gold.

Just check a sub like /r/askhistorians, they might sometimes appear harsh but they managed to keep that place true to its vision and purpose (accepting only high quality responses by people who know what they are talking about). But sure, that is rather the exception.

Compared to say the Meta networks, reddit always felt to me like a platform where I can still control what I see. The feed is only filled by stuff I actively chose to subscribe to.

Sure it is a part of the problem - it’s the reason I joined Lemmy. And I wonder how long it will take to become the same kind of wasteland of trash. Not sure that the “smaller community and less viral incentives” approach will be enough to keep it more civil than the “offers” by the commercial attention economy.

Just as a reminder, before the internet was privatized, people were on self hosted forums. Some were good places and some were toxic shit holes. Really depends more on the moderation and community than anything else if you ask me.

That said, surely I am distrusting any platform owned by some oligarch to have policy in the interest of the user base.

Okay wow, thanks for the clarification. That is indeed weird. Yeah, then I guess I agree, it’s really … Just not very healthy behavior.

Okay I mean for some people maybe this whole Internet thing, becomes too much an end in itself, maybe they are missing something in life and trying to get it that way.

If you are employed, have family and/or friends and a hobby or two, how do you even have the time to mod dozens of subs and stuff like that?

So if they are doing it while being nice, one can actually say they could need some empathy. If they are not being nice, well, for such cases it might explain why the other things in life might be lacking.

That is a rather toxic way of looking at the world. I get it, I kind of can rationally understand the idea that you can explain all selfless behavior as being selfish because the least you get out of it is dopamine, so you are wired to feel good doing what you think is right.

Now, can you tell me how this is just not a very shitty and cynical lens to view humans through? I’ve had my nihilistic phase in my 20’s. I hope you also find a way out of the hole of the “arbitrariness” of ethics.

Because each other is all we have, and ethics is ultimately what makes us human. The ability to reprogram our own pleasure circuit and maybe, just maybe, just use it to be not an asshole, just to start with. And then at some point just do something nice for others. Because if everybody did that, the world would not be the shithole it is.

I’m thankful to mods who volunteer their free time to tend to the garden of the communities they care about.

I managed to be 10 years on reddit in niche hobby and nerd communities and it feels like I lived in some parallel reddit all the time, reading about how toxic and broken it is supposed to be.

Same with YouTube. There are nice channels with less than 100k Views per Video or even just a fraction of it, producing amazing informative videos.

Gotta find the gems in the dirt.

I have a nagging feeling the platform is not or only a part of the problem, but collective human nature is. When enough people join a platform to be a representative sample, you get the representative shittiness of the literally median person on the internet.

This is the way.

In some areas of theory, all the cool stuff happens on https://arxiv.org/ months before they end up being officially published and “paywalled”.

And in my area (theoretical computer science) we mostly publish short versions in conferences and put the full versions with proofs on arxiv. Of course everyone is downloading and using the latter. The rest is just for the “metrics”.

“Turning culture into an expensive amusement park” - made me think of Mark Fishers Capitalist Realism essay. He articulated well how capitalism absorbs everything and sells it back to us as a monetizable commodity, only that its version is a replica, it has no soul, only a form. What remains is an aesthetics, looking close enough to the real thing for a person who has actually no idea. Even “counter-culture” is absorbed and emptied of all content to become just another flavor of the “mainstream”.

AI is the perfect tool for capitalism, because it works in a similar way. A kind philosophical zombie, a parrot that can replicate the buzzwords and mannerisms, one that wants to convince the customers they get a certain value or quality, without truly having it. It’s just as real, meaningful and authentic as green- and rainbow- washed marketing campaigns of huge corporations.

In the previous phase, capitalism absorbed our cultures and values and made a corrupted version into a part of itself, and now it tries to absorb the human soul and thought, to sell it back to us as a service.

I’m not against AI as a technology in principle, I’m no luddite. The problem are those who currently control this power, and what they do with it.

Haha nice bait, which I took to get some actually interesting statistics, well executed !

Here is your comment, you deserve it. Now your post made it to “average”! You’re welcome.

(Was there any correlation between upvote count and the comment-based metrics? That could also be pretty interesting)

Tochter aus Elyyyysium

Yes, exactly. To make America great again, Americans first have to take their country back from the oligarchs that are destroying it and sucking it dry. Noone else can or will do it for them.