I think big tech has proven that it cannot be trusted. Their priorities are simply not in alignment with our own.

agreed

Legislation seems to be the only lever that can hope to rein them in (market forces are no longer strong enough).

I don’t agree. The Internet, at least when not regulated to death, allows new websites to rise and old ones to fall, this has happened many times and can happen again in the future.

At the same time, smaller networks do not have the resources to comply with government regulations to a T

agreed

and so they should be given a longer leash

Not easy to implement in terms of legislation.

Governments also do not have the resources to chase down

and you want to rely on governments not having resources to do things that laws say they could do?

algorithms are

Everything that happens on a computer is based on algorithms. Chronological sorting of everything you’re following is still an algorithm. But I get what you mean.

I agree with you that modern personalized recommendation algorithms like the big social media platforms are based on are not a good thing (for people of any age). They break the Internet’s original promise that it should be the general public who decides on what we exchange ideas about on the Internet. They turn social media operators into (essentially) media companies by picking winners with lots of reach and losers with little reach…

But none of that has anything to do with how old any users are.

u wot m8

The article simultaneously takes the positions:

• that it’s a good and acceptable thing that governments are banning social media for young people, prescribing how social media companies must design their platforms, that the recent court ruling on “social media addiction” was well decided. (in the section “How Governments Are Regulating Social Media”)
• that we should move to services independent from big tech companies, such as the fediverse. (in the section “How Social Media Platforms Could Be Redesigned”)

Do they not see that these are, at least in practice, contradictory positions? For big tech companies, it’s possible to comply with the kinds of government regulations described there, they have hordes of lawyers who can advise them how to do that. For fediverse instance admins meanwhile, it is a lot more difficult to do that. The future of the fediverse absolutely depends on governments staying out of the Internet as much as possible, especially from applying their laws to foreign website operators. All that government regulation does is make sure no one who doesn’t have a revenue from which they can pay any claims they are liable for can ever operate a website where users can participate.

more national instances would probably solve that, i think, so you can just go to your local one.

That’s roughly how I chose my instance… I thought I’d choose an instance geographically close to me for latency reasons and such. I didn’t know anything about different Lemmy instances at the time and didn’t (for example) know that my instance actually hosts very few popular communities, so I’d be participating mostly in remote ones. :D

I think there is no way to build a server based messaging system without the server knowing who is talking to whom? They need that info to deliver messages after all.

They might not store that information, but unable to tell, I highly doubt it.

Yes. And why, dear journalists, are you reporting on this only now instead of last year before it passed the legislature?

It doesn’t have a paywall for me; sorry if it does for some people, I wouldn’t have linked to it if I had known this, but leaving it up because it clearly doesn’t for everyone.

not really, every Lemmy instance has an owner…

What federation is is that every Lemmy instance gets some of its data not just from its users, but also from other Lemmy instances. You can think of each Lemmy instance as one mini-reddit, in principle there is no difference between reddit and one single Lemmy instance. Federation means that Lemmy instances copy their data from/to each other so that you can talk to users who use other ones too.

It’s harder to delete things here than on non-federated services because everything you do here gets copied to lots of other servers, which are supposed to delete things when you do, but it’s impossible to guarantee that they always will (on purpose or by mistake).

I once deleted a comment here almost immediately after saving it, but then still got multiple upvotes for it. I found out that this was because one big instance hadn’t deleted it for whatever reason and its users had no idea that I’d meant to delete it.

Yes, it’s working.

I’ve seen it. :D

Hi, I am from an instance no one ever seems to talk about and when reading these kinds of threads I am glad I made that choice. 😁

Everyone on today’s internet is directly exposed to regulations like GDPR, the Digital Services Act (DSA), the Digital Markets Act (DMA), and lately numerous age verification (or assurance) laws and related social media bans for minors.

How, how, how did we manage to stray this far from John Perry Barlow’s dreams? Is there any good left in the world? ;_;

Thread about that here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/54901501

I have several supermarkets within walking distance. I can carry groceries from there in a cart or bag, usually approximately once or twice a week.

Occasionally I also transport groceries on public transport, mainly because I went to a supermarket elsewhere in the city on the way home, but this isn’t the norm.

In my city (Vienna, AT), there is a long stretch of cycleway right beside a river, parallel to one of the busiest roads (which runs one level further up): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wientalradweg

Walking is technically also allowed there, but not a lot of people do it because there are sidewalks on the top too, which lead to more destinations.

There is also a former metro viaduct that’s been converted to a cycleway, though again, walking is allowed there too: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Bertha-Zuckerkandl-Weg,_Vienna

Of course the shores of the Danube and Donaukanal, including the Donauinsel, are basically (narrow) parks in which cycling is also allowed.

tfw you repost something from 4 days ago https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/54387268

Not disagreeing with anything you wrote, but TBF that highway is planned as a tunnel below the national park. Still, more space for cars will cause an increase in traffic. Only way I could support this if they instead demolished part of the A23, maybe build a railway or tram track in its place, hey can’t a man dream… 😁😎

That “most people” part kinda reminds me of this: https://xkcd.com/2501/

I recommend “new comments”.