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#openweb

24 posts22 participants3 posts today
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Hamish Campbell

From unstoppable slop, to #enshittification the #FT on the internet mess

#Mainstreaming talk about the internet so often completely misses the point, yep, it’s the FT so no surprise there. The actual internet, the one we built before the takeover, is a culture of #4opens protocols, stitched together with moth-eaten mythologies and messy traditions. It was never clean or pure, but it was ours. What this guy in the article is describing isn’t the internet, it’s the #dotcons layer that’s been built on top of that original infrastructure. Worse, it's one we […]

hamishcampbell.com/from-unstop

hamishcampbell.comFrom unstoppable slop, to #enshittification the #FT on the internet is adding to the mess – Hamish Campbell
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#ai#aislop#compostnotcode
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Miguel Afonso Caetano

"From unstoppable slop, to “enshittification”, to a digital world peopled by automatons, all of these ideas have a useful explanatory power. None, on its own, sufficiently captures the problem. The internet suffers from a cluster of disorders, some with overlapping symptoms and causes. I’m interested in uniting them all under a bigger tent, one that accounts for their similarities and for the role of human decision-making in bringing us to our current predicament.

Borrowing from the world of public architecture, I think of it as the “hostile internet”. Through deliberate choices, and some unintended consequences, the architects of the current consumer internet have created a thoroughly commercialised, surveilled and authoritarian space where basic functions are seconded to the extractive appetites of the monopolies overseeing the system. And it’s making us miserable.
(...)
Like the Moynihan Train Hall, today’s internet isn’t really designed for us, but rather to elicit certain responses from us, responses which, to put it loftily, are hostile to human flourishing. The tech companies’ growth-at-all-costs mentality has scaled their products’ flaws and vulnerabilities — and their second-order social effects — in proportion with their billion-person user bases. The hostile internet is a witch’s brew of explanations for how one of humanity’s most important inventions has produced so much simultaneous prosperity, inequality, disruption and social upheaval.

The result is that today’s internet seems to, if not make us actually crazy, make many of us seem crazy. Always connected, always posting and consuming, we resemble madmen now, giving voice to thoughts that are normally the province of the eccentric ranting on a street corner."

ft.com/content/5d06bbb4-0034-4

#AI#GenerativeAI#AISlop
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MidniteMikeWrites

Has anyone worked out an #althistory where TCP/IP and/or HTTP(s) were proprietary? Could the internet meaningful exist in such a world?

Working through some reflections on progress and private property for my blog Misaligned Markets and this topic came up with friends.

Maybe the question just boils down to what size network effect do you need for the internet to facilitate communications and commerce and does fragmenting it change that?

#internet#openweb#tech
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Hamish Campbell

#MutualAid posts?

Why don’t people boost #MutualAid posts? This needs a thread on trust, tools, and the current limits of our #openweb. Saw this poll recently: “For folks on here who don’t boost mutual aid requests, why is that?” – 0% followers don’t like – 8% I don’t like/agree – 63% I curate what I boost – 29% other/see comment One comment stood out: “Because #mutualaid is based on trust – we don’t have very good tools for this. So it's little better than charity at the […]

hamishcampbell.com/mutualaid-p

hamishcampbell.com#MutualAid posts? – Hamish Campbell
More from Hamish Campbell
#Fediverse#mutualaid#openweb
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Hamish Campbell

Finding a path in a messy world

Let’s get this out of the way, most new tech projects are pointless. That’s not an insult, it’s a cultural symptom. People are pushing things not because they’re useful, but because they can. And when every shovel is used to dig holes in sand, we’re not building anything, we’re flailing. From this experience, let’s build culture, not just code, because here's the hard truth, we’re losing the reboot of the #openweb by failing to nurture it. Yes, #mainstreaming people are […]

hamishcampbell.com/finding-a-p

hamishcampbell.comFinding a path in a messy world – Hamish Campbell
More from Hamish Campbell
#deathcult#dotcons#mainstreaming
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witchescauldron

@evan

We need news and personal as they are different things, they serve different social paths, then we already have encrypted chat for the group and personal private path, so this is likely a distraction, on the #openweb balance

So the only thing we actually need is news/personal. To put it into a more group way:

Truth (Innes)
Opinion (careness)

Then private (pervasion, is a foolish way of expressing this, things you prefer, don't feel safe to be public)

How we're expressing these paths matters.

hamishcampbell.com/reclaiming-

hamishcampbell.comReclaiming balance: News, personal, and the #openweb – Hamish Campbell
More from Hamish Campbell
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hamish campbell

@elazar

The current #blocking is it's way too hard to home host - to fix this we might need a law to force #IPS to make this #KISS so if we can't come up with a native geek solution we need a political one.

Then we have the problem of mobile SIM based devices not being on the internet due to being proxied through mobile networks - what path is best for this?

Finally, people feeling trapped on the #dotcons, but this might natural be changing a bit with the current #openweb #reboot?

More?

Replied to rooftopjaxx
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witchescauldron

@rooftopjaxx @hamishcampbell @MediaActivist

Ah, the cockerel crows and the full moon glows, a fine moment to scratch at the compost pile.

You’re right, most are merrily skipping through walled gardens, hashtagging selfies and feeding the #dotcons. But seeds don’t need mass attention, they just do need rich compost. That’s what we need to build. Slow, damp, a bit smelly, but fertile.

The #sheeple and not my flock, they belong to the algorithmic shepherds. We’re feeding the stray goats and curious crows.

You don’t convert people by preaching. You do it by making better paths, ones they choose when the old ones crumble. We don’t sell the #openweb like snake oil — we show it, live in it, fix it when it breaks, and compost the crap. It’s #DIY, not #drm

As for silos and skips, good compost needs oxygen, not airtight boxes. So yeah, a messy open pile — full of half-rotten ideas, posts, drama, even the occasional troll turd.

We trust in tools not gatekeepers, the #4opens are the shovels, rakes, and sieves. The people bring the scraps, and over time, it breaks down into something usable.

No army of mods, no paywalls, simple trust, process, and a lot of patience. Think rural anarchism, not startup governance.

On scaling... Ah, the eternal #techshit question, "Does it scale?" That’s the wrong frame. Nature doesn’t scale, it sprawls.

We’re not building an empire. We’re nurturing a network. Think mycelium, not megastructure.

The #OMN isn’t about numbers. It’s about resilience and agency. If it sprouts in some cracks, the monoculture breaks. And yes, nettles welcome

The #Kolektivas, the #fashernista paradoxes, the semi-anarchic infighting, it all goes in the pile. Break it down, stir it up, give it time…

And what do you get? Fluffy, fertile humus — ready for new growth. That’s the cycle. That’s the plan.

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witchescauldron

Indymedia’s legacy offers critical insights into building resilient, people-centric, and trust-based media networks that can withstand internal and external challenges. We need historical paths to reboot the #openweb with the #fediverse hamishcampbell.com/we-need-the

hamishcampbell.comWe need historical paths to reboot the #openweb with the #fediverse – Hamish Campbell
More from Hamish Campbell
Replied to witchescauldron
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rooftopjaxx

@witchescauldron
OK, you post on this stuff almost as frequently as a clock chimes, more often than the cockerel crows. We'll bite seeing as it's full moon and allegedly the best time for sowing seeds.
• Where are your audience, who are your #sheeple? Most will be blithely hopping in and out of the various walled gardens, so how are they to discover, or be persuaded to, the joys of the #OpenWeb; that it's the (non-cancerous) #growth (aka #PostGrowth / #Degrowth) they're truly looking for? How are they to be converted into disciples and evangelists?
° From the opposite POV, what sort of #silo are you going to build for your composting needs. The sort of open skip that other people will opportunistically fill up rapidly with all sorts of shit and trash? And will you be relying on the rakes, forks and shovels of a huge team of mods? How will they be onboarded? Or a pay-what-you-can-or-will model where people can post all their shit until moved on?
• And with respect to your pitch for the #OMN, just as inevitably, as the Esther Dysons of this word can never be unheard saying, "Does it even scale?"

Would merrily go off on further tangents on the Peertube/Youtube dilemmas, what is to be done with an anarcho-silo like Kolektiva, and so on, but hey there's other nettles to be scythed. Does it all go into the mix and get broken down into some lovely fluffy and friable rich humus in the end?

<wildcat emoji>
#compost #shitposting

cc @MediaActivist

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