During the week I heard someone on the radio bemoaning the degeneration of the Internet. He noted it had begun as a platform where people could express themselves independently of editors or other gatekeepers and now it is largely controlled by four or five major companies which exploit people with algorithms designed to keep them hooked on an endless stream of often extremist content and harvest data about them to sell to the highest bidder in one form or another. These companies control what we are allowed to see for their own benefit. It is indeed a sorry state of affairs and it harms social dialogue and democracy itself by distorting people’s view of the world.
He mentioned one exception, Wikipedia, which he suggested remained open to more subtle understanding because the founder had transferred control to an open group and did not always get his way.
That set me thinking. Do we need a form of Social Media which is not centrally controlled and does not collect people’s data? How would it be funded, since the servers use power and Internet bandwidth which must be paid for? Could such a thing be viable?
Then I remembered Diaspora*, a social medium which had been started a few years ago but failed to catch on. Had that not been intended to be such a beast and why had it not gained traction?
The answer to the second question was probably commercial. A home-brewed, low budget system simply cannot advertise itself as widely as the big companies with their deep pockets. Another problem is that a system relying on enthusiastic volunteers to provide its server space relies on people with knowledge and time to maintain it, and most people sign up to social media because it saves them needing that knowledge and time to access it. There was also a third reason; Diaspora* was an early attempt and uses its own unique communications protocol, whereas later implementations try to comform to a set of standards enabling them to interact with each other. Diaspora stays with its own way and is therefore less useful with a narrower base.
The most popular distributed social medium of this general type is called Mastodon, so I started researching that. It is modern and by far the most available. Should I support that, then? After all, the only way to overcome the dominance of the large companies is to support, use, and thereby promote something less controlled by oligarchs. Mastodon seemed to fit the bill apart from one problem: its Code of Conduct requires users to accept and work within an ideology in which I do not believe, and merely questioning some aspects of that would probably get me disciplined with a claim I was harming the platform or groups of its users. That rules that one out, then.
The remaining projects are all very small. The one that next seems to fit the bill is called Pleroma, but it’s very small and therefore very much a minority interest. Is it big enough to be worth the effort? I’m not sure.
So I’m left back where I started. I’d like to promote a more benign version of the Internet for the sake of pulling people together rather than apart, but the options are limited, and the one most likely to succeed already has an ideological approach which excludes large numbers of people and tries to enforce a particular world-view, so how much better would that be than the existing big players? What we really need still isn’t really there.
K J Petrie has a Full Technological Certificate in Radio, TV and Electronics, an HNC in Digital Electronics and a BA(Hons) in Theological Studies.
His interests include Christian and societal unity, Diverse Diversity, and freedoms from want, from fear, of speech, and of association. He is a communicant member of the Church of England.
The views expressed here are entirely personal and unconnected with any body to which he belongs.
