Probably the best, most succinct explanation of how social media, algorithms and the content creator economy is wrecking societal structures. This was something I noticed back during the Rohingya genocide in 2016. Back then I was the world news editor for a national newspaper and you can't help but feel helpless at how Facebook refused to do anything about how their platform flamed the flames of racism, bigotry and eventually genocide. Then came Cambridge Analytica (2018). Hate to be cynical about it but that's when the West finally took notice and action 🥴.

Perhaps it's controversial, as this regulation can be misused, but Malaysia took the step to insist on platforms like #Facebook to be licensed. (Meaning if they don't abide by Malaysian regulations their licenses will be yanked.)

In Asia, where societal harmony is prized, we cannot afford the disunity and polarisation described by this YouTuber.

I think the only way to solve this is to a) disengage from the major platforms b) take money out of the whole machine.

B is least likely to happen for even in China, the content creator economy drives clicks.

youtu.be/FmYXyWbis9w?si=UsMCjd…

#SocialMedia #Internet #Algorithms

The Internet is a shithole

What drained me of power over the past years is this constant fight of debullshitting the Internet experience for me and others.

You always have to use an AdBlocker, VPNs to circumvent all sort of censorship - and for that matter change the location often else you still get blocked; find proper news sources then find their RSS, add to an RSS reader, try to read locally if these websites allow you to....else go visit their bullshit websites.

Youtube is still by far the biggest, or the only in most cases, video platform. Now even with an adblocker the youtube experience sucks - they autoplay videos, insert shorts into your face, make you click things you don't want, and now insert AI generated video description for videos.. So you have to use an app for youtube that removes these piles of poop. But these apps are constantly blocked and won't work all of the time...

I don't even want to think about search which has become a pile of nonsense. Full of fake AI websites and now when pretty much all search engines introduced AI summaries...makes searching a painful experience.

Even Reddit, which can still feel like a "community" of people posting stuff from time to time, is a garbage. Full of fake posts and bots, and no way you can use RSS to follow subreddits. Login to see some content....endless scroll....all a bazaar.

I have to fight with "free" Wordpress plugins that insert ads into your dashboard, I have to block AI Summaries in searches, I have to keep Freetube up to date and often when videos do not work there, open in Youtube. I have to read my news in a semi-broken RSS reader since some cannot fetch all of the news, I have to install a custom OS on my phone then block ads there too, but now some banking apps do not work....a constant loop of poop, to protect yourself and your sanity, because everyone is there to fucking slice you open for a view, a click, a like...

Always always a fight against this destruction of the internet even tho all I fucking want is to read some reliable science news, watch some educational videos from time to time, and post some content or search for content. What the actual fuck....

I know why this is: TRADE. Same reason why the offline world is a shithole full of destruction, garbage, less nature, all about consuming and shops. This is what happens when humans have a primary goal of trading. Same online, these platforms are about trading, your attention, data, currency in return for a service. So it is a normal "enshitification" of the online too.

At least I have Friendica, Peertube, Nextcloud, Linux (TROMjaro) and the like, that allow me to still use the Internet in a sane way.

But man...such a shithole the Internet has become. I can't even imagine how "normal" people use it without adblockers, with relying on youtube, facebook, tiktok and such platforms....must be hell in the brain for these people.

I used to LOVE the Internet back in the days. It was like a park where you met interesting things and people. Now is like a metrostation full of ads and merchants, where everyone is in a rush to go somewhere else.

#enshitification #enshitiffication #internet #fedi #youtube #facebook #tiktok #reddit #alternatives #friendica #peertube

So there’s a new Guardian interview with Jimmy Wales out (to promote his new book, with an affiliate link for the Guardian in it) titled “‘People thought I was a communist doing this as a non-profit’: is Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales the last decent tech baron?”* that’s making the rounds here.

For those who only read the headlines, here’s a TL;DR: No. There is no such thing as decent tech baron, that’s an oxymoron.

From the article itself:

“‘I’m actually quite in favour of business and capitalism and all that.’ (He’s currently president of Fandom, an ad-funded entertainment site that hosts user-edited pages, owned by private equity firm TPG Capital).”

And:

“Does he still regard Musk, the world’s richest man, as a friend? ‘Friends is probably a little strong. I mean, not, not that –‘ he sputters, editing himself in real time. ‘I want to be careful how I say that, only because I’ve met him maybe five or six times, so that I would be overstating to say friends. We’ve been friendly, and even now he’s much nicer to me in private than you might think. I mean, he’s got a big public persona, and that’s a little bit different from the private Elon, who I think is more thoughtful.’”

Also, some more background:

mastodon.ar.al/@aral/115445244…

#JimmyWales #wikipedia #theGuardian #bookPromotion #capitalism #ElonMusk #adTech #zeroRating #Facebook #Meta #surveillanceCapitalism #regulation

* theguardian.com/technology/202…

‘People thought I was a communist doing this as a non-profit’: is Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales the last decent tech baron?

In an online landscape characterised by doom and division, the people’s encyclopedia stands out – a huge collective endeavour giving everyone free access to the sum of human knowledge.

^{David Shariatmadari (The Guardian)}

Aral Balkan

2025-10-27 08:44:01

@iaruffell Although, do remember this is the same man who partners with Facebook to legitimise their zero-rating with Free Basics (m.facebook.com/help/5109971356…)* and who told me, publicly on Twitter back in the day, that he doesn’t believe in any form of regulation whatsoever. (Sadly, that link is dead with my Twitter account so you’ll just have to take my word that for one. But it’s not like he was hiding it and he’d likely confirm it today if you asked him.)

* You have to set your VPN to somewhere like Peru to see the information presented in the first screenshot. Otherwise you’ll get the page you see in the second.

Wat is Free Basics? | Helpcentrum

^{m.facebook.com}

For 200 years, capitalism, for the last 40 years #neoliberalism, told us that we’re isolated individuals who compete to survive. But any real view of our actual history – and our biology – say the opposite: we’re interdependent, social, and ecological beings. For almost all species time we thrived through commons-based systems, shared forests, grazing lands, rivers, and community knowledge. Villages maintained open wells, fishermen shared tidal calendars, and guilds protected collective craft standards. Cooperation, not competition, is what allowed us to endure.

This is why now alt tech, matters, it is about rediscovering, what makes us human, the digital form of that is commoning online. Just as medieval commons were fenced off during enclosure, our early digital commons were captured by #dotcons. Rebuilding the #openweb is the act of reclaiming that shared ground, not nostalgia, but in the era of #climatechaos and hard right shift its #KISS survival.

What we need to compost is our own-shared memory. The commons are missing from today’s “common sense”. The idea that people can manage shared resources together has vanished from public imagination. Yet the commons is the older, more adaptive, and far more humane way of organizing.

In tech, the #Fediverse shows this in action, thousands of community run servers cooperating through a shared protocol, ActivityPub. Projects like #PeerTube, #Pixelfed, or #Funkwhale replace enclosure with federation, showing that open paths can scale through trust rather than control. Alt tech, built on open protocols and co-governance, is simply the digital commons rebooted, a network of networks where no one owns the whole.

We need much more resources and focus pushed into this real grassroots path of reclaiming the means of communication, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the internet was all ready a commons: decentralized, people-driven, and impactful. Early #Indymedia collectives covered protests outside mainstream #blocking narratives. #4opens email lists and wikis built movements across borders. Then capital pushed in, WE let the #nastyfew of #Facebook, #Google etc privatize our collective infrastructure, turning participation into surveillance and creativity into content.

Alt tech projects like the #OMN (Open Media Network), Mastodon, and wider #Fediverse are attempts to rebuild what we keep forgetting, this time, protected by #4opens shield to build shared governance. This path is not a nostalgic throwback, but living/acting paths for post-capitalist communication we need in the growing era of social backdown.

It’s not only “tech” – it’s social trust infrastructure. A common is not only software; it’s the culture of cooperation that surrounds it, shared values, mutual aid, and relational ethics, you can’t “code” trust into hardware, as the last decade of #blockchain and #AI mess proves. Smart contracts failed to make people honest; they just automated mistrust, it’s on going #geekproblem blindness we need to be working to compost.

What works, the resilience, comes from people, not algorithms. Through frameworks like the #4opens: open data, open code, open standards, open process. We can build transparency and accountability into the social layer of the network. Trust is a practice, not a protocol #KISS

We need a future that’s better, not just less bad. The #deathcult story – neoliberalism’s great myth – says “there is no alternative.” Alt tech is the alternative, working proof that cooperation scales, that people build shared infrastructure without extraction and less coercion. Look at LibreOffice, Wikipedia, Linux, or the #Fediverse, all imperfect, collaborative systems built on trust, not profit. They are real-world examples of how collective will outperform the normal deadened paths of corporate hierarchy.

Alt tech gives us believable hope, which is the only real antidote to despair and apathy. The ground for grassroots power is in pushing change and challenge. If the liberal state and #dotcons won’t reform, we need to be building parallel structures that work differently.
Projects like the #OGB (Open Governance Body) experiment with federated, transparent decision-making. The #OMN builds tools to connect grassroots media in trust networks, bypassing gatekeepers entirely. Together they form a scaffolding of a working commons, capable of hosting culture, not only control.

Healing the social media wound? We need to compost the lie of #dotcons which spent the last 20 years turning us into consumers and outrage machines. The shovel we need is affinity groups rebuilding social tech around self-governance, interoperability, and most importantly trust to reclaim the human side of the internet. Imagine the world different, feeds that empower communities, not advertisers, tools that nurture relationships, not metrics, platforms that amplify context, not conflict.

This is the work of making the internet human again, working together on the path of alt tech matters because it’s not about gadgets; it’s about freedom, community, and survival. It’s our path to remembering that the #openweb, like the Earth itself, belongs to everyone, or it belongs to no one. And every time we build a shared tool, or hold open a door, we remind the world that cooperation is not naïve, it’s our oldest #KISS technology.

youtube.com/watch?v=Z5nZU5cHhC…

A cross-cultural conversation on this subject

UPDATE: I haven’t touched on two other #4opens projects here, so let’s tap them at the end: #Nostr is a “me-too” project stuck in the #geekproblem loop, it won’t go anywhere until it learns to value community as a building block. #Bluesky, on the other hand, is already drifting into the hands of VC-funded #fluffy elitists who turn every commons into a brand. It’s a very likely a dead-end for real change or challenge, which is why the #mainstreaming #blocking #NGO and #fashernista crowds flock to it.