A digital public sphere cannot exist when the entire internet is privatized and dependent on competition for scarce revenue. Every company is therefore incentivised to control what is on spaces they control and to influence discourse in such a way as to maximize profit.
You want a digital public sphere? Vote for the government to open a digital post office. Until we have the right to access, at cost, public services that do not discriminate and cannot be denied us by anything short of a court order, digital freedom is proportional to how much money you can make for someone else.
Giving the post office funding to run as an ISP and grant funds for FTTH would be a huge game changer. Maybe work with the department of energy to colocate datacenter next to power generation facilites to become a public cloud.
"But commoditization!" exclaimed the corporate finance types and assorted growth hackers.
As someone who transitioned from law and finance to tech, it's apparent that a greater reckoning must take place. Trying to graft tech on to what is essentially an early 20th century paradigm bodes well for the entrenched interests.
People don't seem to understand that some people are intrinsically motivated to create things, and don't need to be incentivized with money. And that in fact, when you set out to make money by creating things, the results are shittier, because you're setting out to make money, not to create things.
There is probably an element of truth to that. But given the number of individuals on HN who are deeply concerned how we'll fund content creators if we get rid of ads on the internet, at least a pretty significant portion of individuals have drunk the corporate kool-aid with regards to this.
While I appreciate the distinction you've made in your post, I would encourage you to not use the word "person" to refer to corporations. I understand the judicial precedent--I'm saying that the law is wrong and we should absolutely not adopt the definition of corporations as persons in to the English language. Corporations don't have rights; they exist to serve people who do have rights. Legal precedent granting corporations rights under the law is a morally reprehensible mistake which should be corrected.
>We believe this moment, when people are so dissatisfied with the platforms that have dominated for the past decade-and-a-half, presents a unique opportunity to build a digital public sphere where people and communities with different preferences and purposes can participate accordingly.
I mean a lot of public utilities and services communicate with twitter, instagam or facebook. So essentially giving these free services an audience. With these services ratcheting down their free access to the public (instagram for example, shows a limited number of things before you have to sign in) it would make sense to move to more open services (Mastodon?) Of course then they'd have to pay but I can't imagine that would be a problem.
The problem is how to find people to follow. Twitter, as a centralized service with a search feature solves that problem in a way that individual sites with RSS feeds can't. Someone I've never interacted with can add a hashtag to their post on Twitter, and I can search for that hashtag, and find their post. If I've never interacted with someone, how do I know to go to their webpage and connect to their RSS feed?
This. The problem is not how many legs the internet stool has, it's the problem of discovery in the "dark forest".
You want people to be able to find you, for your outbound communications (self-promotion), and you want people to be able to cold-contact you in circumstances that are useful to you. But if you're not very careful your inbound communications get completely overwhelmed by spam and/or abuse.
Discovery is work. Spamblocking is work. Abuse deletion is work. None of which people want to do themselves, so they delegate it to platforms which do it for them.
I use standalone feed readers; some people use aggregators that have their own web interfaces.
RSS is my primary way of following the web these days (well has been for a couple of decades). If there's no RSS feed I simply don't follow a site; there usually is.
Is a working phone number required to create an account there? I seem to recall one having to be provided the last time I tried to create an account there.
I don't consider any web site or service that requires a phone number to be provided in order to create an account to be "free", both in terms of cost and liberty.
Recently singed a family member up, and set up a couple of accounts to follow, ect. It worked for less than a day before the account was "locked", and the only way to unlock was to add a phone number.
As far as I'm considered, Instagram absolutely needs a phone number. Officially they don't need one at sign up - but they won't allow you to use that account for long before you need a phone number anyway.
Creating an account is not free. It costs 1-2 minutes of your time (assuming no errors, I just tried it and never got the phone number confirmation code, in this case I paid with my time and got nothing, this risk also has a price) and that a record will exist between your name and a list of all the images you’ve viewed and liked, millisecond accurate measurements of when you opened the app for and how long etc. for the next century, probably more. I don’t know how to price such a record not existing and different people price it differently but it does have a price.
Sure, but this is a 1 time cost and most people already have an account. I'm sure it also takes several minutes to set up your internet or phone too.
>and never got the phone number confirmation code
Are you potentially using a phone number from a service like twilio instead of your actual phone number? VoIP and related numbers are usually banned because they are mostly used by malicious users.
Keeping track of the posts you've like is a feature of the app. Personalization is also another feature of the app. Tracking the time you have the app open is why you can see your screen time and how you can set screen time limits. These are features which users find value.
If you don't want this data to last a century you can just delete your account and your data will be deleted too.
Weak tea. If you're gonna sass at least put in some effort. Are you really trying to say "hypocrisy is okay because everyone does it"?
And hypocrisy is the good interpretation: that they know what they're doing and don't care, for whatever reason, about the irony of hosting their "Manifesto for a Smaller, Denser Internet" on Google's very unpublic infrastructure. The worse interpretation is that they're completely clueless.
You want a digital public sphere? Vote for the government to open a digital post office. Until we have the right to access, at cost, public services that do not discriminate and cannot be denied us by anything short of a court order, digital freedom is proportional to how much money you can make for someone else.