A recent trouble in Antenna shows the need for more than one platform for whatever: sharing posts, forums, engines... Because yes, the owner of a platform has every right to disallow content that she or he or hän doesn't want there. However, there should be alternatives to protect freedom of speech and, also, to relief the pressure from platform owners so they can also exercise their own rights

🏕️ Yretek

Jan 06 · 4 months ago · 👍 eph, zinricky, leoperbo

6 Comments ↓

🕹️ skyjake [...] · Jan 06 at 10:58:

Technically speaking, setting up new aggregators is pretty easy. You can just deploy an instance of Antenna (like @gritty did with DSN) or even roll your own solution.

The real challenge with getting multiple aggregators going is the network effect. People naturally congregate onto a single aggregator because that's where everybody else is. It takes a sizable chunk of the audience, people who are unhappy with the way the aggregator is run, to viably kickstart a new one for that subset of the audience.

Fighting the network effect may be tough, but in the end, I agree that multiple aggregators is the best solution. The generous people hosting an aggregator should not be burdened with distributing content that goes against their rules or world view. Multiple aggregators with different rules gives readers and authors the choice which ones they want to follow and participate in, instead of putting pressure on one aggregator to accommodate wildly different, conflicting and perhaps deeply unpopular opinions.

🛸 zinricky [✍️] · Jan 06 at 15:31:

I’m a bit out of the loop. What happened?

🕹️ skyjake [...] · Jan 06 at 15:42:

@zinricky This is a decent starting point:

— ew.srht.site/en/2024/20240105-uproar.gmi

— Cosmos shows the thread.

🚀 bumpsh · Jan 06 at 19:03:

@skyjake, that seems like a good start point

here is tl;dr for @zinricky

I made a thread in s/discuss

I have bad writing skills, things where assumed

people got pissed

and boom 40 comments in 1 day

if you to would like to get pissed you may read the thread:

gemini://bbs.geminispace.org/s/discuss/13406

🐦 wasolili [...] · Jan 06 at 20:14:

fighting the network effect is probably not too hard from a technical perspective since aggregators are, by nature, fully public. Anyone who makes their own aggregator can just aggregate posts from the existing aggregators, and any time a post is submitted to it but not on the aggregators it's leeching from, it can submit that post to the other aggregators

leeching submissions to other aggregators may be a dick move, but call your aggregator a "meta aggregator" or "federated aggregator" and perhaps the icky feeling will be reduced :)

🕹️ skyjake [...] · Jan 07 at 03:58:

@wasolili Note that Cosmos is just that: it aggregates links from various other aggregators and Gemini hosting platforms. I apply a manual editorial policy on it, though, instead of accepting whatever links it may find. Personally I don't feel it's icky at all, as it provides its own additional value of threading linked posts together.

I fear the network effect is too much about psychology and group dynamics to be overcome with technology, though. We've seen how social networks evolve on the Big Web...