● 03.04.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

●● Today is the Last Goodbye to Social Control Media

Posted in Site News at 6:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Video download link | md5sum 37ea9b132fcb09c4c154ef756aa71e0cEnding Social Control Media Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

http://techrights.org/videos/quitting-social-control-media.webm

Summary: Social Control Media (no matter if it’s proprietary, centralised, Free/libre, federated/decentralised, or self-hosted) isn’t the future of the Internet; there has never been a better time to leave it all behind, even actively boycott it (it is an awful, unreliable, biased and censorious modality which encourages or at least rewards mean-spirited behaviour, misinformation, and oppression by platform owners)

THE naysayers in Social Control Media want you to think that Gemini has nothing to offer, even though Social Control Media itself is imploding (see what happened to the valuation of Twitter and Facebook lately) and is becoming a net negative, a burden on society and liability to the world.

After nearly a week of significantly reduced activity in Social Control Media I’ve decided that today, with my main hub for Social Control Media shutting down (it was JoinDiaspora after Identica), I’ll quit participating completely. And sure, I might still post only links to new articles that I wrote, but nothing beyond that. And for the coming week/s not even that.

“Here in Techrights we shall be posting more Daily Links, including Gemini links.”

As a reminder, Techrights never bothered with such Web sites. In hindsight, it was a good decision. Looking back, retrospectively, Social Control Media was always just a bubble, based on the wrong expectation that it would become the future of the Internet. That’s clearly not the case, so those who bet on the wrong horse are busy making up new hype/buzzwords/cargo cults like “Web3″ or “metaverse” (yesterday we saw “plasmaverse” too).

As we recently noted, in 2019 Web traffic was estimated to have already decreased to less than a quarter of the whole. IPTV and DRM platforms are unfortunately flooding networks and taking up most of the Internet’s capacity. GulagTube (YouTube) has meanwhile become more and more like cable television — a similarity that has many facets and aspects.

Here in Techrights we shall be posting more Daily Links, including Gemini links. Recent work on code has already improved the presentation and utility of such links, which we hope can help tackle webspam.

JoinDiaspora shuts down in less than 9 hours from now (almost as originally planned after more than a decade online!), but I’ve come to peacefully accept that. I will still post articles, even more frequently than before, but the best way to follow them is RSS feeds (both here and in my personal site; there’s a ‘proper’ RSS feed for Gemini coming soon too, likely in this address). We need to encourage sites to manage things on their own, freely, not via some third party/ies. Reliance on a third party was always risky because third parties have a tendency to shut down when it’s least desirable to the “tenants” and they silence “tenants” when that suits any owner/s of the third party. We’ve seen lots of that over the past week, in response (mostly) to the Russian invasion. We also saw that earlier this year with Gulag/FeedBurner. As Vivek Gite put it weeks ago: “Google decided to kill the last part of Feedburner. Back in the old days, I and many others used FeedBurner. At some stage, Google acquired FeedBurner, and now they are putting it into maintenance mode. Hence, this new change will affect those getting daily emails via FeedBurner when new content is posted here. Therefore I urge you to update your feed. [...] The lesson is evident here, not to trust 3rd party with your RSS feed or content. I will never forgive Google for erasing Google Reader RSS/Atom feed aggregator. I lost many readers because of that move.”

Clown computing and Social Control Media have this in common (overlapping threats). It’s always about outsourcing operations, data, and even communications.

More people access Techrights over gemini:// and there will soon be 2,200 capsules, a 10% growth in just over a month*. Those who conveniently assume that the World Wide Web is here to stay and thrive for decades to come grossly underestimate the speed at which software changes (or overestimate digital cadence). █

_____* Lupa says that “[t]here are 2176 capsules. We successfully connected recently to 1773 of them.” It was 2,000 in the end January and 1,600 in mid January, respectively.

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