this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2024
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Showerthoughts
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Well I mean 2 problems.
Same problem every social network has... without intense marketing, budget etc... Usage will be low. Same reason why say you don't see, a bunch of lemmy groups for niche or local topics. Because it's mostly nerds etc, and the only topics that are going to have enough people to be useful are ones with national/international appeal because likely there's on average one lemmy user per several cities.
Review sites need intense moderation and verification to be useful. Problem is of course going to be either companies themselves posting swarms of reviews to make themselves look great, or competitors or people with personal grudges posting to make them look bad.
Neither of those seem like complete dealbreakers if there were some form of verification using DID’s and homomorphic encryption for example.
Marketing, to me, is a non-issue if the technology has evolved enough. We can start with nerds only and iterate upon it until the normies can’t deny the superiority of the platform and move over in droves. We are not there yet on the fediverse, IMO. Here’s Hoskinson doing a thought experiment about what would need to be done to truly achieve a decentralized Twitter.
For one, NOSTR’s tech would make this fairly easy for someone just a tad smarter than myself to implement. Of course it wouldn’t be foolproof but it would be FAR better than say Yelp or Google or GlassDoor reviews are on their own.
I’m under no impression that my idea is rock solid and infallible. In fact, I don’t imagine it would work in the current server client relationship. Full stop.
I’m hoping that our acute sensitivity to enshittification will eventually drive us to innovate around these (admittedly major) issues. One truth I can’t find a way to refute, though: A decentralized web is coming whether we like it or not;
There’s all kinds of interesting discussions to be had here:
The EU’s right to be forgotten, for example, seems to be an attempt to reverse the laws of nature, IMO. Information is a Pandora’s box. Once it is out, it is cached EVERYWHERE. Especially with AI scrapers in full effect, boiling our oceans.
Perhaps (probably?), the traditional server-client model of the web will someday give way to a decentralized model that is (IMO inevitably) censorship resistant.