The key benefit is that it’s public infrastructure that’s not owned by a corporation. Public forums should be publicly owned. These are essential social tools that allow us to have discussions with each other and shape our views and opinions. These forums must be operated in an open and transparent manner in a way that’s accountable to the public.

Privately owned platforms are neither neutral or unbiased. The content on these sites is carefully curated. Views and opinions that are unpalatable to the owners of these platforms are often suppressed, and sometimes outright banned. When the content that a user produces does not fit with the interests of the platform it gets removed and communities end up being destroyed.

Another problem is that user data constitutes a significant source of revenue for corporate social media platforms. This information is shared with the affiliates of the platform as well as government entities. It’s clear that commercial platforms do not respect user privacy, nor are the users in control of their content. While it can be useful to participate on such platforms in order to agitate, educate, and recruit comrades, they should not be seen as open forums.

Open source platforms provide a viable alternative to corporate social media. These platforms are developed on a non-profit basis and are hosted by volunteers across the globe. A growing number of such platforms are available today and millions of people are using them already.

From that perspective I think that open and federated platforms. Instead of all users having accounts on the same server, federated platforms have many servers that all talk to each other to create the network. If you have the technical expertise, it’s even possible to run your own.

One important aspect of the Fediverse is that it’s much harder to censor and manipulate content than it is with centralized networks such as Reddit and BlueSky. There is no single company deciding what content can go on the network, and servers are hosted by regular people across many different countries and jurisdictions.

Open platforms explicitly avoid tracking users and collecting their data. It’s also more difficult for third parties to collect data since it doesn’t all conveniently live on the same server that some company owns. Not only are these platforms better at respecting user privacy, they also tend to provide a better user experience without annoying ads and tracker bloat.

Another interesting aspect of the Fediverse is that it promotes collaboration. Traditional commercial platforms like Facebook or Youtube have no incentive to allow users to move data between them. They directly compete for users in a zero sum game and go out of their way to make it difficult to share content across them. This is the reason we often see screenshots from one site being posted on another.

On the other hand, a federated network that’s developed in the open and largely hosted non-profit results in a positive-sum game environment. Users joining any of the platforms on the network help grow the entire network. More users joining Mastodon is a net positive for Lemmy because we get more content and more people to have discussions with.

Having many different sites hosted by individuals was the way the internet was intended to work in the first place, it’s actually quite impressive how corporations took the open network of the internet and managed to turn it into a series of walled gardens.

In order to be truly free, we must own the means of production. This idea is directly applicable in the context of social media. Only when we own the platforms that we use will we be free to post our thoughts and ideas without having to worry about them being censored by corporate interests.

No matter how great a commercial platform might be, sooner or later it’s going to either disappear or change in a way that doesn’t suit you because companies must constantly chase profit in order to survive. This is a bad situation to be in as a user since you have little control over the evolution of a platform.

On the other hand, open source has a very different dynamic. Projects can survive with little or no commercial incentive because they’re developed by people who themselves benefit from their work. Projects can also be easily forked and taken in different directions by different groups of users if there is a disagreement regarding the direction of the platform. Even when projects become abandoned, they can be picked up again by new teams as long as there is an interested community of users around them.

At the end of the day, it’s about owning our tools and using communication platforms built by the people and for the people.

Oh look the EU is rolling out its own version of MAX. 🤣

It’s true, being indoctrinated, you’re not actually capable of rational thought, and therefore unable to make a coherent point. Glad you’re self aware enough to admit it.

I love how you just can’t help yourself reply compulsively. We’ve already established that you can’t actually make a coherent point, and are just lashing out. Take the L and go home.

It’s as if you just have a Pavlovian response to anything AI related, and then just try to deflect when pressed on your bullshit. Seems like some people on here have less mental faculties than a chatbot smdh.

The advantage with the agents is that they can do much better fuzzy searching when you’re not using exact terms, and they can correlate things for you. So, you can ask general questions and get useful information pulled out from your db. A searchable ZIM drive doesn’t do that for you.

You really don’t understand how having an AI agent look through your wiki and pull up relevant links quickly is useful? Also, what higher chance of failure are you talking about. It’s not like it’s an integral part of the system. The whole Ollama component is entirely opt in. At least try to make some sense here.

Oh, do elaborate. This ought to be good.

I don’t see any problem with using a chatbot to find information in a giant wiki myself.

Actually, having a local agent on the system with a bunch of data on it that helps you find things would be great for most people. People really need to get over the whole knee jerk reaction to all things AI related. It’s getting really tiresome.

What internet dependence, it’s completely offline once you install it. Also, nobody is forcing you to use the LLM bundled with it. Stop perseverating.

welcome to western media

Water Moon

yeah that’s the riff

It’s open source, and it’s not tied to a single server the way Signal is. If the original people developing it started doing problematic things, it’s easy to fork. One of the worst parts about Signal is how it’s designed to lock you into using their official app and server making it effectively impossible to have a compatible fork.

You deciding to invite your contacts to Signal isn’t really Signal being better though.

Do explain what makes it better than SimpleX Chat?

SimpleX Chat is an actual privacy focused app that’s easy to use and doesn’t harvest your phone number like Signal does https://simplex.chat/

Collecting your phone number on sign up is literally the opposite of anonymity. Perhaps you don’t understand what this word means?

No, privacy minded individuals do not use a platform designed to harvest phone numbers lmfao.