Internet 2.0 sucks, thank you Permies for being real!

I have very limited internet access at the moment and thought I’d go back on Instaham briefly every now and then as a way to quickly share some photos and promote my stuff. A while ago I was scrolling though my feed on there and clicked ‘like’ on a few pictures that I liked and Instagram bots decided it was suspicious activity, and that I would be blocked from clicking ‘like’, commenting, or posting up new things. Seems strange that clicking ‘like’ would seem suspicious. Somehow I managed to find a way to contact them (through a ‘report a problem’ button on an obscure corner of the website) and it all went back to normal for a while.

The other day I wanted to quickly post up a photo of goats. Posted it up, went to add a comment with my hashtags, and I was told that it was suspicious activity, and that I’d have to change my password. Changed my password, tried doing it in the same way, locked out again. Changed password again, tried to post the photo with the hashtags attached to it, got locked out again. I guess the bots don’t like goats?

With Permies on the other hand, I don’t think Gir Bot does anything naughty. When things are deleted or someone banned, the decisions are made by actual people, giving actual explanations behind the scenes about why something was deleted, and in the trickier cases having a discussion so that it’s a group decision with many different perspectives taken into account.

When I’ve gone on to Failbook or Instaham, it shows me a feed of whatever is high in their algorithm, often it will show the same posts again and again, and I’ll see stuff from some people heavily and nothing or very little from others. I know these and many other internet sites are censoring information on things that don’t fit whatever current corporate stuff they wish to promote. I wonder when this growing list of things will grow to include organic gardening, permaculture, raising animals, and basically everything we talk about here…

I like that when I log onto Permies on forum view, I see a list of recent topics - just the most recent by date, with no funny algorithms. I suspect a time will come when more and more people will grow tired of logging on to social media to see a tiny selection of posts, and tired of getting their posts deleted or accounts locked by bots for ridiculous things, and I wonder if more people will grow to miss old-style forums and join us on Permies.

Thank you Permies for remaining a real place to learn and share. Thank you Permies staff for keeping it spam-free without overzealous bots and other craziness!

There's so much benefit to having a human element look at each situation as new and unique.  

Like they teach about permaculture.  Blanket solutions often lead to failure.  But having a toolkit and a real human choosing which tool to apply when makes the world of difference.  

The weirdest thing they added recently are random short videos by strangers. I don't know how they figured that something so creepy may be interesting :D
I guess it still is, to some people, if they decided to do it.

Most bots on the net are sure I live in Springfield, MO.   It does seem to be a nice community, but I live several hundred miles to the east.   The problem , of course, is that when I order most things off the net, I get notified my credit card account has been hacked .... and everything gets frozen.

For me the main issue with Instaham and Failbook, as you name them, is that they are proprietary, centralised, corporation owned, and that the main method of financing it is selling private people's data to data brokers.

I think we permies, if we are interested in using ethical tools and methods, we also should be using ethical platforms. For me this has to comply with the "3 Res": Respectful, Responsible and Resilient.
Respectful in the sense that it will not do any potential harm to the user and it will respect is privacy, rights and freedoms.
Responsible in the sense that it will not potentially lead us into a distopian future
Resilient in the sense that it depends not on one centralised institution that in the future may change its terms of service or end it altogether, but that it could survive any of these changes.

The permies forum as long as I know, is respectful and responsible, but it misses on the resilient, because it is centralised on one person/institution that dictates how it works and could change/end/sell in the future the whole user base. (I'm not meaning that they will, hopefully not,and I assume that is not their intention at all)

There is a very interesting initiative called the fediverse.https://fediverse.party/ which intends to tackle this issues. It is libre software, federated, and replicates the functionalities of all major networks, like failbook, instaham, twiter, etc., but into a connected network of networks. Why isn't everybody using those then? Because of facebook and popular social media platforms lobbies and marketing, they instaurated theirs as the default. Now, there is the "network effect", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect, which in a few words means that the networks that have the biggest number of users are more interesting, and a new network, be it ethical, secure, private, beautiful, whatever; if it has no users/friends to network with, it doesn't offer us any value.
So how do we get everybody into a federated, free/libre, private, secure, freedom and right respecting platform? I don't know, but I hope we will.

PS. there are a bunch of new social networks which promise to end the fails of the popular ones. Please, before using them, triple check if they are really ethical. According to my own investigation, the Fediverse is our best bet for the future.

Wow Fediverse, just looked it up. Wow...going to take some learning to figure out what this is.

Jose, doe you utilize Fediverse?

Human element can be a very good thing, especially when it deals with AI. AI creeps me out...it's all about the ads.

thanks for bringing up this challenging topic.

There is so much evidence that apps like FB and IG increase mental health issues, especially in young people. These apps know this (their own research shows it) and do nothing. I really try and limit my time on them as I know they are trying to show me the maximum amount of ads possible. Old school forums like permies where it's actually just about connecting and sharing are where it's at!

Edited to add: anyone interested in that research, should check out the Behind The Bastards podcast episode 'Let's Look at the Facebook Papers'.

I don't use much the Fediverse because I don't dig much digital social networks in general, but I do have accounts in the Fediverse and I don't have any on the big mainstream social media.

I've had similar issues.  I used to use "Failbook" a lot for my book marketing  and ran a joint reader group there because that's where a lot of my readers are.  But there were so many problems! Lots of dreck I don't want to see in my newsfeed. Irrational decisions on suspicious behaviour made by bots that don't seem possible to contest or reverse, even posts being censored.  I don't want to be supporting all that's wrong with what they're doing there. I passed the big reader group on to my author friend, don't advertise, and go on once a week for a very short time to reply to comments on my page.

A big thank you to all the hard work the moderators here give us to make Permies a safe and reasonable place to visit!

Jose Castro wrote:
I think we permies, if we are interested in using ethical tools and methods, we also should be using ethical platforms. For me this has to comply with the "3 Res": Respectful, Responsible and Resilient.
Respectful in the sense that it will not do any potential harm to the user and it will respect is privacy, rights and freedoms.
Responsible in the sense that it will not potentially lead us into a distopian future
Resilient in the sense that it depends not on one centralised institution that in the future may change its terms of service or end it altogether, but that it could survive any of these changes.

I love this.  Sad that we need to work for things to be this way, though...

But we are stronger and make better decisions, more easily, when we know our basic ideal, guiding principles.  This helps to establish those bases.

Jose Castro wrote:According to my own investigation, the Fediverse is our best bet for the future.

Thanks for putting that up, I'd never heard of it. Mind you, I don't do any social media stuff myself, Permies being the closest I get to that, but I will pass the word around. I looked all through their special interest list but saw no mention of Permaculture. It needs someone who knows about these things (not me!) to put it there and start a group. Not that it could ever come close to rivaling this community. This is a wonderful place, full of knowledgeable, courteous, interesting real people who do all sorts of interesting things and take delight in passing on their knowledge and experience. I was blessed to find it!!

John F Dean wrote:Most bots on the net are sure I live in Springfield, MO.   It does seem to be a nice community, but I live several hundred miles to the east.   The problem , of course, is that when I order most things off the net, I get notified my credit card account has been hacked .... and everything gets frozen.

When CenturyLink offered to increase my speed  it put me in a que that switches to a less used server.  So my server location jumps all around lower Puget Sound.  So it is important that my browser is set to report my actual location.

I mostly use social media business to business but I have to be quick to stop the video feed after an instructional or something worse than cat pictures will start up.

Jose Castro wrote:I don't use much the Fediverse because I don't dig much digital social networks in general, but I do have accounts in the Fediverse and I don't have any on the big mainstream social media.

Is that like Diaspora? I've used https://diasp.org, not free and not that many local people on it though.

I dont understand how Facebook "sells your data" though. Ive only ever entered a fake name and non identifying email. Oh and eventually a phone number. What value is that to anyone else?

C Murphy wrote:There is so much evidence that apps like FB and IG increase mental health issues, especially in young people. These apps know this (their own research shows it) and do nothing. I really try and limit my time on them as I know they are trying to show me the maximum amount of ads possible. Old school forums like permies where it's actually just about connecting and sharing are where it's at!

Edited to add: anyone interested in that research, should check out the Behind The Bastards podcast episode 'Let's Look at the Facebook Papers'.

The layout of this forum is great, tbh there are loads of forums out there on all subjects that are less headache inducing/crack-like than social media. I dont get why anyone wants to give their personal information to strangers, make things public etc, for free.

The reason they cause issues in young people is that everything moves too fast to process emotionally and doesnt promote the right types of hormones in the brain. We release oxytocin when we physically are among groups of people. We release a lot of bad stuff including cortisol, vasoconstriction etc when we chase dopamine via posting/attention seek/cloutchasing, trolling, chats, texts, random pics, social comparisons etc. These are pixels
..JUST PIXELS ON A FLAT SCREEN It's obv to me as a gen Xer minus the medical explanations. I got depressed once in my life- as a teen- that was from reading one teen fashion magazine. Once. ONCE. Losing a child didnt do it. Boredom and feeling poor did. There's the answer.

Social media is unrewarding, like an addiction but at least  other addictions give you a high. This stuff just leaves my eyes tired and angry because after an hour, i'm down like six subject holes and I am left with 100 tabs up of information i now need to read/watch/organize/collate/delete/note/remember where i put something

Not fun. How do yall process all the data? When there is no reward?

I try to just use it as therapy like journalling but that stopped working for me after blogspot.

Apparently social media and internetting is bad for neurodivergents since we have sensory processing issues

Sorry if too random

Jane Mulberry wrote:I've had similar issues.  I used to use "Failbook" a lot for my book marketing  and ran a joint reader group there because that's where a lot of my readers are.  But there were so many problems! Lots of dreck I don't want to see in my newsfeed. Irrational decisions on suspicious behaviour made by bots that don't seem possible to contest or reverse, even posts being censored.  I don't want to be supporting all that's wrong with what they're doing there. I passed the big reader group on to my author friend, don't advertise, and go on once a week for a very short time to reply to comments on my page.

A big thank you to all the hard work the moderators here give us to make Permies a safe and reasonable place to visit!

Another huge issue I've noticed where life diverges negatively with social media is that ounce for ounce, the negative interactions are just soooo much higher than in real life. From the absurd usability to ads covering 30-40% of your display to the relentless censorship of a typed opinion to the authoritarian narrowness and stupidity of people you dont know..: in real life there is what? A library overcharge on a stained book? Bad memories from childhood? Nothing present, nothing physical specifically judging *me* like with social media sites....people honking at me or drivers who cant drive around cyclists, maybe? I have a wonderful husband, cat, lovely city, white sand beaches, friends who I do things with, amazing food (when i can afford it) moving from one place to another people are just welcoming and happy. But I open my laptop and god forbid I click on search result to facebook or instagram..mine was hacked btw..and it's just Pain!Pain!Pain! Lol. Notifications, fear, weird posts. I cant shut out the visuals either like I said, maybe just me. Well at least culinary social media has been nice to me thus far...

But yeah I know I can't be the only one to feel assailed by constant negative feedback on social media but treated well in real life?

A nice person sent this via email:

To Mr Paul Wheaton,
    I present my gratitude in writing for you forum permies.com. You have created a community promoting forum based upon the natural foundation of food and farming. This is the foundation of all societies. For without a surplus of food there is no society nor free time to write online for example.
   I recognize you forum rules and realize this is your site. While others may complain about how you order your site they are at liberty to create their own. And if they have a difference of opinion they can tactfully present to the master of ceremonies and adjustment in approach. The entitlement mentality of Americans is rude. They complain about what they don’t get while contributing nothing to the equation to create something, a forum, in order to complain about.
   I too have goals and ideals a religion and some personal values. I can create my own forum to voice the sensitive ones that are incompatible with your vision for your site. But for what I can have common ground I thank you for allowing me to be a guest and interact with the other people you created a safe place to meet.
   I am most interested in homesteading. And it is special to see an American site that cares about peace and civility and food surplus and productivity.
    I wish you a good day and thank you for your contribution in creating this site.