A while ago I started loosing hope in the internet, even before ai it was mostly bots, and copy and paste articles. Everything is exponentially getting more and more malicious, with algorithms made to suck you in with obviously no care for the human user, just make stock go up, and make comically evil board members happy.

Not enough people are talking about what lemmy and bluesky have done, I'm not that tech savvy but from what I've understand their decentralized nature makes people always in control as opposed to one company.

Going on these sites brings me back to the earlier days of the internet, where it felt like interacting with real people, posting to an actual community, rather than being in one of those dystopian movies with slurm drinks and infinite amount of trash being pumped out by bots, to get as many views for monetization/outreach which is what pretty much all major social medias feel today.

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[–] Spzi@lemm.ee 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

Offering a slight damper / correction:

This is about two things (design and ownership), which are correlated, but not identical.

Malicious design can be things like:

Algorithms to keep people engaged
UIs to confuse users (luring them to purchases, or making 'cancel' hard to access)
Using intermediate currencies to make it harder to assert value
...

Obviously, these patterns and practices can also be applied to a FOSS instance you own. There is less incentive to do so if the profit motive is removed - which makes a huge difference.

These design patterns are fundamentally about making user numbers go up. Attract more users, keep them on your platform longer, make them leave less. And a portion of user guidance mixed in. None of that is inherently evil, to some degree even desireable, and to some extent unavoidable to offer a functional service.

Some users may expect a feed like lemmy to browse indefinitely, since they find it inconvenient to have to click to go to the 'next page'. And because they got used to this feature elsewhere. Others already see this as a dark pattern.

I just wanted to highlight how some of the malicious stuff may still be present in the fediverse, without any company involved. Here, we're kind of in charge on both sides: Each is responsible for their own user agency (like controlling your online hours, or what sites you visit), and collectively to decide what user experience we want to shape (which might include controverse patterns).

I spent way too many words on this. Mostly I agree with you! And overall, users will encounter far less malicious patterns on FOSS.

[Edit: Formatting]