I certainly agree that the Internet should be by and for individuals; whether we can in the long term do completely without corporations, I am not sure, but the current “algorithmic curation” is definitely a problem.
I mean I agree with that in principle, but: before the Internet, of course big corporations influenced kids and adults! Before the internet only big corporations had the resources and practical ability to distribute any information to a lot of people.
The promise of the internet was that we would have a society where we could all have a say and the flow of information would be democratized. You are right that, because of “algorithms”, that promise hasn’t really been fulfilled.
No it wouldn’t, but people would only see them if they were part of a preexisting community where such things are posted or they specifically looked for them.
On the Internet, censorship happens by having too much information for our limited time and attention span, so going after recommendation algorithms will work.
OsmAnd (another OSM-based app) allows you to set underlay maps from external sources which will be downloaded from those external sources as needed. I do not know if Organic Maps has this feature too but it can clearly be done.
Looking through the ones I have installed, I think these are useful to most people:
It is supposed to believe that climate change is a … scam?!
You can believe that climate change is not real, but a “scam”, how does that even work?
I am too young to remember that. Of course browsers are now free (at least as in beer, many also as in speech) again and that is a good thing. In my childhood, computers were pretty much synonymous with Windows and the web was mostly unusable without Flash Player and it’s a good thing that that has changed. Still, we don’t live in the utopian society I imagined the Internet would lead to.
2004: The Internet is going to lead us into a utopian future of free communication where we exchange ideas with each other without corporate media being gatekeepers telling us what to read, write and think!
2024: Hi, I’m Meta and everyone gets their information from my platforms and I can decide what ideas to allow there. What do you mean we weren’t supposed to have that anymore by now, whoever told you that kind of nonsense.
I think the line is easy to draw: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moderation-is-different-from-censorship
I oppose most censorship, but I do not oppose moderation. If you don’t want to see certain people speaking freely, you shouldn’t have to, but you shouldn’t be allowed to keep them from speaking freely to each other.
Remember when reddit was a free speech platform where pretty much everything legal was ok except doxing?
What went wrong that we can’t have places like that on the Internet anymore?
2004: The Internet is going to lead us into a utopian future of free communication and access to information! No government will ever be able to censor information anymore because they will lack legal reach to censor everything!
2024:
you do realize that people from other instances than beehaw can post here too? :D