After finding myself another time completely sucked by all the internet bullshit, finding a huge difficulty doing whichever task involves using a computer, I think I am finally sure to address the need of better moderation on the internet.

Not for platforms, but for people.

So many people have these kind of problem with the internet: there is too much dispersion, it is hard to use it while staying focused on a single task and it’s hard not getting hooked by one of the countless activities you can find online. Weren’t PC conceived to be “bycicles for the brains”? The internet was supposed to be a place where to share things to each other. It’s a tool, but a tool needs to be at the service of who’s using it, and so many people nowadays have no fucking idea of what they are doing. And even between tech savvy people (I include myself here too), how many of us do you think could decide to stop using all the bad side (because we know it’s bad, I mean we’re on Lemmy) of the internet just with will force?

People should have the right to use the internet it as they please, but as we have so many tools for finding and consuming mindlessly everything on the web, and as they are pushed towards us so strongly, I think it’s right to give more options to “opt out” as well, for one that desires so.

I think we lack tools for moderation, for making a clear distinction between “I wanna consume this kind of content” and “I wanna stay the hell away from all this bullshit”.

It’s cool there are alternatives: Lemmy it’s really safer as a space compared to the hell that’s Reddit now, but I think we should go deeper than that and decide to opt out better from what we don’t like as well, and while the focus should still be “build a better internet/software/hardware”, I think we need to address the problem of the difficulties on taking distances from certain aspects of the currently unavoidable and somewhat desperate situation of the web.

Linux has a clear solution for managing one’s activity on a computer: users, groups and ownership. The admin has the complete freedom to shape the environment for the users. And it’s very effective, once a directory belongs to another user, you cannot read it without the other user consent (or the admin). There’s not so much space for bypassing this, and it’s effective.

But what do we have for the web?

We can use browser extensions, proxies, DNS filtering, VPNs, blacklists etc etc… But bypass methods for all this kind of filtering is one web search away. At least most of that.

I’ve come to a point that I am thinking only strict whitelisting with only the few sites you want could be good, blocking every other connection. But it still looks incredibly hard with so many sites using CDNs now, and so many new domains registered.

We should be able to have something like users on accessing web content too: Jane is allowed to visit streaming sites, Bob wanna focus on studying and can only visit cultural content. But I think categorization and moderation of an ever changing content, which is not as “static” as on an OS, needs ever changing moderating tools as well.

I think AI could have an amazing role in this, they can scrape content before we visit it and understand if it is suitable for our purpose. And since content always changes, ai will be always changing as well. I am also thinking that setting something like an “AI in the middle” in between https requests could have it’s role, even if privacy concerns would need to be addressed. I like the concept of something like openai’s omni-moderation API for example.

Projects like TOR focus on breaking censorship and that is amazing, but I don’t see why a user shouldn’t be able to censor some content reliably by himself if he wants to (on a client level).

I don’t know, but I feel like a better control on how we use the web would be needed, if someone wanna have a talk/brainstorm I can make a Matrix room.