Advertising predates tracking by millennia. We can have online advertising without tracking, and certainly without this orgy of sharing data between 4353 partners. But market alone won’t get us there, because whoever offers advertising without tracking and selling data will be at a huge disadvantage compared to the crooks who sell. Only regulatory action can help. So this small step should be celebrated.

Then what are you talking about? I didn’t downvote your post, but probably like people who did, I have trouble understanding your point. Everyone online - privileged and underprivileged alike - is under omnipresent surveillance of countless actors. Until very recently this was completely unregulated. Information about our behavior, interests, opinions, relations, health, anxieties and dumb shit we post in moments of confusion, is gathered, sold, recombined and resold. The rich and powerful are doing it in hope of gaining ability to predict and change our behavior - i.e. gain more power over us. So just because you are more privileged then some, you should not care? Or not appreciate that something good, even if small and insufficient, happened about this awful situation?

It’s not about advertising. It’s about spying on our online lives. Not the same thing.

Sure. It’s in our nature to surround ourselves with like-minded people. Back in the old days, people would subscribe to a newspaper, watch TV and listen to radio stations, or go to pubs with folks they felt comfortable with, and that would often lead to gruopthink. There is only so much we can do about it with different platforms. The rest is up to us, individually and collectively. Being polite, open minded, thoughtful and critical takes effort. But it’s also in our nature.

What you wrote is probably true, but it’s not the end of the story. Ownership model of corporate social media creates incentives to polarize and divide people. It drives engagement and creates moats. Also, billionaire owners of those media have their own political goals, and are happy to use the platforms they own to advance them.

Fuck incels! Not literally, of course.

Why not? It would cure them 😉

Don’t listen to the person. Listen to the argument.

Technically? Not very much, but I’m handy with NixOS. The hardest part was the configuration of a mail server. I should probably blog about the setup process. But of course the real work is attracting people and keeping them engaged.

Recently I’ve created a private forum and so far I’m very happy with it. It’s nice that our discussions are private, keeping data gobblers, programmatic advertisers, grifters and other schmucks like this out in the cold.

https://tad-lispy.com/club/

To be clear, I’m advertising the idea, not membership.

Is this coming from Wired magazine, aka the press organ of silicon valley? Big wows.

If we are talking about American adults, I guess they might be right.

Thank you very much! Now I’m tempted to pretend that I made those errors on purpose to find out who has the initiative and attention to detail required to correct me 🤣 But seriously, well done! That’s the spirit. I’ll send you a link to schedule the call in a PM.

Nothing to be sorry about! I love your proposal. Also I don’t know yet who the public will be.

Looks cute! Let me upload it for you so others can also chime in.

Personally I like it a lot, but it might be a bit too cute. We might have to do business with “serious corporate types”, so we might need to project a bit of seriousness too. But I’m open to hear from others.

I would love it!

I appreciate your input. As a side note, I don’t think Russia (nor USSR) was ever socialist, but let’s not get into politics here 😉

I’m super happy with all your responses. Across different fedi channels I got 25 positive answers and even more expressions of support. That’s more than I expected ❤️‍🔥 In a separate post I wrote a roadmap and will appreciate your constructive feedback. There’s also a logo I quickly doodled and I plan to use as a visual identifications for our project until someone with real talent provides something better.

I don’t see much reason why we shouldn’t operate in Canada too. One day it might be Europe anyway 🙂 We will have to discuss it when I gather some people. But if you want to try working with us and have some spare capacity, you are welcome to join.

Feelings are never wrong and I’m happy to read your feedback. The co-op is meant to be workers controlled and owned, so I think socialist connotation is not off. One of the early versions was like this:

I think it looks less professional but that might be subjective. Also, I’m not a real artist, so maybe someone can come up with a better thing. The big issue though is that it doesn’t scale well. We need a logo that can be used as e.g. a browser favicon without much modifications. With the current version it’s easy if we just remove the letters and center the shapes. Like this:

I just exported it from Inkscape with low DPI, so it looks a bit blurry. Probably the sharpness could be improved, but I don’t want to invest more effort before I get some feedback on the general design. The point is, that this simple design can be presented as a tiny icon and still be recognized.

I don’t know. There’s a lot of brands that use a five pointed star. Have you seen the Heineken logo? Also many political entities, notably the European Union.