The problem:
The web has obviously reached a high level of #enshitification. Paywalls, exclusive walled gardens, #Cloudflare, popups, CAPTCHAs, tor-blockades, dark patterns (esp. w/cookies), javascript that makes the website an app (not a doc), etc.
Status quo solution (failure):
#Lemmy & the #threadiverse were designed to inherently trust humans to only post links to non-shit websites, and to only upvote content that has no links or links to non-shit venues.
It’s not working. The social approach is a systemic failure.
The fix:
-
stage 1 (metrics collection): There needs to be shitification metrics for every link. Readers should be able to click a “this link is shit” button on a per-link basis & there should be tick boxes to indicate the particular variety of shit that it is.
-
stage 2 (metrics usage): If many links with the same hostname show a pattern of matching enshitification factors, the Lemmy server should automatically tag all those links with a warning of some kind (e.g. ⚠, 💩, 🌩).
-
stage 3 (inclusive alternative): A replacement link to a mirror is offered. E.g. youtube → (non-CF’d invidious instance), cloudflare → archive.org, medium.com → (random scribe.rip instance), etc.
-
stage 4 (onsite archive): good samaritans and over-achievers should have the option to provide the full text for a given link so others can read the article without even fighting the site.
-
stage 5 (search reranking): whenever a human post a link and talks about it, search crawlers notice and give that site a high ranking. This is why search results have gotten lousy – because the social approach has failed. Humans will post bad links. So links with a high enshitification score need to be obfuscated in some way (e.g. dots become asterisks) so search crawlers don’t overrate them going forward.
This needs to be recognized as a #LemmyBug.
That’s much more difficult to implement a social solution for and not even entirely solvable. If Bob wants decentralized GAFAM-free links & Alice has your preference of direct Youtube links into the exclusive walled garden, then the social solution is hundreds of thousands of authors manually posting both kinds of links. Who is going to create that level of awareness? What’s the remedy when awareness fails (because it will)? Which link gets the privilege of the URL field? There is only one URL field; should it be the exclusive link or the inclusive one?
Only tech solutions have a chance at solving that problem.
What’s a “source of truth link”?
I don’t consider it a problem, social platforms should enable people to be social. So it succeeds as long as it shares whatever the poster wants to share.
Source of Truth is the canonical thing… i.e. a link to the youtube view and not a link to piped proxy of the youtube video.
If the same video, exactly the same, was also hosted in peer tube, or rumble, odyssee, those would be good options for bots to “link also here” as a comment.
Not a problem that people are marginalized and excluded? If you don’t recognize the problem then you’re not going to be useful in solving the problem either.
Of course. The question is, all people, or some people?
So IIUC your answer is “some people” and exclusivity is fine. And it’s fine if the excluded group sees titles and abstracts of content they are blocked from… and fine if we click a link and get hit with captchas and popups and other garbage. Correct? If web enshitification is okay, then no problem to solve… is that your position?
“Source of Truth” sounds like some kind of religious biased spin. I wouldn’t throw that term around too much. Invidious is not a proxy. It’s a client. A connection is still made to Youtube for the exact same video stream you get if you point the browser to Youtube. The only difference is that invidious is more inclusive & gives users a download option, unlike Youtube’s default client.
It’s literally proxying the video from YouTube to the client. Definitional proxy
You should tell the #Invidious developers that because they think they created a front-end, not a proxy. If you go into their IRC channel they will fight you on your claim but perhaps you can present some evidence and get them to put something on their project pages about being a proxy.