Post by @strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz

Strypey

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz · 2 hours ago

There's an interesting pattern here that I thought was worth describing.

1) Someone posted a video of a band playing a song critical of generative models

2) I saw it, liked it, decided to Boost it, then wondered if maybe it was burped up by a Trained #MOLE.

3) So I did a web search and found an article about the band by the local public broadcaster

4) This gave me confidence to promote the post, and the band, so I shared a link to the article;

https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@strypey/116643604406268286

(1/?)

#mole

Strypey

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz · 2 hours ago

There are 2 institutions that allowed me to do this; the public broadcaster itself, and the web search tool that allowed me to find it, and to find a relevant article on their website. Without knowing that either existed before I started my search.

In the late 1990s I got involved with independent media with an assumption that only the second of those really mattered. That public broadcasters were creatures of the state, no better than corporate media at reporting the truth. I was wrong.

(2/?)

Strypey

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz · 2 hours ago

As demonstrated by the current war on public broadcasters by corporatist governments around the world - including here in Aotearoa - they are *not* in service to the powers that be. They do have institutional biases (like the anti-Palestinian bias of the BBC), which we need to identify, criticise and ideally fix. But their very existence serves as an increasingly important way of confirming reality at a distance.

(3/?)

EDIT: typos

Strypey

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz · 2 hours ago

However, public broadcasters are only helpful if we can find their work when we need it. Which is where the need for public service online search tools comes in. Web search in particular, because thanks to the digital convergence indymediatistas anticipated in the late 1990s, everything online is represented somewhere on the web.

For now, we only have the web search equivalent of corporate media, and many of those are enshittifying rapidly. This is a problem we urgently need to solve.

(4/?)

Strypey

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz · 2 hours ago

The closest things we have to the web search equivalent of a public broadcaster are Wikipedia and Archive.org. These institutions offer a model for how a public interest web search engine might be created and maintained. Lots of people are building bespoke search engines for the small web;

https://the.socialmusic.network/t/marginalia-search-engine/167/2

These are important experimental steps in the right direction. How can we support and build on these efforts?

(5/5)

The Social Music Network

Marginalia search engine

A new search engine to check out, awesome! There are a few human-curated search tools like this, focused on the human-scale web; Curlie SearchMySite RawWeb Ooh Directory PoweRSS indieblog.page Scour I can imagine a future where every community operates one of these. For example by dumping any links shared using their fediverse service/ web forum into a moderation queue, to be added to a search index. Then federated search being built by Web of Trust relationships between ...

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