K‮ly‬e @khird@qoto.org

@freemo Thanks for checking! I just tried to follow someone and it switched to "cancel request" - maybe in future they'll approve it, but I'm not particularly optimistic. Is it possible to refuse interaction with users who don't have a high enough follower count? That might explain why it works for you but not me.

@freemo What did social.libre.fi impose on QOTO, a silence or a block? If I reply to someone on that instance, click over to their local web interface and view the post, my reply doesn't show up. Similarly any follow attempt I've made there has shown "requested" and never seen any further action.

@QOTO I'd appreciate a visual indication (e.g. turn interface elements red) if I'm looking at a user who's on an instance that suspends QOTO or blocks it personally. If this condition can be detected in advance, it would save me the bother of trying to interact with them.

About two days ago, @freemo made a well-considered proposal to create a collective among Fediverse instances, for the purpose of enforcing respect for one another's freedom of speech. It doesn't quite line up with my idea of free speech, however, and I decided to publish my thoughts on the matter to solicit feedback. Just as "your right to swing your arm leaves off where my right not to have my nose struck begins," so too one person's right to speak leaves off where another's right not to repeat his words begins.

When you access a webpage, your browser sends a request to the server on which that website is hosted. In the simplest case, this request is essentially a formalised way of saying, "Hey, [server], please send me [page]." If things go according to plan, the server responds with the named page. You can set this up yourself: type up some text, share it using a tool like SimpleHTTPServer, and load it in a browser.

But you don't, strictly speaking, *need* to run a server to send the content in response to client requests. You could, for instance, run netcat listening on an appropriate port, and manually type in whatever you wanted as the content of the webpage. Of course, this would get very tedious if you had to type it in more than once or twice, but it does cause the browser to display the content.

It should be evident that typing the response directly back to the listener is an instance of speech, the same way it is to answer a question on the telephone or by a printed letter. In this case, it's very clear who the speaker is - if the reply is based on information obtained from a third party, or even if it's a direct quote of a third party, the role of speaker still remains with the person actually making the reply by typing it up, by speaking it into the handset, or by putting pen to paper.

Note that the freedom of speech allows one person to decline to quote another as well. If Alice asks Bob, "What did Carol say about me?" that freedom allows him to say, "It doesn't bear repeating," or even lie and say, "Nothing at all." It is not a violation of Carol's freedom of speech for Bob to do so, even if Bob knows full well what Carol said about Alice, even if Carol made her remarks directly to Bob, and even if Carol wanted Bob to pass the remarks on to Alice.

Let's return to the idea of manually typing out your HTTP responses. Suppose, for instance, you have a comment section on the page you want to show the user - why would you be obliged to type out a given comment, simply because the commenter wants you to pass it on to your site's visitor? Clearly, as you're the speaker, your freedom of speech is still in operation as in the above scenario, and it protects your decision to decline to do so.

Consider an old-fashioned printing press, which works by pressing an inked design against a sheet of paper. When that paper is retrieved from the machine, it may have some words on it - but the printing press itself is not the speaker of those words. It is the operator of the press - who carved the design, or constructed it from movable type or some other means - who is responsible for their content. The press itself is merely a tool that enables him to produce many copies of the same words more rapidly than he could by handwriting them repeatedly.

Likewise, a webserver is just a tool that saves the site owner from having to repeatedly type the same response to each HTTP request he gets. This is just a program running on a machine somewhere, which itself doesn't have the degree of autonomy necessary to enjoy freedom of speech. The program's speech cannot be "free" in any meaningful sense, because it is completely controlled by the person with the capability to determine how it works, whether by altering the program itself or by modifying the content files it sends.

This is how federation works among Mastodon and related technology. Each instance is normally responsible for passing along the content produced by others, but silencing, suspending, and banning allow the operator of each website to specify policies under which his machine should not repeat that content. This control makes the operator the speaker to whom freedom of speech applies, even though he neither authored the content nor manually transmitted it to the client. His free speech rights, far from compelling him to never use these tools, are in fact what allows him to exercise his discretion to do so.

Although they use tools to distribute content more efficiently, the human operators remain the speakers, and it is to them that the freedom of speech applies. Machines themselves don't have such a freedom protecting them from our decisions to modify the content they emit, and if others offer comments, it is no infringement of their freedom when we decline to repeat their words.

@QOTO Hacker News already has a bot elsewhere on the fediverse, at @hackernews@die-partei.social - does the local one on QOTO offer anything that one doesn't? That noise is more tolerable in the federated feed than the local one.

I'd condition the larger allocations you're contemplating on the user demonstrating utility, in something like a grant process. Someone who wants extra space says "I want to do X [project], for which I'm requesting Y [amount of space]." Then it's up to you, as the holder of the purse strings, whether to allocate your space in that way. You can be more or less selective as warranted by how much space is requested, how many requests you're getting, and how much space you're willing to endow the service with. If the amount of space requested is excessive, you doubt the applicant's claim as to his intended use of the space, or you simply think it's not a beneficial thing to subsidise, then he will have to look elsewhere.

The user isn't entitled to extra resources by virtue of having a high post count or any other marker of "status". It's your personal gift, and publicly imposing on yourself a set of rules about how you give that gift would encourage people to game those rules, that they might benefit thereby. To the extent that people would otherwise put your gifts to higher use by not participating in this gaming, such rules are probably counterproductive. Following them consistently would make your decisions more transparent, but I doubt they'd prove an effective replacement for simple good judgement.

@QOTO "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." If you tie certain benefits to post count, for example, it creates an incentive for people to toot every half-baked thought that occurs to them in order to inflate their post count. I voted no because I think it is better for community health not to have that sort of thing happen, but to just cap uniformly instead.

@QOTO Keep in mind the inherent sampling bias when you rely on user engagement (responses to this poll) to evaluate attitudes toward engagement as a criterion for benefits.

@freemo I used the DuckDuckGo browser for Android, version 5.32.1, which is the latest available from F-Droid. LaTeX rendering doesn't work at all in standalone client Tusky, but I doubt there's much you can do about that. As far as I'm aware, there are no zoom settings for the browser so by default it's at 100%.

@freemo The horizontal bar on your radical sign seems to have a white border which obscures other symbols near it.

@mikelga No, aeronautics R&D. Both of your pictures were of aircraft, so I knew what to look for.

@mikelga That one's a Sikorsky VH-60N White Hawk operated by the USMC's Marine Helicopter Squadron One.

@mikelga It's a Boeing C-17A Globemaster III operated by the 21st Airlift Squadron of the USAF's 60th Air Mobility Wing.

@sashahamilton Are you sure about the units? 12 mi/gal ≈ 17 km/gal, but 12 gal/mi ≉ 17 gal/km

@morre Do you mean "retcon"? From "retroactive continuity"

@freemo Nice. Not that I'll block either - I'm just in favour of techniques like this that give users more control over what content they want to see. Played a big role in me choosing this instance in the first place.

@denikombucha@playvicious.social In French, the exceptions follow the "BANGS rule": adjectives describing [B]eauty, [A]ge, [N]umber, [G]oodness, or [S]ize precede the noun, while all others follow it. I speak hardly any Spanish but I'd guess that the rules are pretty similar given how closely related these two Romance languages are.

@MutoShack@functional.cafe It's not what I'd expect naïvely, but thinking about it, skipping blank lines is probably more useful. Bring able to pipe a command's output to another's input was pretty important in old-style Unix. Since many programs treat empty lines specially, the default setting is good if you want downstream programs to act correctly.

@TheGnuMaster opposition to the Extradition Law Amendment Bill, which would expand the circumstances under which a person in Hong Kong can be sent to the mainland for trial