volkris @volkris@qoto.org
I think the most pressing and fundamental problem of the day is that people lack a practically effective means of sorting out questions of fact in the larger world. We can hardly begin to discuss ways of addressing reality if we can't agree what reality even is, after all.
The institutions that have served this role in the past have dropped the ball, so the next best solution is talking to each other, particularly to those who disagree, to sort out conflicting claims.
Unfortunately, far too many actively oppose this, leaving all opposing claims untested. It's very regressive.
So that's my hobby, striving to understanding the arguments of all sides at least because it's interesting to see how mythologies are formed but also because maybe through that process we can all have our beliefs tested.
But if nothing else, social media platforms like this are chances to vent frustrations that on so many issues both sides are obviously wrong ;)
Joined Dec 2022
Perhaps that's what you get without defederation :)
But I say that with my eternal emphasis that each user should be empowered to shape their own experience here, as much as practical, even if that includes an experience that some of us might view as cesspoolish.
The big issue I'd see is that the skillset needed to operate a site like Tumblr might not be very front and center in that group of superusers.
From technical through organizational skill, it sounds like a job one can't really do as a side project, and I'd worry that users wold focus on their personal goals for the site without having the abilities to actually implement those goals.
The important thing here is not what some rich guy did or what Thomas did, but rather was a law actually broken, and if not, let's elect the people who are willing to fix the law.
And stop reelecting those who aren't.
We need to not get distracted by the drama and instead reform laws that need reform.
Well there ARE some clever applications of #cryptography that are underappreciated but that might help break some of those dichotomies.
Just for one trivial example, letting a platform have a hashed* version of an address book would allow lookup against the book without them actually having the contact info.
*and salted, but nevermind
I mean yes, if you really want to look at it that way, a government is a grand conspiracy. And a government with a constitutional basis has the details of the conspiracy written right there in public.
Police are prevented from doing something about it? Police are part of the government!
Sure, and if you can't tell, I'm critical of those design choices :)
But it is what it is. Horse is out of the barn. Now we work with what we have.
Right. The Constitution that doesn't mention the DOJ, but *does* mention that "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”
The design of the US government is exceedingly clear about this point because it was considered just so important that there be one person, a president, to be held accountable for the actions of his branch.
Should the DOJ misbehave, it's the president's neck on the line, for very good reason. He faces impeachment should he not keep the DOJ in line.
To disconnect the DOJ from that source of accountability is to set the federal police free from their constitutional limits.
It's a very dangerous proposal.
As far as I recall, qualified immunity requires good faith, and if the guy is issuing fake tickets it'd be hard to see how it would apply to him.
Basically, the software engineering decisions that went into the ActivityPub protocol were really focused on the instance, not the user, being fundamental, for better or worse.
The benefit of the doubt argument might be that they were imagining different instances having different communities, with a sense of home community.
But in the end it does make it like email, where if you had email addresses at gmail and msn, you wouldn't expect the inboxes to synchronize.
There are some people with ideas about how to make what you describe work, but they generally seem to be kind of kludges, trying to make the protocol do something it wasn't really supposed to do.
I really don't see this clip as pumping Bitcoin.
It sounded like a pretty tame description of cryptocurrencies in general, contrasting them with other potential asset classes.
fediverse
Probably yes, depending on exactly the sort of case you're referring to.
If it helps: posts don't live on the origin instance. They are broadcast to other instances, and basically every reply is a brand new post, with a reference to the old post, that also gets broadcast to other instances.
Checking out the standard, though, it leaves it optional ("may") for clients to notify the origin instance that there was a reply.
At least, if I read it right.
It is utterly idiotic and disconnected from reality for anyone to present Ukrainian ascension to NATO as such a done deal.
Not only that, but such rhetoric only lends fuel to the Russian cause, so why promote the idea even if the person is foolish enough to believe it?
The DOJ is an executive branch agency, and "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America."
As an entity of the executive branch, the DOJ has no where it can work EXCEPT for under the president.
It has no legal authority but that granted as it executes the president's direction.
Otherwise you're talking about a policing force that exists outside the rule of law, which, talk about authoritarian and problematic!
The DOJ works on behalf of the president in the US design of government.
The executive doesn't just prosecute people for no reason. He prosecutes to satisfy some incentive that he has, whether political or financial or to assert his own personal preferences on those he goes after.
And this ruling says that the executive can't legally send the police to enforce his policy assertions against you.
It sounds like you don't think something can be authoritarian without a significant profit on display, but I don't think that's a common element of that concept.
To me, it's authoritarian to have someone claiming authority over your life regardless of anything involving profit.
volkris
boosted
In 2020, I published* This is Fine: Optimism & emergency in the p2p network *(https://newdesigncongress.org/en/pub/this-is-fine)* *It laid out a clear argument that the #fediverse is irreparably vulnerable because of its p2p nature and political naivete:
*"Anyone with administrator access to an Instance can read anything that travels through that Instance’s infrastructure – including direct messages. The level of risk correlates with the number of cross-Instance interactions between users. If users from different Instances communicate, an attacker need only compel one Instance to reveal the direct messages between all of the interacting accounts. [...] In a peer-to-peer network without encryption, there’s no structure, no agreed-upon governance, and absolutely no protection. Compromising or compelling an Instance or its staff means that all of network traffic is laid bare to its assailant. [...] The decentralised community seeks to antagonise a powerful status quo whilst making tradeoffs that do not acknowledge how societies directly threaten their communities."*
Today, Kolektiva - a anti-colonial anarchist instance - announced an FBI raid of one of their admins, which included the seizure of an entire copy of the Kolektiva instance.
This is *literally* the kind of situation I warned about nearly three years ago.
If you're interested, there have been a couple of discussions about doing this in feature requests.
For example:
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/21461
@lauren
Check out this discussion of the preview DDoS issue *from 2017*.
#Mastodon devs know it's an issue. They just don't really care too much.
You also get the gem of, "I can totally see this being a problem, but I also don't see a solution to it, because people want previews."
Once again the lead dev projects his personal preferences on all users.
Here's an example of a server operator worrying about EU compliance, just a post I saw today.
Yes, a lot of Mastodon servers are going to be in trouble :)
Well, I'm half joking.
In seriousness, I'm happy to admit that I don't know the details of the US regs, and if anyone does know the details I'm interested in learning.
BUT, from what I've seen, the EU regs are pretty broadly applicable, and there's no reason to think those Mastodon servers will be exempt, so yes, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if those Mastodon servers ARE going to be in trouble.
If the EU decides to enforce the regs against them, that is.
I also do see Mastodon server operators posting to this platform that they expect to be in trouble, so there's that.
I haven't really used CSS in maybe decades, so I wonder if you have an opinion on its development since then, or if that's just overshadowed by core problems.
For example, I remember CSS as seeming logical but with some glaring holes that needed filling, feeling incomplete.
I wonder if you feel that that was the case decades ago, and they either didn't fill those holes since then, or maybe they broke the logic through missteps, leaving it a mess now, or something else entirely.
I think the most pressing and fundamental problem of the day is that people lack a practically effective means of sorting out questions of fact in the larger world. We can hardly begin to discuss ways of addressing reality if we can't agree what reality even is, after all.
The institutions that have served this role in the past have dropped the ball, so the next best solution is talking to each other, particularly to those who disagree, to sort out conflicting claims.
Unfortunately, far too many actively oppose this, leaving all opposing claims untested. It's very regressive.
So that's my hobby, striving to understanding the arguments of all sides at least because it's interesting to see how mythologies are formed but also because maybe through that process we can all have our beliefs tested.
But if nothing else, social media platforms like this are chances to vent frustrations that on so many issues both sides are obviously wrong ;)
Joined Dec 2022
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