[HN Gopher] Protocols, not platforms
___________________________________________________________________
Protocols, not platforms
Author : allenbrunson
Score : 83 points
Date : 2022-12-21 12:16 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (allenbrunson.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (allenbrunson.com)
| distcs wrote:
| > Its decentralized nature makes some things a lot more difficult
| to pull off than its competitors.
|
| Help me understand one thing about Mastodon. We choose a Mastodon
| server to create account. What is decentralized about it? Doesn't
| choosing a server make it effectively centralized? I choose
| mastodon.social. What is there to stop mastodon.social from a
| change of ownership that makes it fall in the hands of people who
| take user-hostile decisions?
|
| I know we can create a new account on a new Mastodon server and
| move all the followers but that's about it. We can only move the
| followers. We cannot move our post history. So when I choose
| mastodon.social or any Mastodon server, am I not putting all my
| eggs in one basket again?
| allenbrunson wrote:
| my mastodon account is less than 48 hours old, so i am not the
| best person to answer this. i will say this much, though:
| anything i write that i feel has value will always go onto a
| site that i control. currently, that's my blog with my name on
| it. if i'm forced to move to a new mastodon instance, i won't
| lose much.
| loudmax wrote:
| You should consider linking to your Mastodon profile in your
| blog. I didn't see it in that post, or in your "About" page.
| allenbrunson wrote:
| my mastodon link is on the front page of my site. i decided
| not to put it in the article because i want to emphasize
| the phenomenon rather than my own small place in it. and
| who knows, maybe i'll move soon, just to demonstrate for
| myself that it is possible.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| > Doesn't it make it effectively centralized?
|
| The word you are looking for is _federated_. Different Mastodon
| servers comprise a so-called federation, so servers belonging
| to it can exchange data between each other. There are many
| federated protocols, for example, email and xmpp are federated.
| Some server owners choose to not be part of federation, or
| refuse to connect to some specific servers in a federation.
| That 's what happened to Gab a few years ago.
| distcs wrote:
| The word _federated_ makes total sense. Thanks! The word
| _decentralized_ was written by the author of the OP, not by
| me and that 's why I needed to ask the folks here if Mastodon
| is really decentralized. Your comment clarifies it for me. So
| thank you!
| taurusnoises wrote:
| Maybe a little sticky, but decentralization doesn't
| discount that there are nodes, or points where things
| gather. In fact, decentralization, as I've always
| understood it (coming from anarchism background), is that
| there is no _central_ node to which all others are
| beholden. Rather, there are centers (plural). So....
|
| At the level of instances (plural), no one is central. The
| network is decentralized, containing multiple centers, all
| (most) of which are connected through federation (the word
| "affiliation" is not too far off either). And, while yes,
| any one instance _could_ be considered a "center" and thus
| maybe considered to be centralized, it really isn't.
| Decentralization is less about a single specific object or
| node, and more about how said objects interact and relate.
|
| Side note: I think when it comes to convos around
| decentralized networks, there really needs to be more
| investment in how they differ from distributed networks. In
| that difference is a ton of insight about how systems
| function, etc, imo. Personally, I'm much more interested in
| distributed networks.
| r721 wrote:
| I like how Jay Graber (who is now CEO at Bluesky)
| formulated it in old blog post:
|
| >Calling a network "decentralized" only defines it by what
| it is not -- it is not dependent on a single set of servers
| run by one company. What it actually is can look like many
| different things. Federated and peer-to-peer (p2p)
| protocols are different approaches to designing networks
| that structurally empower users.
|
| https://medium.com/decentralized-web/decentralized-social-
| ne...
| dekken_ wrote:
| Mastodon is part of the Fediverse.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse
| loudmax wrote:
| You created your account with mastodon.social. My mastodon
| account is with techhub.social. So your eggs are in that
| basket, but my eggs are in a different basket and others' eggs
| are in yet more baskets. You can argue that all of your own
| eggs are in one basket, but not _everybody 's_ eggs are in that
| one basket.
|
| Some narcissistic infantile billionaire could buy out
| mastodon.social and burn it to the ground, but the rest of the
| Mastodon network moves on. You'd have to relocate, which is a
| pain, but you're not relocating at the same time the rest of
| the world is relocating. Decentralization is resilient, not
| bulletproof.
| serverholic wrote:
| Yes. Also whoever runs the server can read your DMs.
|
| This is also true of big social networks however those
| companies usually have access controls that prevent employees
| from accessing private data. Some random mastodon server isn't
| going to have that.
| bin_bash wrote:
| I don't understand why you're being downvoted. I'm not
| familiar with Mastodon's architecture but I highly doubt DMs
| have E2E encryption--so the server maintainers must be able
| to get to DMs.
|
| Correct me if @serverholic is wrong here.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| We maintain a free messaging server for many years and
| believe me, there are far more important and interesting
| things to do for a server operator than looking at some
| random user DMs. It is simply _not interesting_.
| bin_bash wrote:
| yikes. OK, then I'm definitely never using Mastodon. At
| least at Twitter and Facebook the employees have a strong
| incentive to not breach my privacy expectations other
| than me not being "interesting".
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| That was precisely the same with every single forum or
| email server since the beginning of time. And you know
| what, the capability to log in from anywhere and read
| your messages trumps privacy concernts for 99% of users.
| For the rest there are ways to exchange information
| without risk of it being accessed by third party.
| serverholic wrote:
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| > instead of YES WE SHOULD IMPROVE THAT.
|
| No, most likely we shouldn't improve on that. If you
| force an end-to-end encryption on all users, you'll
| introduce an extreme inconvenience for users so they'll
| have to do things like identity verification of their
| messaging partners, do fingerprint matching, and also
| lose the capability to easily sync messaging history
| between different devices. Or you could skip on major
| inconveniences like identity verification, turning your
| encryption into a security theater [0].
|
| 99,9% of users want convenience and a warm fuzzy feeling
| of being secure, they don't want to exchange keys and do
| other nasty stuff that real e2ee requires of the. This
| was proven in force by Durov, who just promised that his
| app is the most secure ever, while, in fact, all regular
| messages in Telegram are unencrypted (except so-called
| secret chats), and I'm yet to receive a secret chat
| request in telegram from anyone.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_theater
| distcs wrote:
| So the answer is yes, the server operators can look at
| our random DMs. You may not be interested in looking at
| them but some other server operator might. So it is a
| good thing to know this beforehand to know what we are
| getting into.
| adwn wrote:
| Not sure if you're serious, or if this is some attempt at
| satire?
|
| If it's the former: Okay, it's great that you don't feel
| the temptation to spy on your users, but even the most
| basic understanding of human nature should tell you that
| this doesn't generalize to all (or even most) people and
| organizations that would run a messaging server, free or
| not.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| I'm serious and I also know many operators of public
| servers. Unless you are somebody important/person of
| interest for various three letter agencies, no one cares
| for your messages. If you are such person, just run your
| own server and use e2ee. Other than that, enjoy the
| convenience and easy message syncing and server side
| search the unencrypted messaging brings.
| fsflover wrote:
| I downvoted the parent, because they are missing the point
| of a public social network. It was never the goal of
| Mastodon to provide a place for private communication. Use
| Matrix for that.
|
| Mastodon is for speaking publicly.
| serverholic wrote:
| A direct message is implied to have a certain level of
| privacy. By definition they are not public.
|
| Mastodon should at least have some way of indicating that
| the server owners can read their messages.
| 0x20cowboy wrote:
| DMs do not have e2e encryption. Don't use it for non-public
| things.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > We cannot move our post history.
|
| At the moment. There's good reasons why not[1] but those can be
| worked around if people come to consensus[2].
|
| [1] Because it's a push system, you'd have to re-push all those
| posts from the new account and that's not even necessarily the
| same set of people they were pushed to in the first place, etc.
|
| [2] e.g the re-pushing can be obviated by having servers
| rewrite their local copies of statuses to the new account ID on
| receipt of an "A is now B" message. Obviously you'd need to
| make this unspoofable, etc., but the theory seems sound.
| agluszak wrote:
| > Right about the time a product achieves a near-monopoly, some
| genius product manager decides it is time to tighten the screws.
| Make search just a little bit worse, so the company can make more
| from ads. Make the user's experience just a little bit worse, to
| increase engagement, and make more money from ads.
|
| That's exactly why capitalism must be regulated.
| allenbrunson wrote:
| you know what they say: capitalism is the worst form of
| government, except for all the other ones. i am at a loss as to
| what would work, here.
|
| (edit: whoops, democracy, not capitalism)
| agluszak wrote:
| Nitpick: they say it about democracy. Capitalism is
| (hopefully) not a form of government (yet).
|
| I'm not saying that we need a completely different system. We
| need more regulation. Stronger FTC in the US, more anti-
| monopolistic policies everywhere. Prevent big corporations
| from locking in their customers/users and creating walled
| gardens. Use open technologies in state administration[1].
| Release publicly-funded code as open-source[2]
|
| Basically implement everything Electronic Frontier
| Foundation[3] and Free Software Foundation Europe[4] have
| been advocating for since forever.
|
| That would be a radical change, yes, but not a revolution and
| cOmMuNiSm.
|
| [1] https://element.io/blog/bundesmessenger-is-a-milestone-
| in-ge... [2] https://publiccode.eu/ [3] https://www.eff.org/
| [4] https://fsfe.org/
| allenbrunson wrote:
| right, democracy instead of capitalism, i should have
| looked it up. and yes, i would support all of that. the big
| roadblock, it seems to me, is that our government in the
| usa is now so dysfunctional as to make that stuff all but
| impossible. not sure how we get out of that quagmire.
| ambientenv wrote:
| "as to what would work" ... that's because we, the collective
| we, have not spent any sincere time and effort to find other
| ways. Capitalism in it's various incarnations and disguises
| has worked extremely well for just the right amount of
| people. Those days are coming to an end, and unlike, say, the
| laws of physics, we can adopt new beliefs, values and ways of
| doing things that benefit the collective we. Finance is
| basically made up as we go as it is.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > why capitalism must be regulated
|
| It is regulated, pretty heavily, and we still get
| shrinkflation. I'm not even sure what sort of regulation you
| could propose that would protect against that - you don't
| seriously believe that this doesn't happen in communist
| economies as well, do you?
| notwokeno wrote:
| IMO capitalism isn't the problem, non-free software is.
|
| We actually had chat interoperability between all the major
| social networks/email providers via XMPP and that ended about
| when the iPhone came out.
| lucideer wrote:
| > _We actually had chat interoperability between all the
| major social networks_
|
| No we didn't - XMPP is a federated protocol & none of the
| major networks ever supported federation. The XMPP protocol
| came with a lot of decently implemented open source packages
| that helped those companies get their chat systems off the
| ground & to a point where they could lock them in. Supporting
| federation from the beginning would've made that lock in much
| more difficult, so it wasn't in their interest. i.e. a
| capitalist disincentive.
|
| Capitalism is the problem, you're just doing your best to
| find excuses for it elsewhere.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| > XMPP is a federated protocol & none of the major networks
| ever supported federation.
|
| Google Talk did. It was the only one, though, so GP's
| assertion that multiple major networks did is indeed
| incorrect.
|
| But we came closer to federation between big players than
| you're implying. One more would have done it.
| cmdrk wrote:
| It can be a little bit of both.
|
| For what it's worth, for a time Google Chat federated other
| XMPP services and it worked just fine. They eventually shut
| that down for $GOOGLE_REASONS.
|
| Companies aggressively going after open source 3rd party
| clients caused interoperability to suffer greatly.
| Mandating open standards can help mitigate the most user-
| unfriendly parts, which often turns out to be the "business
| model".
| allenbrunson wrote:
| (i stole the title from mike masnick. if he's upset about that, i
| would be happy to credit him, or change it.)
| carapace wrote:
| > If you are unfamiliar with Mastodon, you will no doubt wonder
| what the big deal is. How is this one going to be any different
| than its slimy competitors?
|
| I think it's important to remind people that Mastodon isn't a
| "competitor" to proprietary social media, it's an _alternative_.
|
| No one cares whether you use Mastodon or not-- I mean people do
| care, they like you and want to interact with you, that's not
| what I'm getting at. I mean that no one is getting paid or not if
| you do or don't use Mastodon. In other words, there's no stock
| ticker for it, there's no investors, no executives, no marketing
| dept., etc. It's just folks talking to each other, on their own
| terms, over the Internet.
|
| It's a totally different thing than Twitter. They only
| superficially resemble each other in some of the UI.
| luuuzeta wrote:
| >I can't say that Twitter was exactly an exception to this rule,
| for me. I never liked it enough to contribute my own content to
| it. I do like its userbase enough to have spent many hours
| reading it, over the last couple of years. That all came to a
| screeching halt in the last month or so, when it was acquired by
| a tyrant.
|
| Oh my hyperbole, what would we do without you?!
|
| >Then came the exodus from Twitter, due to the tyrannical new
| owner. Many of the voices that I have come to appreciate the most
| are leaving. In particular, the ones with the highest morals were
| the first to jump ship. As well they should! If you stay on
| Twitter, the way it is now, and continue to contribute your
| content to it, then you are saying that you approve of the
| tyrant-in-chief banning reporters for writing about things that
| make him look bad.
|
| Oh my hyperbole! It's interesting to see the dichotomy between
| people who think Twitter was a safe haven and people who think it
| was a hellhole.
|
| And you can both support that Elon Musk shouldn't have been so
| trigger happy banning reporters without a clear policy in place
| AND that doxxing should earn you an instantaneous and permanent
| ban.
| allenbrunson wrote:
| hey, here's an opportunity to respond to a thing i've seen
| going around a lot.
|
| in one respect, elon musk and i agree: the twitter bots that
| follow airplanes around are egregious and in poor taste. i
| would be fine with twitter having a policy saying that they are
| off-limits.
|
| ... but that's not at all what he did. his approach was
| erratic, scatter-shot, and full of post-hoc rationalizations.
| it's that sort of gaslighting and lying that is the real
| problem, not being against plane-tracking bots.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > when it was acquired by a tyrant
|
| Especially grating when you consider the previous owners were
| far more tyrannical for a much longer period of time.
| luuuzeta wrote:
| Exactly! I stopped reading when I reached that paragraph. I
| cannot take anyone pedestalizing journalists and leftists in
| general as "the ones with the highest morals" seriously,
| despite all what was going on with Twitter. After all it's
| not like it cannot be disproven quite easily.
|
| - Opaque moderation (at least more opaque than the current
| one)
|
| - Banning and shadowbanning users despite admitting the
| administration admitting they didn't violate company's ToS
|
| - Soft banning users regularly so they could build a case to
| outright ban them once and for all
|
| - Collusion with some three-letters agencies (see Twitter
| Files) to censor speech, bury newsworthy stories, etc
|
| - Journalists were treated as a separate class above regular
| users.
| riffic wrote:
| Eugen Rochko is doing an "ask me anything" now in the Mastodon
| subreddit if anyone is curious.
|
| https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109546596477513691
| allenbrunson wrote:
| yep. good stuff! this is all new to me. eugen seems like a good
| steward of his platform.
| TheMagicHorsey wrote:
| People should also check out Bluesky and Nostr. Both are open
| protocols for social media.
| allenbrunson wrote:
| agreed. if either one takes off and leaves mastodon in the
| dust, i am happy to support the winner, whatever that turns out
| to be.
| sposeray wrote:
| distcs wrote:
| > Yes, Mastodon is more difficult to use than whatever social
| media platforms you are on now.
|
| What about Mastodon is more difficult to use? Isn't it just
| choosing a server, typing its URL, signing up for a new account
| and then you are ready to post?
|
| The UX does not look any more difficult than Twitter either. Both
| support search, hashtags, following people, creating lists,
| retweets (called boost in Mastodon), commenting. The UX looks and
| behaves similarly too. So why do people say that Mastodon is more
| difficult to use?
| allenbrunson wrote:
| argh, if only it were that easy. if you try to follow someone
| who is not on your instance, there is a whole rigamarole you
| have to go through. likewise, if you try to interact with a
| post, but you're viewing it on somebody else's server, rather
| than your own.
|
| this is a price i am more than willing to pay, for the first-
| ever social media phenomenon i feel good about participating
| in.
| distcs wrote:
| > if you try to follow someone who is not on your instance,
| there is a whole rigamarole you have to go through.
|
| Can you be more specific? What rigmarole did you have to do ?
|
| For me, I just hit the follow button on anyone I like and it
| just works, even if they are on different instance than mine.
| Their posts now show up on the page my instance serves me.
| Same for commenting or boosting posts of other people on
| other instances. I just hit the boost button and it just
| works. Commenting also just works. What did you have to do to
| follow someone on a different instance?
| allenbrunson wrote:
| are you using one of the apps? if so, then yes, it's as
| easy as that. but if you are using a web browser, then
| that's where all the rigmarole comes from.
| distcs wrote:
| No, I am just using the https://mastodon.social/ website
| on browser.
|
| > but if you are using a web browser, then that's where
| all the rigmarole comes from.
|
| Requesting again. Can you be more specific? What
| rigmarole do you have to do? Does hitting the "follow"
| button of a user on another instance from your instance
| not work for you? Do you get an error? Some other issue?
| Details please!
| allenbrunson wrote:
| if you look at a user or post who is on your server,
| i.e., the domain displayed in the url bar is your server,
| then you're fine. if you're viewing a post or user on
| their own server, i.e., it is _their_ domain in the url
| bar, instead of _yours_ , that's where things get ugly.
| distcs wrote:
| > the domain displayed in the url bar is your server,
| then you're fine. if you're viewing a post or user on
| their own server
|
| Wait! You do know you can see the users and posts of any
| server (even if it is not the server you are on) on the
| server you have account with, right?
|
| Like https://mastodon.social/@fosstodon@fosstodon.org
| shows you a fosstodon.org user on your mastodon.social
| instance and all you need to do is hit the follow button!
|
| Here is the opposite.
| https://fosstodon.org/@Gargron@mastodon.social where you
| see a Mastodon.social user on fosstodon.org instance.
| Again you need to just hit the follow button to follow
| that user from fosstodon.org. As simple as that! You
| don't really need to find a way to log into the other
| server. You don't have to do any rigmarole or ugly stuff.
| That's how federation works!
| allenbrunson wrote:
| here's an example from in the wild:
|
| https://mastodon.social/@willoremus/109552745423998782
| allenbrunson wrote:
| > Wait! You do know you can see the users and posts of
| any server (even if it is not the server you are on) on
| the server you have account with, right?
|
| yes. but that is not convenient, and definitely not how i
| have used a web browser, up to this point.
| [deleted]
| turmeric_root wrote:
| agreed. i've been on masto for 4-5 years now and while i do
| understand why this is a pain in the ass that doesn't make it
| any less annoying.
| turmeric_root wrote:
| > So why do people say that Mastodon is more difficult to use?
|
| - the contents of a thread differ depending on which instance
| you are viewing it from. replies from users that your instance
| is not subscribed to are not shown, so you need to view the
| thread on its origin instance in order to see the full thread
| context. on my instance lots of federated posts appear to have
| no replies, while on their origin instance the posts have
| dozens or hundreds of replies.
|
| - - side note: this is why i don't recommend asking a tech
| support question if you're on a large mastodon server, you'll
| get flooded with identical replies for days from helpful people
| who think no one else has answered your question.
|
| - search results also differ depending on which instance you're
| using. hashtag search only applies to the federated timeline,
| so if I tell you to check out #coolthing we may have completely
| different results, or you may not even see any results.
|
| - poll results, post favourite/boost counts aren't replicated
| in real-time between instances, so they vary between servers.
| when a poll ends you'll get a notification from the origin
| server with the final results but until then you'll just see
| votes that come from your instance.
|
| - pinned posts for users from other instances don't always
| federate, so again you need to view user profiles on their
| source instance to be sure that you're seeing pinned posts.
|
| - mastodon 4.0 introduced post editing, but replication lag
| across fedi can range from hours to days. it's not uncommon for
| someone to edit a post and get confusing replies because the
| edit hasn't been propagated to other instances.
|
| - if you get linked to a mastodon post in the wild, you need to
| copy-paste it into your instance's search bar to interact with
| it.
|
| - post deletion takes a while to propagate, and certain server
| implementations ignore deletion requests. this can be confusing
| when both you and a person on another server are discussing
| someone's profile.
|
| imo mastodon makes more sense if you see it as a distributed
| system that achieves eventual consistency with an SLA of a few
| days. that is understandably confusing for most people.
| jacooper wrote:
| Choosing a server is incredibly confusing for the average joe
| distcs wrote:
| The average joe can just sign up for https://mastodon.social/
| can't they? How is it really more difficult than signing up
| for Twitter or Facebook?
| jacooper wrote:
| No, not currently. Official mastodon servers are filled to
| the brim.
| dymk wrote:
| If you can figure out that's the "main" server to go sign
| up on, sure.
|
| With Facebook and Twitter there is no question where to go
| sign up. That's less clear with Mastodon. Simply knowing
| one has a choice of servers will turn some away.
| distcs wrote:
| Ok! Granted there is some effort to figure out which
| server to choose. Isn't everything as easy as Twitter
| after that?
|
| Arguably, it is even easier than Twitter because what
| really happens on Twitter these days is you sign up for
| an account, follow a few people, make a few posts and
| then suddenly find yourself to be blocked due to
| suspicious behavior. Mastodon is free of this nonsense so
| arguably Mastodon is easier to use?
| [deleted]
| dymk wrote:
| It's still harder to use even once you're signed up. I'm
| not able to click on a user's profile and see their
| posts, unless I go directly to the server that their
| account is on.
|
| That's presumably a setting configured on my particular
| instance, but it's just _weird_.
| shanebellone wrote:
| My name isn't Joe, but it all looks sketchy to me.
| jacooper wrote:
| The easiest way to understand it is to just think of
| mastodon/fediverse like E-Mail.
|
| An email address is a user name @ server Activitypub is the
| same.
| shanebellone wrote:
| I do understand the technology and paradigm. It just
| appears gimmicky. The shift in approach does not tangibly
| benefit me. It benefits Mastodon, the servers, and
| probably (if not now, eventually) advertisers.
| allenbrunson wrote:
| i agree with that! i solved it the way you're supposed to
| deal with new technology, i think: i lurked for awhile. read
| accounts from other mastodon users, to get a feel for things.
| jacooper wrote:
| > (As long as I am ranting: what the hell is up with
| billionaires, anyway? Quite a few of them have accumulated more
| money than they could spend in a hundred lifetimes, but still
| they want more. It's disgraceful.)
|
| I mean its more like equity than real money they can directly
| spend.
|
| Also most of their wealth is in companies that are no where near
| worth their marketcap, such as Tesla which isn't even close to VW
| in sales, yet somhow is worth more.
|
| So once the hype dies down, or the founder sells enough stocks,
| the market cap is going to take a nose dive for sure.
|
| And as rich as elon is, we have seen how he is putting _Billions_
| into twitter, so they can spend it, just not in normal lifetime
| stuff.
| bin_bash wrote:
| Economics Explained did a great video on the topic of how
| diversification is a big problem for some billionaires:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MeRN7LE1LQ
| seanhunter wrote:
| I have met and worked with a few billionaires now and they all
| had one thing in common which I think explains some of this
| well.
|
| Firstly, they spend the _vast_ majority of their time with
| enablers, fluffers and sycophants fulfilling their every whim,
| constantly telling them how great they are and how brilliant
| all their ideas are etc. It's bad for anyone's ego to have only
| that sort of feedback. Someone once told me that because people
| are scared of giving powerful people bad news his theory of the
| organisation was a tree of monkeys. When you look up all you
| see is assholes and when you look down all you see is smiling
| faces. Well billionaires are at the top of most trees and so
| all they hear is good news and all they see is smiling faces.
| That means they become disconnected from reality to the point
| of seeming unhinged to the regular mass of people.
|
| Secondly, the billionaires I have met hang out a lot with other
| billionaires or similar ultra-rich folks. They are envious of
| people even more rich and successful than them until you get to
| the very top and there they are paranoid about losing their
| status to others on the rise. This makes the first phenomenon
| more acute and they radicalise each other. You can see this in
| the DMs that were published between members of Elon's circle
| leading up to the twitter acquisition. All sorts of people were
| telling him how brilliant a job he was going to do at twitter
| and how his idea of taking an axe to the org chart etc was the
| a surefire recipe for success.[1]
|
| [1] Check this out and you'll probably cringe like I did
| https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/09/elon-...
| carapace wrote:
| One of my favorite jokes from the Simpsons: Homer and Mr.
| Burns are chilling in the rocket house
|
| Homer: Mr. Burns, you're the richest man I know.
|
| Mr. Burns: Ah yes, but I'd trade it all... for a little more.
|
| - - - -
|
| > people are scared of giving powerful people bad news
|
| Robert Anton Wilson called it the "Information Disease":
| people lie to those that have the power to hurt them, so
| hierarchical systems are controlled by elements that perforce
| have bad information.
| gambler wrote:
| When your revolution against "platforms" is led by people who
| host all their code on GitHub and have a public LinkedIn profile,
| you're not paying attention to your surroundings and will
| inevitably be taken advantage of.
| allenbrunson wrote:
| i host, like, _maybe_ two percent of my code on github. what 's
| there is just for show. and i am no great fan of linkedin, that
| is for sure. same with facebook. but i am not quite such a big
| deal that i can afford to ignore all of those big bad
| platforms. i am not quite ready to go live in a cabin in the
| woods, in other words.
| gambler wrote:
| So, in essence, you don't have anything meaningful to respond
| with. You're perfectly fine with using centralized platforms
| when it's convenient and their ownership aligns with your
| ideology. You might say you don't like them, but you like
| them well enough to put links to them on your personal
| website.
| allenbrunson wrote:
| you seem to be advocating for absolutism: these things are
| bad, so abandon them completely. i don't think that's
| reasonable, or workable. there is basically no corporation
| in the world who has clean hands. i don't think it's
| possible to divest myself of all of them.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| I think it's not advocating for absolutism as much as
| moral consistency. You cannot in one stroke suggest that
| people who stay on Twitter are behaving immorally and
| supporting, among other things, the banning of
| journalists, while at the same time excusing your own use
| of Microsoft and Meta platforms with "[nobody] has clean
| hands".
| allenbrunson wrote:
| it's a matter of degree. you are free to make your own
| choices, just as i am free to make mine.
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