CaptArmchair

I'll put it like this.

Close by where I live is a monument for civilians who were taken from their houses and shot by the German occupiers during the last months of WWII. Simply because they were suspected of having distributed pamphlets. There wasn't even evidence to that claim, and retribution was a thing.

I passed that monument countless of times during my youth, giving me pause to contemplate.

It's a tangible reminder of what ultimately happens when people stay silent about something as final and poignant as one group denying the existence of another group for whatever reasons.

I have no problem with expressing differences over world views. I take issue when that world view entails denying the other side's existence because of differences, and a fervent intent to act on that notion.

It's a matter of boundaries, and speaking up.

This an interesting question. Forgive my meandering take on this.

We already have a mix of technologies to achieve that effect. Sort of. Simplified, you can host a personal website on shared hosting, a VPS, or wherever, at the same time chat via IRC or XMPP, and use RSS to create feeds to share tidbits about yourself. Nothing stops you from combining different programs and services to get that.

So, what are the problems you're actually trying to solve here?

Do you want to improve accessibility, that is: lower the bar for non-technical people to join feeds, publish their own thoughts, join group chats,...?

Do you want to improve discoverability across what we already have? Make it easier for everyone to serendipitous finding information? Like, search, recommendations, linking, pub/sub, and so on?

Do you want to solve sustainability? Developing models that also cover the expenses involved i.e. either covering the costs in maintaining tech, or redistributing the costs?

Do you want to solve governance, the issue of providing enough affordances to communities to moderate/govern themselves?

These are big questions, and once you try to solve them together, you'll have to make trade-offs, inevitably. Decentralizing everything sounds great, but that has an impact on discoverability, as well as accessibility. Not having another account sounds great, but that hides complex debates about online and offline, distributed identities.

Even more so, if you dig deeper, our approach these affordances is based on our values. And those can be very different depending on who you talk to. That's where things enter the murky, ambiguous teritory of sociology, culture, and so on where few absolute truths are offered.

That doesn't mean we should just accept throw up hands and accept the status quo, though. Talking in terms of a single "network" or a single "protocol" is too crude to approach these questions. The intrinsic value the Internet offers us, can be found in a handful foundational design principles like standardization, composition, openness,... which allow us to create many networks that host many diverse communities. Each to their own isn't a bad thing as it's too naive to think that there's a catch-all solution that caters to everyone's needs. Balkanization, such as it is, becomes really problematic if it erodes common beliefs we hold about a free, open and accessible digital global network.

Many "technical" people who are active in these niches like Mastodon, Nostr, the Fediverse, or even the Smolweb, do so because they are steeped in a particular (counter)culture that espouses the same values that also led to the birth of the early Internet. Cyberspace really is a marketplace of ideas first. Technologies are an expression of that.

From the posted article:

> EPA Seeks to Eliminate Critical PFAS Drinking Water Protections

> The move continues to expose communities across the country to toxic forever chemicals in tap water

If this really were a "team sport", one half of the team wouldn't be set on undermining the health of the other half of the team.

If a pension system is purely based on repartition: yes. But that's not the case in most countries. Pension plans mostly involve pension funds which are rooted in the financial markets. It's the individuals responsibility to max out their pension plan, and fiscal policies are used to incentivize this.

Ownership of assets, like home ownership, also contributes towards the totality of a pension.

In that sense, not owning a home, having to pay rent in old age, is a form of impoverishment. If that rent isn't offset by other sources of income like financial investments.

Oh, it's not just the "big stories". History is a pretty big flag that covers a lot of territory. At heart, history is about asking perennial questions like "where do we come from?", "how did the past shape us today?" and "how could the past inform us?".

This is true on an individual as well as a collective level, and goes well beyond academia. Consider genealogy & family history, local and regional culture and traditions, remembrance,... There is always a personal connection, and that tends to become extremely tangible in individual stories. Whether that's finding a lost relative, honoring one's culture, or just being able to empathize with the lives of people who are centuries gone and discovering that they weren't all that different from us today.

Historians do carry a big responsibility. That's why accountability is at the heart of anyone who does historical research on a professional level; or are motivated to spread their interpretation of the historical record well beyond a few listeners. That's why historians are instilled with a reflex to keep a pragmatic attitude and ask critical questions.

> personal responsibility

A sense of personal responsibility dilutes very quickly as more people get involved. This is a well researched dynamic in groups and collectives.

As it turns out, it's very easy to rationalize your own actions if you can defer your responsibility to a wider context. On an operational level: "My job - HR, SRE engineering, project management,... - didn't hurt anyone.", "I received an industry award last year for my work",... On a strategic level: "Too many people rely on us, so we can't fail.", "Our original mission didn't change.", "Our mission was, is and will be a net positive", ... Not just that, actually being convinced that those rationalizations are 100% true, and not being able to consciously notice how your own actions in a small, or large, way contribute to a negative impact. Just listen to testimonies of these people, the truly are convinced to their core that their work is a net positive for humanity.

> If I sell 400 million skateboards - do we need a regulatory board to approve skateboard design changes?

Suppose your design involves a wonky wheel. If you sell 10 skateboards, and 1 person falls, breaks their leg and decides to sue you for damages: that's a private problem between you and that person. If you sell 400 million skateboards, and millions of people people break their leg: that's a problem for the entirety of society.

Safety is also why car design is heavily regulated. Not necessarily to ensure individual safety, but to make sure that society, as a whole, isn't crippled by hundreds of thousands of people requiring care or getting killed in car accidents.

If you are able to sell 400 million skateboards, I sure hope there are regulations that enforce the safety of your product design.

> Your standalone web site is like a cactus in the middle of a vast desert nobody cares about

Yet, cacti thrive in the desert, uncaring about the opinions of others.

> in fact now at a mercy of Google's indexing policies.

Inherently, the Web doesn't carry "maximizing an audience" as a maxim. That's an expectation that the Web's denizens have come to believe in as a matter of principle: the only valuable reason to put anything online, is because you intend to cater to an audience.

That doesn't exclude owning a personal website that you'd just peruse for your own sake. In fact, the author writes as much:

> You can write at length, ramble nonsensically, and people can choose to read it or not. It’s about putting things out on the internet for yourself.

Like, sure, there are platforms where you could share cooking recipes. But maybe that's not something you want for yourself, for whatever reason, maybe you don't want to attract undue attention, and you just want to keep them in your own quiet corner of the Web, for yourself.

You might want to write for the sake of the craft of writing, and use the Web as your medium, rather then paper. Others happening to stumble on your work, is just a by-product of your choice to publish thoughts on the Web.

Maybe you don't care about search engines, and if you need someone to find your work, well, you can just hand them an URL.

From your perspective, all of that may sound horribly inefficient, and that's true, it is inefficient and not the right way to do things if your express goal were to cater to large audiences. But that doesn't make it any less valid an option to approach the Web.

> There is no bottom line here. It's all about economy and capitalism, which seem to always win.

Well, my argument is that the Web, such as it was, experienced an Eternal September with the advent of social media and mobile devices. Suddenly, everyone could reach an audience with nothing but a smartphone. And that notion caused millions, billions, flocking to those few central platforms that catered to this apparent want, creating a self-perpetuating feedback loop.

Whereas, do you thoughts and intentions really need to be shown in front of an audience of billions, just because that's possible now? Of course not.

Wanting to be like a cactus is perfectly valid, giving your thoughts a quiet spot in some corner of the Web you can call your own, not having to worry about likes, favorites, comments, shares or clicks. As long as doing so caters to your own intentions.

I strongly disagree.

One of the examples mentioned studies population changes during NZ's colonization. It's part of Maori-led research. Such research provides a better understanding of the history and culture of the indigenous population of NZ. In turn, this research contributes towards contextualizing and enriching relationships between communities within the larger modern NZ society with respect to the economic and political plight of these groups.

The overarching theme here is identity. Both on an individual level, as well as a community level. Our shared past, heritage, traditions, stories, relationships with others,... are all what make us "us". And social sciences are paramount within that never-ending debate.

In a way, defunding research which studies particular indigenous communities within society is tantamount to effacing those communities from a larger national historical identity. However, doing so will never end that drive communities have to remember and to assert their own history and identity.

That's why studying how the arrival of Europeans in New Zealand has had an demographic, political, economical, cultural effect on the indigenous population definitely is fundamental research. And an important one at that.

This depends on the jurisdiction you're in. I.e. Europe's GDPR argues that you need consent to keep someone's personal data. Encryption doesn't equate anonymization, so there's a potential liabity.

That's not because of the GPL. The GPL has little to do with barring access to a platform on which code is published. Arguably, if a copy existed elsewhere, say GitHub, then WPEngine is free to use that code according to the GPL.

In other words: once code is published with the GPL and someone has a copy, the original creators can do little to nothing to stop them from using said code however they see fit. That's what drives forking.

In the same vain, original creators always have, and will have, the freedom as rights holders over creative works, to change the license on new versions published. Of course, the caveat being holding the rights over contributions made by third parties (hence the existence of contested contributor agreements).

The real issue here is a for-profit entity driving the governance of a non-profit entity. There's not just the ethical but also legality at play here. And this has little to do with copyright.