neuland

Or, people are just inconsistent and not thinking about things beyond their politics.

People will praise the Arab Spring organizing on Twitter without considering the implications for the events at the Capital on Jan 6th.

People are fine with Parler getting banned by all their vendors for not moderating violence and threats. But people would loose their minds if the same thing happened to Facebook for their failure to moderate violence around the Rohingyan genocide.

Ah ok. Yes, I was mistaking Aether Pro. You have excellent docs!

Oh cool. I didn't actually try it myself, since I read in the docs that it would take a long time. Good to see it's quick. Urbit looks like a really interesting system with great design underpinnings and philosophy.

I was looking at your service recently while surveying the landscape of currently active P2P projects.

Am I right in seeing that a monthly subscription is the only option to get a client and start using Aether?

This is difficult to balance with having data be available when you are offline.

If your data is local to a user's device (laptop, desktop, tablet, phone), then it's not online 24/7. So, you need some way for other people to see it.

If you require people to use a server, there's either problems onboarding and trusting that server operator. Or you make people host their own server and nobody uses it b/c that's too technical.

Where are you getting an Urbit ID in 3 minutes? I am not super familiar with Urbit. But my understanding is that even getting a temporary Urbit ID (a commet) takes hours.

It's not strange if you view it through from their point of view. Rightly or wrongly, these people just want to see much less centralized moderation. And they feel unherd and oppressed (again regardless of whether that's actually true, that's what they experience and feel).

They see things in a more absolutist free speech lens, meaning any content that is legal should be allowed. And they don't see platforms as being responsible for moderation. They view centralized moderation as inherently biased and illegitimate. If they can't or wont allow legal speech, then they think 230 should be repealed and these sites should cease to exist.

They are reacting to takedowns from social media sites, SaaS providers, IaaS providers, and financial services because they view these sites as an oligopoly acting in unison to bar them from the basic infrastructure of modern life. Imagine if typewriter companies ganged up to stop selling to right leaning newspapers and authors. Or, imagine if telegraph companies said they wouldn't transmit messages for Abraham Lincon.

On 230, they see social media sites as a monopoly due to network effects. Also/alternatively they talk about a bait-and-switch, where the social media sites held themselves out as public squares when they were small. But once they were big, they started enforcing their views.

Generally, I think people are failing to put themselves in a Trump supporter's shoes. Imagine you genuinely believed that the election was stolen. The court cases were almost all dismissed on standing and laches. From their perspective, no one will substantively address their videos, affidavits, statistical anomalies, etc.

And when they protest, people call them violent insurrectionists, despite all year BLM doing very similar things (again from their perspective).

I don't see how these apps dont eventually get taken down like the Fediverse apps earlier this year. Eventually (probably once it's polished enough to be usable) the deplatformed communities will discover SSB and then Google/Apple will take the apps down.

How do they enforce the code of conduct on E2E encrypted rooms?

This project seemed innocuous enough. And it's a shame Discord killed it. As long as services are centralized, platform owners keep doing things like this.

I realize most wouldn't. But I would accept that trade. HN is a rare exception. And, there would still be sources for tech news: personal blogs, company sites, LWN and other news sites. It's true that news and discussion would flow less freely. But, I think that on-net 230 is doing profound damage to our society.

I didn't watch the episode. But, I don't think the effect of repealing 230 is in dispute. It would make hosting content you didn't write unfeasible. The questions is whether that is a good thing or not. And what new rule would replace it if any.

Personally, I think even a complete repeal with no replacement would be a good thing. The vast majority of social networks, forums, comment sections, and other public spaces online are a cancer that are destroying our society.

And censorship is a poor alternative. Even if you find yourself on the favorable side of the censors now, inevitably they will come for you.

I agree the web as a platform for publishing static information is feature complete. You can publish basically any kind of static content you want (news, academic articles, personal sites, business landing pages, restaurant menus, etc) with ~2005 era tech and no JS.

But once you start to consider forms and interactive content, the possibilities for expanding interactivity are near endless: raster or vector maps, the spam bot / capcha arms-race, custom form widgets (ie. better dropdowns, file upload dropzones, datatables, drag/drop items), different connection types or wire protocols (XML/JSON vs. binary formats, Websockets, WebRTC, QUIC, more UDP-based stuff in the future), rich API's like payments, hardware security dongles, and social networks (webmentions/activity-pub/etc).

Kind of like Excel, these are each must-have's for some industry or app. Each one requires a different 10% of core features to work. So, we need them all if the web is going to be an application delivery platform. And for better or worse, it is the current de-facto standard cross-platform apps.

But I think this shows an interesting effect: platforms are very unlikely to ever be feature complete. Whereas distinct pieces of software are. PDF is another example of this kind of scope creep.