Threads for anton

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      will this be something you need to opt-in to? or at least something you can opt-out from?

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      If you think about it, the signs of the “Internet of Trash”, as you can call it, were there back in the web 1.0 days.

      Many people had personal web sites, usually published on GeoCities, where exploring the web was a fun adventure that was not [fueled] by algorithms.

      There are still many people with personal web sites, I and many others in this community have their own.

      Could these sites have formed the “gateway” for published works on the web to go from self-administered (personal or organizational) servers, to rather massive “community” based hosted services, to the also massive Service as a Software Substitute platforms with nearly every [known/current] monetization and tracking methods?

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        ~dwh argues that the problems were inherent from the original design of the Web: https://medium.com/design-warp/the-web-was-never-decentralized-bb066138c88

        The web was never decentralized and the for-profit centralization and surveillance of the web started almost immediately after it was created because it was baked into the design.

        AOL did all of the same things back in the 1990s that Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube do today.

        [The] decentralized feel came from the fact that it was originally a centralized system that only seemed decentralized because it was inefficient.

        Staltz analyzes the changes as a more recent shift: https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.html

        […] The underlying dynamics of power on the Web have drastically changed, and those three companies [GOOG, FB, AMZN] are at the center of a fundamental transformation of the Web. […] After 2014, we started losing the benefits of the internet’s infrastructural and economical diversity.

        but also attributes the situation to physical and virtual bias in the Internet infrastructure: https://staltz.com/a-plan-to-rescue-the-web-from-the-internet.html

        The Web only got to this current situation because of fundamental flaws in the Internet’s architecture which rigged the system.

        This well organized hierarchy [of undersea cables] is the only way the wired Internet can be feasible.

        The technical flaw [of scarcity of IPv4 addresses resulting in dependency on NAT] that favored intermediate computers prefigured a world where middlemen business models thrive.

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          the dwz article is useful in understanding how the web become this way. but saying the web was “never decentralized” is only true if you rely on dwz’s own idiosyncratic definition of decentralization (which he elaborates in a linked article), and isn’t a fair characterization, in my view.

          the web was an open platform. companies used the web to build services the web didn’t originally offer, and those services were made centralized because the companies wanted to collect tolls.

          i don’t know how useful it is to say something like that “was never decentralized” when the problem is inherent an extendible platform like the web, and has to do with things built on top of the web, rather than the web itself. furthermore, no design of the web could potentially anticipate all the things we’d want to do with it, so there would always be potential for capture.

          though its true, a non-extendible web could have resisted centralization longer. it would have to omit javascript, form fields, and anything that could be used to build other services on. it would probably look like gemini. and it wouldn’t have lasted as long or gained as much traction as the web did. furthermore, all it would take is for someone to create a browser-specific extension, and then you’d have the whole embrace-extend-extinguish problem once again.

          (side note: its important to build decentralized alternatives to the big 3, and promote them. we should not stop doing that. but i think transformative change will require governments breaking up tech monopolies and requiring the tech industry to adopt open standards and protocols. either that, or we wait and hope something new comes along that changes everything, hopefully for the better)

    3. 2

      What tags would you want to change/remove?

      If anything, we should consider getting rid of foss and replace it with “free-software” for the things that are truly free, and move the “permissive” software to the “open-source” tag, and possibly move “open-source” to the capitalism category due to the ability for permissive software to become proprietary. (See “What is Free Software?”)

      We should also consider getting rid of things like cloud-computing, since there is a difference between renting a server with the condition that you control the computing and it can run free software, and giving your data to proprietary services/platforms/software. (See “Who does that server really serve? by Richard Stallman)

      Perhaps if someone would be able to go through the list of tags and deal with the terms mentioned in “Words to Avoid (or Use with Care) Because They Are Loaded or Confusing”, we’ll be off to a good start!

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        I believe there are way too many tags, with many overlaps and many off-topic and some quite unclear. They act more like “fuzzy” tags and are not really useful to “filter out” stories.

        If it’s considered useful, I can go through all of them and make suggestions but I’m a simple user, I don’t know how it would be received.

        Just to take the first 10:

        • Twitch : should be removed (it’s a proprietary service after all)
        • data-analysis : quite unclear. Everything is about data-analysis.
        • health-insurance : looks completely off-topic
        • social-data : unclear
        • data-brokers :  does it worth having a full tag for that ? I’m sure it overlap with lot of other things like surveillance capitalism
        • extreme capitalism : while the name is fun, I believe it mixes the effect with the subject (and, as such, many stories might be tagged that way. Rendering the tag quite useless)
        • government
        • propaganda
        • censorship

        Those 3 are also quite large, quite overlaping and mixing subject and cause. Who would like to filter out based on those criterias ? How are those tag useful ?

        • U.S.A -> same as USA…

        etc…

        you see my point? One strenght of lobste.rs is that every tag is really useful and that you rarely doubt which tag to apply.

        My question is : do we want that for tilde.news or not? It’s quite a change in philosophy.

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          Twitch : should be removed (it’s a proprietary service after all)

          Considering there is only one post from 3 years ago, we could probably do without it.

          data-analysis : quite unclear. Everything is about data-analysis.

          The posts mentioned here make it seem like it’s more about things that explicitly do data analysis though.

          health-insurance : looks completely off-topic

          I’ve never paid attention to the fact that there is a health insurance topic before…

          social-data : unclear

          Same, but it looks like, from @cmccabe’s posts that it has to do with data collection. Perhaps it could use a better name?

          data-brokers :  does it worth having a full tag for that ? I’m sure it overlap with lot of other things like surveillance capitalism

          I’m not entirely sure what this is talking about. Is it people who sell data? Could it use a better name?

          extreme capitalism : while the name is fun, I believe it mixes the effect with the subject (and, as such, many stories might be tagged that way. Rendering the tag quite useless)

          I’ve always thought of this as a place for the more extreme cases of capitalists exploiting people. I’m not exactly sure what the original meaning was.

          government
          propaganda
          censorship
          

          Those 3 are also quite large, quite overlaping and mixing subject and cause. Who would like to filter out based on those criterias ? How are those tag useful ?

          Maybe staff should take a look at these. These topics could use being broken up if it won’t leave a bunch of small (as in nearly-unused) topics.

          U.S.A -> same as USA…
          

          etc…

          I think it would be good to get rid of the duplicates if possible.

    4. 1

      the superior version of this story is here lmao

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      Basically Terahash, LLC, a company which its CEO said was founded “in order to manifest a particular vision I’ve had about bringing password cracking into the mainstream”, unfortunately, went bankrupt. This program then got “repossessed” by what appeared to be its old owners (formerly known as L0pht Holdings, LLC) who proceeded to stop selling the software, cancel people’s licenses and open-source it.

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      Seems interesting, but it takes away a lot of the social aspects of Medium for something that seems to be done nicer with just the web browser’s reading mode.

      It still loads some client-side things from medium.com servers anyway, so it’s not like there’s a solid privacy aspect to it.

      Plus, couldn’t Medium just ban scribe rip’s server(s)/IP(s) if they think the platform is being abused?

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      This looks interesting. I’m going to have to try it some time

    8. 1

      The merch shop idea actually happened? 😲 Nice!

      Any chance we could have some tildeverse hoodies and caps? Maybe also items with the “space” logo as well? https://tildeverse.org/logos/tildeverse-space.png

    9. 1

      Mr Corporation strikes again ;P

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        ?

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      First, there’s no official client. The fact that it’s so easy to implement a client means there’s a Cambrian explosion going on, and the filtering die-back has not yet occurred. This might change in the medium future.

      as opposed to what official client for the web?

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        the web at least has standards…

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            no. I mean a real technical specification, not a first-draft quality half-baked pseudo-specification that calls itself feature complete.

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                I guess you haven’t read where the document itself refers to itself as a pseudo-specification…

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                  I guess you haven’t noticed it basically hasn’t changed in like a year plus because it’s stable at this point.

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                    I have noticed it hasn’t changed, and I’ve noticed that it lacks things that could really make it a better protocol

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          It’s worth reading Tangled Web

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            This book is currently out of stock, but the ebook is still available

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              Content is still valid as an ebook. :)

              Nostarch ebooks are DRMfree when you buy from their store if that’s a concern

    11. 2

      “The human genome is about 3 gigabases long, which boils down to 750 megabytes. Depressingly enough, this is only 2.8 Mozilla browsers.” - Bert Hubert

      I like the Gemini is useless post

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        because it’s gemlog and .gmi?

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          No, because of the content

    12. 0

      So it’s opposite day.

    13. 0

      It would be nice to have a replacement for utterances, and massive platforms closed such as disqus

    14. 3

      There’s sites that offer the latest versions, but Incopro went after a version for DOS? This should probably also have the “yikes” tag

    15. 0

      I thought it was going to be a negative change. I was happily surprised :)

      Although, I learned from the article that a lot of country TLDs don’t allow domain privacy, which makes me concerned for some of the cool cats in the tildeverse using .uk and .us domains.

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        Until I read that article, I didn’t know there were TLDs that didn’t allow domain privacy… and that’s somewhat concerning imo

    16. 0

      For a second I thought this was going to be that Amazon leaked some/all of their keys for AWS… hehe

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        To jumpstart everyone into action for the new year :D

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      I’m conflicted about most of the advice on this site. At least half of the points they list are things I’d consider anti-patterns like not including manpages, using windows, and even using emoji.

      A bit disappointed to see the linked discussion is on a closed platform like discord as well.

      At least they’ve got the basic points correct.

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        It’s a bit ironic imo that discussions on CLI guidelines are held on a platform that doesn’t let you use any CLI-based clients.

    18. 0

      Doesn’t this just take from Internet Archive? Doesn’t seem like much of an “old web / retro” proxy?