Notices by Rob Ricci (ricci@discuss.systems)

Dragon Dads (https://dragondads.org/) is a group of dads and other caregivers who are affirming and supportive of LGTBQIA+ kids. One of their big activities is going to #pride events and giving out free dad hugs. Many of them have been doing this for 10 years or more. This was my first time.

Let me tell you, I saw, and felt, absolutely everything.

There was someone who squealed when they saw the booth and did a ten yard sprint to catch me in a flying hug. There were people who walked by several times before they timidly came up and asked for a hug.

There were people who wanted long hugs, side hugs, pats on the back, fist bumps. (We have a menu.) People who don't like hugs, but were nonetheless thrilled that we were doing it.

People told me that their dads had passed away, refused to have anything to do with them, or that they had had to cut their own dads off. One told me "I miss my dad", and when I said I was so sorry, they said "he's in Arizona".

There was an elderly person in a wheelchair who told us how their alcoholic father used to beat them, then told us all the things they had accomplished in life in spite of him, just to show him.

There were people who trembled. People who sobbed. People who melted.

A giant dude in one of those neoprene dog masks (with my permission) grabbed me in a great big hug and lifted me off the ground.

I leaned down to hug people in wheelchairs, and stretched up to hug a woman who I swear was seven feet tall.

Some people stayed to chat, or to cool off in our misting fan in the blistering heat. Others got a hug and left quickly, tears in their eyes and a "thank you" on their lips.

Absolutely everyone who wanted a hug got one.

I've signed up for more events.

Congratulations to Dr. @sachindhke , who successfully defended his dissertation this afternoon.

He reports that donuts taste better once one becomes a doctor.

@evan fwiw I gather numbers for bluesky, and the fraction of MAUs vs total user is actually about the same there too

@evan thanks, u/GorillaRimjob

Sitting around with four dudes having a heated argument about what the worst Taylor Swift song is

@evan subsidiarity and solidarity

https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fr164-the-pope-on-defederation/

Error: password was delicious, so cold and so sweet

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a new account in possession of a verification code must be in want of a better password than that, you fool, you absolute buffoon

Error: "average password has 3 special characters" factoid actualy just statistical error. average password has 0 special characters. Ümläüts Gëörg, who lives in cave & types over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

Error: password must contain:

Three lower case letters for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven upper case letters for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine digits for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One special character for the Dark Lord on his dark throne;
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

One username to rule them all, one password to find them,
A second factor to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them;
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie

I made a proper longform article from my thread on datacenters:

https://ricci.pckt.blog/datacenters-in-utah-a-photo-essay-gehy55y

RE: https://mastodon.social/@nuwagaba2/116528765062848131

I'm extremely excited to see what good these folks do with their own land!

@cwebber amazing how easy it is to rugpull clout

Independent bookstore day, Stop 1

Weller's Book Works

RE: https://discuss.systems/@ricci/116449653450547769

The joke here is that English has two meanings for the word "sanction", and they are opposites ("give one's blessing to" and "prohibit")

Made sense when I was at the dentist on nitrous oxide

My "we care about your privacy" sticker on my Privacy Violator 3000 glasses is raising questions already answered by my "we care about your privacy" sticker

One of the things that's really important to me as a research professor is to have students who are confident in questioning me and disagreeing with me - I'm not always right, I make mistakes, I get the wrong mental model in my head for systems, I miss things. Because there's an inherent power imbalance between me and my students, one of my main tasks is to build up deserved confidence in my students, and to make it clear that they are always free to disagree without penalty.

I have some ideas for another metric for distributed social networks:

# The B-Index

The B-Index intends to model the number of entities that have blocking-level control over an account's participation in a distributed social network.

It is expressed as $B_X = N$, where $X$ is the fraction of the network that the account is blocked from if N entities block it from the portions they have control over.

For example, a network with $B_{50} = 20$ would mean that 20 entities making blocking decisions can block an account from half of the network.

## Uses

The B-Index can be used for multiple purposes:

* From an individual user perspective, it can be thought of as the ability of administrators, etc. to block that user's access to the network; users may prefer networks that have a high B-Index if they have concerns about being blocked from network access

* From a Trust and Safety perspective, it can be thought of as the amount of cooperation required to limit bad actors' access to the network: users may prefer networks with a low B-Index if they have concerns about being targeted

* From a resilience perspective, it can be thought of as the exposure of the network to the disappearance of infrastructure due to financial collapse, DoS attack, legal action, etc.; users may prefer networks with a high B-Index if they have concerns about the stability or sustainability of individual infrastructural elements

Details here, comments welcome: https://github.com/ricci/distributed-social-networks/blob/main/BIndex.md

@bnewbold @jdp23 I would particularly like your thoughts on application of this to the ATProto world if you are so inclined

@jdp23 @bnewbold

Thanks very much for these thoughts! I really appreciate your help and patience filling in the gaps in my knowledge here. FWIW I'm playing around with these things hands-on to learn more, I set up my own PDS last night and hope to try my own relay, either with the reference implementation or blacksky's rsky this week.

On PLC: The number of did:web handles for the network appears to be - according to another dataset I found that scrapes handles - 159. I'm not confident in saying that's the complete set, but the number of PLC handles would appear, conservatively to be north of 99.9% (the dataset I am using, which is coming from the bluesky relay, contains 402k handles, so that's assuming that I'm seeing a representative sample of the full set of handles)

My conclusion here is that the B-Index for atproto is, depending on your viewpoint, very boring or very revealing. Unless the handle data I'm looking at is very incorrect, the B-Index for the *current* atmosphere is effectively $B_X$ = 1 for all $X$ at least up to 99.9; whether or not you believe they *would*, through administrative decisions or company failure Bluesky PBC could cut off any or all users from 99.9% of the network. I'm sure some people find that totally unsurprising, while others are probably quite surprised.

On your third point, this is actually kind of what I'm trying to capture with B-Index. Yeah, it does seem like (maybe other than the PLC) that someone who is using blacksky's appview, PDS, and relay, is going to be just fine within the blacksky network - but they will be cut of from 99.999% or so of the atmosphere. The B-Index is not trying to model whether they care - some people will be perfectly fine with that scenario, but rather model the centralization of power that gets one to that point; ie. one company can decide to cut me off from 99.999% of the world, vs. if m.s blocks me (worst case on the fediverse) that cuts me off from 25% of the world.

On the Mississippi situation, my answer is kind of similar: how many companies (or instance admins, etc.) does it take to make a decision that affects X% of users. On the VPN thing, I think we can't model it, since we can't really model the how accessible VPNs are. On the alternative appviews, we can, though, if we can get user counts for them; here the B-Index may be higher, because more entities have to make the decision to block.

So some other thoughts here:
* One of the interesting things (I hope) about B-Index is that you can use it for little 'what if' experiments, eg. we could move on from the PLC, assume that it will not be used to revoke DIDs and that it will not go down, move on to the next 'largest' resource and go from there: I assume that's likely to be the bluesky relay or maybe the appview. But this is where I need to understand better what someone on, say, blacksky, who has been banned at the appview and/or relay level from bluesky can or cannot see. Maybe once I have my own relay to play with I'll have a better understanding.

* I think it would be interesting to create some version of this metric that looks not at blocking but credible exit, separately for social graph and user data (which as you point out is going to cover an exceedingly small number of Fediverse users today). Though it sounds like atproto might run into the same problem with PLC - but we can use the same technique of 'here's what it looks like today, here's what it would look like if the PLC were in the hands of a consortium, or truly decentralized, etc.

* Labeling and feeds are also going to be interesting here, I'm not giving up on trying to look at those just yet :) This will probably be the case where, assuming I can get appropriate data, the *fediverse* is the one that's complicated to model, since each instance has its own blocked

* As you point out there are DNS and other external dependencies, and I'm interested in those as well, I did some rough numbers for the fediverse in terms of networks that hosts are on a while ago, I'm sure this could be formalized: https://discuss.systems/@ricci/114396317436420669

* I think it would be interesting to extend the kind of thing noted in my previous point to legal jurisdictions as well.