Notices by Jer Warren (nyquildotorg@fedia.social), page 2

That McDonald's employee in Altoona isn't going to get that CrimeStoppers $10k reward for turning in Luigi, but Luigi apparently got a mysterious $10k in cash while getting arrested 🤔

Allegedly

It's pretty funny that the police claim that his "Faraday backpack" is evidence of being a "sophisticated criminal" and he's like "bro, it's just waterproof 🤷"

@rysiek @thenexusofprivacy @damon would you two mind removing me from future replies. My position remains the same: that everyone is arguing about different things here, that the important parts of "decentralization" are different to each participant, and every new reply just reinforces that and makes me mad lol

@rysiek ok, that was my guess. Small number of personal mails from a small number of addresses that people actually reply to 👍

@rysiek I'm not going to try to claim that you're having more delivery problems than you know about, but the number of angry posts I've read from people who are doing all the right technical things with their mail server and DNS that find by chance that they've been blackholed by Google and Microsoft for some time suggests it might be difficult to know whether someone running their own mail server wasnt having deliverability problems.

I'm curious how you know all the mail your server handles is delivered, because that seems like an interesting/fun thing to try to determine without some kind of bounce feedback.

@rysiek @thenexusofprivacy just to be clear, I've never claimed that Bluesky is decentralized. My claim is "neither is the fediverse," and all these discussions going around and around about it get us nowhere."

But also, the fediverse leans on DNS, too, so I guess this is a good time to pack in the discussion about "decentralized" lol.

@rysiek @thenexusofprivacy with email, you do have to connect to the email server that (federated, not decentralized) DNS records point to. If your mail server goes down, email sent to you does not get to you set up an account on a new mail server and then configure DNS records and hope an eventual retry delivers that mail to the new central point that manages your mail.

XMPP works essentially the same. The servers federate, but are not decentralized. And even if you are ok with calling the server topology itself "decentralized," you still have to lean on DNS, which is absolutely not decentralized.

@rysiek @thenexusofprivacy p2p things like Gnutella, or BitTorrent (with dht) are closer to decentralized, but this is all kind of supporting my claim that "decentralized" is not a good term to use for discussing merits of platforms 🤷

@rysiek @thenexusofprivacy I don't think anyone is "making" decentralized blurry, I think it's always been a poor marketing term applied to whatever people are trying to promote the usage of.

@rysiek @thenexusofprivacy email and xmpp are federated.

"Decentralized" doesn't apply, because in order to get and send your mail, you have to connect to a central point.

(Email is also now a bad example because so much of it really is centralized. Almost every email you send or receive talks to GMail servers.)

@thenexusofprivacy @rysiek I do think "has different meanings and interpretations" makes "decentralized" unsuitable for debating whether or not the fediverse or Bluesky is decentralized; "many meanings" doesn't mean "no meaning", but I think it does when you're trying to use it to compare different aspects of different things with different people because it's almost impossible to be on the same page.

"Meaningless" is just shorthand for "no common ground to argue from."

@thenexusofprivacy @rysiek where I keep getting hung up is "who controls my identity and content?"

On the fediverse, my identity and content are absolutely controlled by my instance, which makes that a huge obvious centralization point.

Sure I can "migrate" my identity, but that just causes (many of) my followers to automatically follow the new account, which comes with its own new identity. Now there are two identities out there. Unless my instance goes down, in which case I cannot "migrate" my identity.

But then, topologically speaking, even if I host my own instance on my own domain, I can't ever point that domain to a different instance without causing federation problems that require all the other instances on the fediverse to take action to get federation going again.

Those two things make my experience on the fediverse incredibly centralized.

@rysiek @thenexusofprivacy I think in a way we're saying the same thing, kind of.

I've really struggled the last couple years with the descriptive nature of language, how words evolve the way people use them, making the popular usage of them "correct" despite it absolutely being incorrect.

I guess I'm saying that "decentralized" has already become meaningless, and did well before Bluesky showed up, and that it having done so is actively contributing to debates like this one. But, like with "crypto," me shaking my fist at the sky just makes me feel bad, and — for me at least — it's probably healthier to just stop using it rather than getting mad at it repeatedly.

I'm sorry I chose your thread to finally join in on in order to work out this point. I wasn't trying to argue with you, and agree with your sentiment about diluting meaning. But, because I was having "wait a minute, this isn't really decentralized," discussions about the fediverse, on the fediverse, in 2017, seeing happen again with Bluesky has been interesting to see.

Again, sorry I sounded argumentative rather than trying to contribute to your argument. I'm trying to work on that lol.

@rysiek @thenexusofprivacy my only point is that "decentralized" means a lot of different things.

If your mastodon instance goes down, you're dead in the water, too, unless you planned ahead with recent backups, and even then you're going to lose followers.

Even the in-depth architectural apologists aren't calling Bluesky "decentralized," in their big "this is how ATProto actually works" posts, they're calling ATProto that, and they're not any more wrong than the people who say Mastodon is.

Indeed there is only one ATProto "instance" currently, but that was once true of ActivityPub too. I don't have a horse in this fight, and I'm not interested in Bluesky no matter what changes they make; I'm just pointing out that a lot of people are creating their own debate here based on how other people are interpreting "decentralized."

@rysiek @thenexusofprivacy I think what a lot of people may be getting hung up on is that ATproto is decentralized, but the thing Bluesky uses it for is not. Very similar overlap to how ActivityPub is decentralized, but Mastodon is a network of centralized instances that federate. What you see as a Mastodon user is all pushed to you from a central point, and is therefore "centralized," in basically exactly the same way that Bluesky's ATProto aggregator is. It's just that Mastodon currently has more than one of those while Bluesky does not 🤷

@h5e @solarbird @hazelnoot that's definitely a concern, but I'm hoping this makes people more aware in general of the problem of native apps that embed browsers in them. The Facebook app has been doing this sort of thing for a long time in ways that the user can't actually notice.

Any app where a link to a remote site opens inside of it, instead of handing it over to your default browser should be eyed extremely warily; they can and probably do track you in ways they couldn't if you were looking at it outside the app.

But yeah, if Google also controls your default browser, there's definitely room for concern.

Don't Fuck with Scrolling

Someone needs to make a "Bluesky is going just fine" page that lists the daily atrocities people are inflicting via public data on its users.

Yesterday everyone was freaking out about the page that shows any user what accounts any other user blocks, now today HuggingFace is distributing an AI training dataset of posts they sucked out of the hose.

Reading the list of domain names included in the InfoWars auction is interesting. Some bonkers stuff in there about Obama slavery and goblins, but there are two that I think the Onion will get good use out of:

wokeyleaks.news
derpstate.news