Notices by Proto Himbo European (guyjantic@infosec.exchange), page 3

@cwebber @bnewbold I am absolutely not techy enough to understand most of what is going on here, but this paragraph smells fishy.

Note that I could be very, very wrong about this...

it feels like the message is "this is inevitable so we might as well do it." I know the person is implying "do it well" and "do it mindfully," but when these arguments are put forth in any domain I immediately wonder how inevitable the thing actually is.

Are huge public networks inevitable? And if they are, is the sorta-implication accurate that smaller networks are unable to do the "important" things the big public ones do? Is it inevitable that large, public, (centralized?) networks will do all the tasks better than smaller, decentralized ones?

I am probably not asking the right questions, and maybe the answer to these (and those I should be asking) is "yes." I just have a deep distrust of arguments in favor of some action when a major premise of that action is "it's inevitable, anyway." Maybe it's true sometimes? IDK, but there's a lot of very bad history with this kind of argument.

@bnewbold @cwebber OK, that metaphor I understand, at least. Is this not possible with a network-of-networks like the fediverse?

@shiri @bnewbold @cwebber Just a note: I was influenced by something @pluralistic (Cory Doctorow) wrote: I'm less concerned about power outages than capture. I've started to evaluate services by how easily they could be captured by someone I don't like. I think Bluesky can be captured easily, so it makes me uncomfortable. That isn't the same as saying it can't be useful or "good" (I'm not the one to evaluate that) but it's not what I want.

@icedquinn Or a 20something white Canadian guy I knew in the early 2000s. One night driving in the GTA he got pulled over by Mounties. He asked why he was pulled over and spent the next 10 minutes getting beaten to a pulp. After ER visits and a few days in hospital he decided that, yes, he would take his American gf up on her offer to go live in Virginia.

I absolutely don't think your cops have quite the same problems as our cops, but I do believe something I read years ago: police across the world tend to feel more kinship for other police than for citizens of their own countries.

@cwebber Or you could be like my students: getting a joke painfully explained to you because I'm annoyed that no one laughed at it.