Notices by Robin Berjon (robin@mastodon.social)

@apostolis @cwebber @khinsen
Some large-scale things can be expensive.

We have this huge centralised and expensive thing called the postal service (in most countries), it's better than the alternatives. Most digital infrastructure is orders of magnitude cheaper though, and even when expensive it's cheaper than losing to fascism!

@apostolis @cwebber @khinsen

A few quick notes.

Polycentrism isn't democracy but you can't have democracy (durable, at scale) without it.

Complex problems are multiscalar and need multiscalar solutions — therefore polycentric.

If you try to do everything locally you get captured by whoever can solve the large scale problems. Eg. email is concentrated because dealing with the whole world is too hard. The web is captured because you have to have search.

@jens @urixturing I tend to agree. My thinking is: "build what we need to have, if we can reuse parts of the web great, if not it doesn't matter."

That said, I think that building the new things without trying to save the web might actually… save the web. The web's great at general-purpose document retrieval. Shifting the rest off the web could make that part work great again.

@josemurilo @uira One idea I like is to help people organise to create their own content moderation. We don't all need to have the same one but if every individual has to do all of it alone that's way too much work. But people could come together in groups to produce content moderation labels, and others can apply those labels (to block, mute, etc.). I think there's great collective potential there. Tools like https://github.com/bluesky-social/ozone can help.

@josemurilo @uira There are other examples around the world (e.g. Beckn). I think it would be wonderful if we had some kind of place that all of us who are interested in democratic digital spaces and digital self-determination could come together to share experiences and debate how best to do things.

@josemurilo @uira Regarding the European conversation, right now it's mostly talking. There is this event coming up: https://digital-independence.eu/ (sorry for the bad accessibility on that page) and a lot of discussion on the topic, but not a lot of concrete work yet.

I think Brazil is ahead on this topic. I look at something like Pix and I think "Hey! Why isn't the European Central Bank doing that!?"

@josemurilo @uira
* Building new protocols atop AT. Maybe there is something to do with Pix?
* Build up capacity for Ozone governance so people can make their own content moderation.

That's just a few morning thoughts from an ocean away of course, I'd love to hear what you think would be most useful!

@josemurilo @uira Those are very interesting questions and also an important topic here in Europe even if the situation is different! I would love to sit down and spend more time working through the details of what would be the best approach here. A couple quick notes:

* I think that deploying AT PDS hosting alternative to Bluesky would be relatively easy, cheap, and useful. It would serve as a guarantee of independence.
* Developing the AT/AP integration to avoid lock in (more work & harder)

@josemurilo @uira I think there are more details about that at https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds. But before jumping into the hosting part, I would recommend spending some time figuring out what the goals are and what the governance for such a PDS hosting service would be. In my mind, when democracy works it is also a school for democracy, and we all need to learn how to do democracy in digital spaces, there is very little experience. Maybe this is a place to experiment!

In case you missed it over the weekend: check out this Tech Policy Press piece I wrote with Cristina Caffarra about the wrong and right ways remedies to use now that Google Search is officially a monopoly!

https://www.techpolicy.press/google-is-a-monopolist-wrong-and-right-ways-to-think-about-remedies/

You know who has written about how our concentrated tech monocultures create fragile systems that predictably collapse at large scales?

Yup, that's right, it's @mariafarrell and I (stuck in Seattle), that's who.
https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/

@luis_in_brief @blakereid @ntnsndr @mnot Blake has more of a pitchfork deck.

@blakereid @luis_in_brief @ntnsndr @mnot Computers weren't a great idea either.

@ntnsndr @mnot Never not be shilling Nate! (Did I say it right fellow kids?)

@ntnsndr Is there one that's not terrible?

@darnell @jeff You can use a Chromium-based browser, it won't track your every breath the way that Chrome does. There are issues of browser engine diversity for sure, but at least as a user you're better off with anything not Chrome.

(I used Firefox, heavily, and no problems to report here, even on mobile.)

If you're still using Chrome in 2024, the only question is why?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/01/technology/google-chrome-browser-data.html

@ntnsndr Which client do you use? I tried a few but they were quite painful. I trust Signal enough that it wasn't worth it.

@ntnsndr @mmasnick @blakereid It sparks joy because you stumble onto things.

A todo list doesn't work I'll never see it again. I've only driven tab volume down with an extension I wrote that makes a Markdown snippet of page metadata that I can paste into the appropriate Obsidian entry's to-read list. *Then* I'll find it again but it's high friction because it requires there to be a matching note in Obsidian, ideally with stub text and links to related notes.

@boris @ntnsndr @mmasnick @blakereid I don't need a browser to have too many tabs open in Obsidian!

(Different purpose though, that's not to find again it's just active projects.)