Notices by Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz), page 62

"Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side."
- George Orwell, 'Notes on Nationalism'
http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/nationalism/english/e_nat

As the nearest existing equivalent I have chosen the word ‘nationalism’, but it will be seen in a moment that I am not using it in quite the ordinary sense, if only because the emotion I am speaking about does not always attach itself to what is called a nation — that is, a single race or a geographical area. It can attach itself to a church or a class, or it may work in a merely negative sense, against something or other ..."
George Orwell, 'Notes on Nationalism'
http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/nationalism/english/e_nat

@LibertyPaulM a quote from John Walker:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/#Conclusion

@LibertyPaulM
"Power, especially concentrated power, is rarely relinquished willingly. Each technology proposed to ameliorate supposed problems with present-day computing and network architectures must be carefully examined, individually and in conjunction with others, for the potential it holds to shift the balance of power back from the individual to the centre; to supplant the peer architecture of the Internet with a producer/consumer model more comparable to publishing and broadcasting."

@LibertyPaulM can you quote the relevant section of the FB ToS? Most hosts treat the act of uploading as granting them an unlimited, irrevocable license to reproduce the content uploaded (necessary to deliver the service, when you think about it), but the copyright remains with the uploader. Would be good to know who has copyright over content uploaded to FB.

@LibertyPaulM
> these rules are necessary or else they would face massive legal liabilities

#IANAL but my understanding is that hosts of user-generated content are not regulated (in the US at least) as publishers, but as ISPs. So like a datacentre hosting a website, they're not legally liable for the content they host, but they are granted powers to do some level of moderation on it.
https://www.wired.com/2017/04/face-law-cant-keep-violence-off-facebook-either/

@danjones There are many possible strategies for redecentralizing, and resolving the *many* problems with JS, some of which are described here:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.en.html

I agree with @alcinnz that moving interactive functions back into native apps, leaving the web as a platform for static pages that don't require (or use) JS, is a strategy worth exploring.
@aral

@danjones fair points. But privacy is only a subset of a much larger concern, which is about *control*. Putting aside the argument we could have over the "black box" part of my post, the fact remains that:

> outsourcing processing work to the user's PC - via JS - is exactly how #SurveillanceCapitalism achieves massive scale, while claiming that #ThereIsNoAlternative to centralized server infrastructure.
@aral

@danjones
> effectively open source, even if it's not licensed as such.

Please don't misuse the term #OpenSource this way. It has a widely accepted definition (https://opensource.org/osd) , and unlicensed or proprietary JS does not fit that definition. If there is no existing term to describe code that is visible but not freely reusable, feel free to coin one :)

@zig in hindsight, it's not really that surprising that the original P2P internet (early 90s and before) came to be replaced by #DataFarms. Essentially the same process happened with TV, radio, film, and newspapers. They all started as decentralized, hobbyist media, then became commercialized, then increasingly centralized through VC and acquisitions. See #BrianMartin's book linked in the last post, and also 'The Pirate's Dilemma' by #MattMason.
@VeintePesos @buoyantair @aral @alcinnz

@zig
> People are used to star-systems where some people produce and the majority only (!) consume.

Sure, and this is an ancient pattern. You can trace it back through broadcast media (TV, radio, newspapers, see #InformationLiberation: http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/98il/), to parliaments and chartered corporations, to pre-Reformation theocracies under the control of entities like the Catholic Church, to the Roman and Greek Empires, and probably much further back.

@VeintePesos @buoyantair @aral @alcinnz

@zig
> Also #gnunet support search no need for a supernode to do the indexing for you.

I freely admit that despite making a number of attempts to find out, I still don't understand what GNUnet is meant to be used for. I've never come across anyone who actually uses it on a regular basis. Do you? If so, feel free to fill me in on what it's useful for, I'm genuinely curious.
@VeintePesos @buoyantair @aral @alcinnz

@zig OK, but #BitTorrent still needs trackers, yes? These are also supernodes.
@VeintePesos @buoyantair @aral @alcinnz

@gdr @Wolf480pl curiosity got the better of me. That's some awesome retro artwork right there. Took me right back to the days of pirating games for my #Commodore64 ;)

@lightweight could I run #OpenStack on a consumer-grade desktop computer in my home / office (in my case, the same place)? If I did, could people connect to it over a consumer-grade internet connection? If not, the decentralization enabled by OpenStack is an improvement on the corporate #DataFarms, but still centralized around commercial #DataCentres, compared to the distributed early 90s web 1.0 architecture John Walker describes.

@bob @lightweight
"With no possibility of migrating to IPv6 in time to solve the address space crunch, the industry resigned itself to soldiering on with IPv4, adopting the following increasingly clever means of conserving the limited address space. Each of these, however, had the unintended consequence of transforming the pure peer relationship originally envisioned for the Internet into “publisher” and “consumer” classes, and increasing the anonymity of Internet access."
- John Walker

@bob according to John Walker, the centralization of the web started around 1995, with the failure to adopt IPv6. Although the term "web 2.0" wasn't coined until later, sites that fit that description started to appear in the late 90s (including the first #Indymedia site in 1999)
@lightweight

Although it doesn't affect the main thrust of his argument, I don't agree with Aral that the web was always centralized. There are still, here and there, remnants of the pre-Geocities tradition on personal homepages hosted on the person's own desktop computer in their home or office. The changes to the ISP business that made this increasingly impractical - and set the stage for the #DataFarming business - are documented by #JohnWalker in 'The Digital Imprimatur'
http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/

'On the General Architecture of the Peer Web' is an excellent essay by #AralBalkan of Ind.ie, laying out a brief history of the social impacts of computers and networks with a minimum of geek jargon, and some ideas for what the future of digital network technology could hold for us:
https://ar.al/2019/02/13/on-the-general-architecture-of-the-peer-web/

@aral this is a fantastic piece of writing. Get out of my head! :)
@alcinnz @buoyantair @VeintePesos