Notices by Alan Zimmerman (alanz@social.coop), page 4

There's a pervasive liberal myth that the powerful care, or even want to know, what we think. It's the same thought process behind sidewalk protests, because the thing that *really* causes change is witty slogans on posterboard

These things have *never* worked, yet people still believe that all we need is a few more signatures and a few more protestors and then they'll crack. Why should they?

The only language the ruling class speaks is force. If you don't make it more damaging for them to keep up than to relent to you, they won't give a fuck

Debian, along with 30+ organizations, recently signed the Affirmation of the Open Source Definition. https://opensource.org/node/966 #opensource #freesoftware

« In the past, it often made sense to believe something until it was debunked; in the future, for certain information or claims, it will start making sense to assume they are fake. Unless they are verified.

If this sounds like a suspicious and bureaucratic world, it’s important to remember the alternative: a societal fracturing into a million epistemic communities, all at war with one another over the nature of truth. »

@Tryphon The PGP WOT's core concept goes like this:

1. I publish claims with my key, e.g. "this key belongs to Bjarni."

2. Others sign these claims to vouch for their truthfulness.

3. You calculate a trustworthiness score for a key by finding paths through the social graph of attestations.

It conflates "This key is safe to use" with "a claim was truthful", with "I convinced people of something", with "I am to be trusted to evaluate others' claims."

These are not sane or safe equivalences.

@bhaugen E is the programming language that Electric Communities Habitat was written in. After EC(H) shut down, the E language survived and lived on as http://erights.org/ so you're absolutely right :)

You know, Mastodon is cool and all, but when you get right down to it Twitter-style communications just kind of fundamentally suck for some kinds of stuff.

You know what'd be cool? An ActivityPub-powered web forum, or a LIveJournal-style personal blog but with some of Tumblr's social aspects thanks to being able to network with other blogs.

Make Web 4.0 into Web 1.0 again.

@aral it's the scarcity aspect of the money that leads to centralisation and encourages investment and speculation.

Mutual credit based crypto like we're starting to see with a few projects is the seeds of a truly decentralised money mechanism.

Blockchain: decentralisation centralised on my coin.

Hint: the core of decentralisation isn’t about having a billion copies of the same database. It’s about a billion people each having their own, unique database.

PS. In a truly decentralised system, no one makes a billion dollars. *watches all the right libertarians make for the door*

PPS. A venture capitalist would never invest in a truly decentralised system. Why? See PS, above.

#blockchain #VentureCapital #bullshit

@emi is quoted in this piece about cooperatives and other forms of sharing economy.

https://www.shareable.net/blog/how-Japan-is-working-towards-creating-a-true-sharing-economy

@Shamar But to be super clear, where I'm coming from is that I want to find ways to make enough money from libre software development in order to live on without infringing the Four Freedoms. I think it's vital for that to be possible, and I'm not really interested in debating that.

And while I do think many projects do need to be openly governed, I don't think every project needs to be. Closed governance may be one path, as long as those projects do not complain about forks.

The new DNS over HTTPS (DOH) in #Firefox has an anti-feature. It bypasses any ad-blocking entries you might have in your /etc/hosts file.

There's a setting in about:config called "network.trr.mode" which is set to 2 by default. (TRR = Trusted Recursive Resolver).

I set the value to 1, which creates a race between /etc/hosts and the TRR to resolve the domain first and the winner's IP address is picked.

I hope both ad-blocking and #DOH work with this setting.

Ref:
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2018/06/03/inside-firefoxs-doh-engine/

Great. Google have added a level of bureaucracy to their OAuth, requiring apps be verified before people can grant access to their accounts.

Since I missed the initial notice this was happening, and the verification process can take *weeks*, the #mailpile credentials may be disabled. Nobody will be able to download their mail for who knows how long.

Nothing anti-competitive to see here, this is fine. Just use the official Google apps, you'll have fewer problems.

In the name of security... 😞

Kibousoft is just a couple people doing web development. It's as much of a "corporation" as I am, since I am self-employed and doing web development. mastodon.cloud was struggling with an owner who had no technical experience, so the people of Kibousoft offered to take it over. It wasn't bought out.

I'm sad to see people spreading misinformation about this. One of the Kibousoft guys was co-admin of KNZK and is one of the nicest people on here.

All of GitHub's menus & dialogs work without JavaScript. The brilliant @muanchiou@twitter.com figured out that `<details>` elements could make popover menus work without JS https://github.com/muan/details-on-details! We've got open source helpers too: https://github.com/github/details-menu-element https://github.com/github/details-dialog-element

@cwebber Some of my research possibly relevant to your work: https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.02426

I'm not sure in what order #Spritely things will come out. I expect a series of regular releases, but *what* comes out will be whatever is most convenient for me to release at that point.

Near term possibilities:

- Crystal: How can we bring updateable content to p2p systems? Inspired by Tahoe-LAFS and Freenet's updateable content, but simplified for easy explanation.
- Crystal Golem: The Golem demo, but now using Crystal URIs!
- Humanoid: a bare-bones ActivityPub implementation tutorial

At TPAC in 2017, someone asked me, what would I do if I could work on what I was really interested in and cared about? I sheepishly admitted that, well, I'd like to work on social networks as a distributed virtual world / game.

I thought I'd be laughed out of the room. Instead, it turned out that almost everyone I was working with had background in that space. Even the ocap stuff I'd been studying came largely from Electric Communities Habitat.

That gave me the courage to pursue #Spritely.