Notices by ar.al🌻 (aral@mastodon.ar.al)

Food for thought: The bigger mastodon.social gets, the less successful the #fediverse is.

Sadly, the fundamental design of Mastodon mirrors the design of Big Tech (a server architecture that can support hundreds of thousands of “users”) and thus inherits its success criteria.

I feel it’s time we at least started thinking about what the web would look like if we all had our own place on it and what it would take to get there from here.

#decentralisation #centralisation #fediverse #SmallWeb

Folks making alternatives: don’t recreate the systems of closed, centralised silos. They’re designed with the needs and success criteria of closed, centralised organisations. You cannot compete with them on their own terms. They have the resources to create centralised workflows, you do not. And your success criteria are the opposite of theirs. You do not want to centralise information, power, and wealth. Think about where your strengths lie and design from first principles according to those.

If you’re comfortable within injustice, you’re complicit in injustice.

So remember when I was saying Zoom is a privacy and security train wreck? Apparently, that was an understatement:

“Zoom has ‘rolled their own’ encryption scheme [with] significant weaknesses … [and transmits] meeting encryption keys through China.”

https://citizenlab.ca/2020/04/move-fast-roll-your-own-crypto-a-quick-look-at-the-confidentiality-of-zoom-meetings/

Via @ScottMortimer

You can now watch my talk on the future of Internet regulation at the European Parliament yesterday on Peertube (@joinpeertube) thanks to @vincib

https://video.lqdn.fr/videos/watch/70f2128c-8c06-4cc4-8a5a-bf77e765c8fd

And here are my slides (which were on the screens but aren’t visible in the video):

https://small-tech.slides.com/aral/dear-regulators-dont-throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater#/

There are people who will tell you that the way things are is the way things have always been and will always be.

Don’t listen to these people.

The way things are is just raw material for the way things can be. And by your every action or inaction you help determine what that is.

@Gargron Hey Eugen, thanks, man. I’m going to go in there and give the talk I’m going to give tomorrow. I hope I will do Mastodon proud and I hope that I will show them how centralised differs from federated differs from peer-to-peer and how Facebook, etc., are scum of the earth and do not deserve a place at the table (they have one tomorrow, of course).

Wanna blow up my Raspberry Pi Zero?

Here, have some random ASCII cows: https://pi0.ar.al/cows

You can also see the stats for this session here: https://pi0.ar.al/b829a930d7dc1a0e8d118eb83d1d9576

(I just want to see how it performs. Will turn it off at some point and delete this tweet when I do.) :)

#SiteJS #RaspberryPi

Dear @gitlab, after reading this, I am ashamed to be using your product:

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/30656/diffs

We will stop using it as soon as we can manage to and I will stop recommending you to others. Unlike you, we don’t associate with folks incompatible with our values.

Shame on you.

#gitlab