@aral@mastodon.ar.al
@aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar

aral

@aral@mastodon.ar.al

I make small things.

My posts are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/)

🍉🌻 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️

#SmallWeb #SmallTech #web #tech #privacy #humanRights #personhood #democracy #aral #fedi22 #searchable

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kev, to Futurology
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deleted_by_author

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    aral,
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    @kev This is how you respond to something like this when you have a backbone. Thank you.

    aral, to random
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    If there is even a single gram of truth to this…

    Any instance that goes along with such a thing will be lost to surveillance capitalism. I don’t care how large they are or who they are, any instance that becomes Meta’s bitch should be defederated immediately by all others. Let the largest few get swallowed up whole by Silicon Valley if they’re dumb enough to do it. The rest of us will rebuild.

    I really hope no one is stupid enough to take Meta up on this if it’s true. https://beach.city/@vantablack/110594120842443355

    aral,
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    @supernovae @MariaLiv (And by ignorance, I mean privilege.)

    aral,
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    @Chimaera Hence the “if”

    aral,
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    @alternative_be Exactly. If it comes to pass, we should do all we can to help people on those instances migrate to safer ones before defederating those instances.

    aral,
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    I started on the Fediverse with Mastodon about seven years ago when I had ~42K followers on Twitter and zero here.

    Personally, I don’t care how many followers I lose. My tiny, ineffectual, instance of one will defederate with any instance, no matter how large, if this rumour is true.

    If this comes to pass, I’d urge those of you on the instances that become Meta’s lackeys to move to instances that are not if you’d like us to stay in touch.

    Remember, it’s about quality not quantity. Always.

    aral,
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    @qwazix The same way you moderate in real life as a person. By deciding who gets to follow you and disassociating yourself from the people you don’t want in your life.

    The system merely models the human being as we know it in physical space.

    aral,
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    @MariaLiv @supernovae Oh, I think we know rather clearly where he stands. From his posts it’s possible he’s the one who reached out to Meta first and started this whole thing to begin with.

    https://universeodon.com/@supernovae/110568600592555576

    aral,
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    @wakame But it only looked like the Small Web. In essence it was the Big Web we have today. Only it hadn’t been injected with capital yet and the centres hadn’t grown.

    Any system that can scale vertically, will scale vertically.

    aral,
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    @ubiquity75 Thank you. More than anything, I think it’s necessary.

    PS. I’d love to be able to present this to academia more but not sure, short of doing a PhD on it or something, how to go about that. Any ideas?

    aral,
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    (And maybe some of you will now see why I’m designing the Small Web as a peer-to-peer web. Why ensuring that every node – every instance – is equal is essential to any system that wants to resist centralisation and corporate capture. Why if these places are extensions of ourselves, we must own and control them ourselves. It’s the difference between being a person and not a person in the digital age. It’s high time we understood this.)

    https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/

    aral,
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    @kite @prdan Findability and availability. Every node has a physical, always-on, addressable place on the network. We don’t need immutable trees of data and gossip protocols and signaling servers beyond what’s in the existing infrastructure of the web. And so I hope this will lead to far greater simplicity and usability as well as allowing for emergent, extensible use cases and protocols. I see it as a bridge between the web and p2p for everyday people who use technology as an everyday thing.

    aral,
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    @ij Thank you 💕

    aral,
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    @supernovae @MariaLiv Your painting of the entirely rational trepidation of those who understand Meta/Facebook/Instagram/surveillance capitalism – based not only on their toxic business model but the many documented ramifications of it on human rights and democracy – as “hate and pitchforks” and “fear, uncertainty, and doubt” is the problem here and is what’s incompatible with “love for this place.”

    What I don’t know is, is it out of ignorance or malice?

    aral,
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    @chrisg Exactly.

    Heck, it should be baked into the protocol.

    I mean that’s what I’m doing with the Small Web. Only the instance size limit there is 1 because I’ve had enough of this bullshit.

    aral,
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    I’ve been shouting with my whole chest about the danger of large instances for as long as I can remember.

    Even if this rumour is not true today or even if the large instance admins decide to act intelligently and with backbone and refuse such an offer if it is true, the danger remains.

    You don’t have to wait for the ship to sink before taking action. If you’re on a huge instance, move to a smaller one. Spread yourselves thin. Make each instance a smaller target. Make the fediverse stronger.

    aral, to random
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    Silicon Valley folks: I love this federation thing but can’t we just have one corporate server that everyone joins?

    aral, (edited )
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    @ParadeGrotesque They’re not even the customers. The advertisers are the customers. They’re the livestock that’s sold to the customers.

    aral,
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    @gabek 🔥

    Radical_EgoCom, to random

    Anti-homeless bench promoting the Barble movie

    aral,
    @aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar

    @Radical_EgoCom May capitalism die in a fire.

    aral, (edited ) to random
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    Can you imagine Zuckerberg signing an NDA with Musk? Cook signing an NDA with Nadella? No? Damn right, no. There’s a reason for that.

    Ffs, buy a fucking vowel.

    aral,
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    @jonathan And how limited was that NDA and how many lawyers were involved in ensuring that it was absolutely limited in scope?

    aral, to random
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    It seems Russia is best at invading Russia.

    aral,
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    @wakame My bad ;)

    jens, to fediverse
    @jens@coma.social avatar

    One thing I'm wondering, aside from any ideological viewpoints: Does scale the way new potential giants like / would need it to? I remember some bigger accounts already having put a lot of pressure on / instances (i.e., see https://ar.al/2022/11/09/is-the-fediverse-about-to-get-fryed-or-why-every-toot-is-also-a-potential-denial-of-service-attack/ – thanks for the write up, @aral!)and that would be nowhere near of what to expect…

    Protocol wise, it just doesn't look like a good fit to me. Any insights or thoughts here?

    aral,
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    @jens Wish I’d been clearer in the post: will definitely scale the way like / need it to.

    In fact, at its core, any protocol – no matter how inefficient – that assumes hierarchy where one group is ruled over by another inherently favours centralisation. And Big Tech can always throw money at the problem as well as “optimise” protocols to improve economies of scale.

    The alternative is /p2p, where every node is equal.

    https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/

    aral, to random
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    I know several of you have contacted me with speaking and interview requests via email (thank you) and I haven’t gotten back to you (sorry).

    I’m trying to focus on getting Domain¹ ready so I’ve been really bad at email. It’s not that I don’t want to but it’s hard to context switch and I’m finding it difficult to get into the flow with coding at the moment so I’m trying to minimise distractions. I will get back to you as soon as I can.

    :kitten:💕

    ¹ https://codeberg.org/domain/app

    aral,
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    @MariaLiv To you too :) 💕

    aral, to random
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    @MariaLiv I’d love to say yes but mine’s an instance of one. I don’t want to moderate for anyone else and believe everyone should make those decisions for themselves. So, as much as I’d like to help, I won’t be your (or anyone else’s) moderator.

    (That’s why I’m designing the Small Web as peer-to-peer; instances of one.)

    That said, if you make a post asking for good small instances to join, I’d be more than happy to boost it :)

    aral, to random
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    What’s schadenfreaude in Russian?

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