For those that are questioning what the point of the lengthy article is because the title doesn’t help much, here’s the explanation:
Imagine it this way: let’s say every time you stepped outside your front door, you decided you want to be safe, so you dressed head-to-toe in full combat gear, complete with bulky full-body kevlar, a helmet, safety glasses, steel-toed boots, and gloves. I can stop the scenario here: even for those of us living in the roughest places, that’s a silly visual because it’s overkill. To be a little detailed, it also goes back to that word I used: “you want to be safe.” Safe from what? The sun? Then just put on some sunscreen and a hat. The cold? Put on a jacket. Danger? Keep your eyes up, headphones out (or low), and be aware of your surroundings.
Yet, many of us do the equivalent of overdressing in our digital lives because, as I said, we don’t always see it right away. Most people can instantly tell when they might be putting on too many items of clothing. Even something as simple as a jacket – when you feel the weight and restriction of movement – makes you pause enough to go “how cold is it really outside?” With the digital world, it can be much harder to notice the added weight, at least for a while. This makes it easier to overdress and not notice for a long time – or to dress up in full armor except for going barefoot (like I said, inconsistent action). In the past, I’ve compared some of the easier cybersecurity strategies with locking your front door: it’s technically inconvenient but we accept that inconvenience because the dramatic increase in security and safety outweighs it. This is comparable to things like using a password manager and 2FA or making the upfront switching cost to another service.
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Once [people] understand the concept, they quickly start to realize where they can safely dial back to something less stressful without risking themselves and where they should instead focus more attention to improve. You don’t need the entire suit of body armor, you just need to put on a jacket.
Mastodon’s moderation model is very different than BlueSky. BlueSky’s seems to be much better for targeted individuals and groups. But things aren’t entirely hashed out on either protocol or their implementations. We’ll see how it goes.
With BlueSky, it pretends to be similar, but the reality is that everything needs to go through their central server in order to be displayed on a timeline.
They have been saying that this is an implementation detail that will change when they open up that part of their implementation. Which is nice, but until that happens I’m only lukewarm in my optimism for Bluesky and the AT protocol.
On the other hand, every federated network has converged on a central host for the vast majority of accounts and data. That host has outsized influence over the standard used on the network and unencrypted acess to the majority of data. So I’m not sure what really matters to what extent.
GitHub's Missing Tab | Brane Dump | The thoughts of Matt Palmer | Thu, 30 May 2024 (www.hezmatt.org)
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