For this #ThankYouTuesday, I want to thank everyone who still wants to own their data. Those who aren't swayed by seemingly valid and effective technical solutions designed solely to entrap. To those who don't believe in the flashy pages created by web giants that promise better results than others and sometimes sabotage competitors to create this illusion. Or embrace and extinguish the competition.
When all our data and activities are chained to the servers and infrastructures of a few entities, what will we truly own?
WhatsApp introduces "ask meta ai" in the local chat search bar, and Slack auto-feeds messages to train their LLM robots https://eigenmagic.net/@NewtonMark/112455578857917485 ... Delta Chat is among the shrinking number of messaging applications that does not look at your data except to end-to-end encrypt it and send it over interoperable message transport servers chosen by yourselves and your contacts. #decentralization#security#privacy ftw!
We have two new team members First, we are massively pleased that @Shu has agreed to join us to help out with monitoring, observability and visualisation of operations.
Second, we’re delighted to welcome Nic, who joins as product manager. This is an essential role as we move out of the R&D phase into delivery.
#Ghost#ActivityPub#Decentralization#OpenWeb: "They say the best way to predict the future is to create it, so two weeks ago we shared our intention to connect Ghost with the ActivityPub Network to bring back the open web. We were delighted when our ideas managed to spread even further and wider than we'd imagined, and that so many of you signed up to be a part of the journey."
We have a new stable test network for you as PunchNet winds down. Impressive work as always from the community, and it’s wonderful to see all the dashboards brightening up the thread.
I regularly think about this essay about the evolution of #centralization in computing. It focuses on businesses and research, but I have a feeling that the next stage of #decentralization will happen via the general public.
We don't have to rely on energy-hungry, leak-prone servers to run 24/7 to do our basic tasks. We need more local-first computing.
"If you just imagine teleporting yourself back to 1970, and somone who was looking forward to the PC revolution - which was going to happen in just a few years - was like 'alright, we're not going to have entire rooms full of computer stuff anymore, and you're not going to have a mainframe that you connect to to do everything. Everything's going to work on these little boxes people have in their home'."
It's easy to agree with imposing due process requirements on services like the existing DataFarms, commercial operations that have become so large and so dominant they are de facto common carriers (and I include AWS in that). But what about services set up by one person on a PC in their closet, so they can chat with their friends?
Does it really make sense to apply the same rules to a house party that we apply to a mall? If not, how do we fairly define where due process rules apply?
Fortunately, lawmakers are learning how to apply different rules to different situations when regulating the net. Laws like the EU DMA lay out criteria for when a service becomes a "gatekeeper", dominant enough to be subject to the consumer protection rules in that law. Rules that are potentially complicated and expensive to follow.
We could have similar criteria for triggering due process requirements, so they only apply to services large enough to be considered a gatekeeper.
We have a new testnet out, following successful poking at the recent alpha network. Thanks to all those who have tried it so far.
And we are pleased to say the node manager is performing well now, so we advise that as the default way of deploying nodes as it provides several additional controls, particularly with regard to upgrading.