@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/)

šŸ‰šŸŒ» šŸ³ļøā€šŸŒˆ šŸ³ļøā€āš§ļø

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

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

aral, to random
@aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar

If there is even a single gram of truth to thisā€¦

Any instance that goes along with such a thing will be lost to surveillance capitalism. I donā€™t care how large they are or who they are, any instance that becomes Metaā€™s bitch should be defederated immediately by all others. Let the largest few get swallowed up whole by Silicon Valley if theyā€™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 itā€™s true. https://beach.city/@vantablack/110594120842443355

aral,
@aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar

@wakame But it only looked like the Small Web. In essence it was the Big Web we have today. Only it hadnā€™t been injected with capital yet and the centres hadnā€™t grown.

Any system that can scale vertically, will scale vertically.

aral,
@aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar

@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 donā€™t want in your life.

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

aral,
@aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar

@chrisg Exactly.

Heck, it should be baked into the protocol.

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

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

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

aral,
@aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar

(And maybe some of you will now see why Iā€™m designing the Small Web as a peer-to-peer web. Why ensuring that every node ā€“ every instance ā€“ 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. Itā€™s the difference between being a person and not a person in the digital age. Itā€™s high time we understood this.)

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

aral,
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Iā€™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 donā€™t have to wait for the ship to sink before taking action. If youā€™re on a huge instance, move to a smaller one. Spread yourselves thin. Make each instance a smaller target. Make the fediverse stronger.

aral,
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@ij Thank you šŸ’•

aral,
@aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar

@ubiquity75 Thank you. More than anything, I think itā€™s necessary.

PS. Iā€™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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@kite @prdan Findability and availability. Every node has a physical, always-on, addressable place on the network. We donā€™t need immutable trees of data and gossip protocols and signaling servers beyond whatā€™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,
@aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar

@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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@Chimaera Hence the ā€œifā€

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

aral,
@aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar

@wakame My bad ;)

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, to random
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Silicon Valley folks: I love this federation thing but canā€™t we just have one corporate server that everyone joins?

aral,
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@gabek šŸ”„

aral, (edited ) to random
@aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar

Can you imagine Zuckerberg signing an NDA with Musk? Cook signing an NDA with Nadella? No? Damn right, no. Thereā€™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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I know several of you have contacted me with speaking and interview requests via email (thank you) and I havenā€™t gotten back to you (sorry).

Iā€™m trying to focus on getting DomainĀ¹ ready so Iā€™ve been really bad at email. Itā€™s not that I donā€™t want to but itā€™s hard to context switch and Iā€™m finding it difficult to get into the flow with coding at the moment so Iā€™m trying to minimise distractions. I will get back to you as soon as I can.

:kitten:šŸ’•

Ā¹ https://codeberg.org/domain/app

aral,
@aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar

@MariaLiv To you too :) šŸ’•

lisamelton, to apple
@lisamelton@mastodon.social avatar

My name is Elizabeth but please call me Lisa.

I'm probably best known as the person who started the and projects at . You may think you know my deadname but... you don't.

I've drawn underground comics, pioneered using a Mac for newspaper graphics and developed software at Adobe and Netscape.

Now I write video scripts and sometimes podcast.

Follow me and I'll fill your timeline with boosts.

1/4

aral,
@aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar

@lisamelton šŸ’•

jwildeboer, to Titanic
@jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net avatar

Debris field located 200m from the bow of the titanic where nothing was found before. Catastrophic implosion of the vessel. Damn. As I feared :(

aral, (edited )
@aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar

@jwildeboer Iā€™ll get to them after Iā€™ve mourned the 500 non-billionaire Brown people we drowned in the Mediterranean because, as Europeans, weā€™re racist and xenophobic.

aral, to random
@aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar

Self-driving cars are just billionaire death subs for the rest of us.

aral,
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@arielcostas @precariousmind Oh, I hear you ;)

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

ncrav, (edited ) to random
@ncrav@mas.to avatar

It is with great sadness that I tell everyone that followed Lua&Orcus, that Orcus has passed today during the neutering procedure. He was a young bunny filled with health and joy, but had a complication due to anesthesia and didn't wake up.

This is the last photo I have of him waiting, good bye my little bun, me and Lua are going to miss you a lot ā˜¹ļø

Edit P.S.: I've removed previous posts of him since it's a little too much to look at rn

aral,
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@ncrav Iā€™m so sorry for your loss šŸ’”

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/ ā€“ thanks for the write up, @aral!)and that would be nowhere near of what to expectā€¦

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

aral,
@aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar

@jens Wish Iā€™d been clearer in the post: will definitely scale the way like / need it to.

In fact, at its core, any protocol ā€“ no matter how inefficient ā€“ 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 ā€œoptimiseā€ 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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So whoā€™s gonna tell libertarians BioShock is a warning, not an instruction manual?

aral,
@aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar

@daswickerman True ;)

LilahTovMoon, to random

Is this what a mid-life crisis looks like for cis people? Or just cis billionaires?

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65981876

aral,
@aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar

@LilahTovMoon * psychopaths

ramsey, to random
@ramsey@phpc.social avatar

Folks, get off Twitter. I donā€™t care where you go, be it Bluesky or the Fediverse, but leave Twitter.

Your continued involvement on Twitter supports this.

aral,
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@alexl @ArneBab His own trans child disowned him, ffs. What more evidence do you need? I seriously cannot believe youā€™re spending your life defending a douchebag billionaire.

aral, to random
@aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar

@MariaLiv Iā€™d love to say yes but mineā€™s an instance of one. I donā€™t want to moderate for anyone else and believe everyone should make those decisions for themselves. So, as much as Iā€™d like to help, I wonā€™t be your (or anyone elseā€™s) moderator.

(Thatā€™s why Iā€™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, Iā€™d be more than happy to boost it :)

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