@robin@mastodon.social
@robin@mastodon.social avatar

robin

@robin@mastodon.social

Governance & Standards at @protocollabs — Former NYT, W3C TAG, science.ai — Privacy, Web, Science, Politics, Philosophy. (he/him/Ishmael)

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gordon, to random

bridges two permissionless protocols

“noooooo nobody asked my permission!! nooooooo!!!”

robin,
@robin@mastodon.social avatar

@dsalo @boris Pretty much all the existing bridges to non-Bluesky things have happened without anyone complaining. Someone mentions Bluesky and all of a sudden it's open season to harass someone. This isn't new, it's a pattern. This place is in-groupy beyond what I think is healthy. Happy people don't get aggressive at the simple mention of elsewhere. More than anything else, it feels like imagining an evil out-group to justify putting up with the experience.

robin,
@robin@mastodon.social avatar

@dsalo @boris I've seen other things screamed at but nothing at this level of visceral hatred. (Perhaps for Threads, but, like, they do actual genocides.) Maybe I just missed some of the other stuff.

Dorsey certainly seems to be an idiot. At least he shut down his Bluesky account so there's that.

robin,
@robin@mastodon.social avatar

@dsalo @boris I think that's where I disagree: I don't think that it's "Servers and services that expose fedi content beyond what its users understand to be usual-for-the-fedi are seeing the protests." I think it's just because it's Bluesky.

The problem isn't technical at all and I don't see it being improved by increasing technical understanding. The problem is in part people's social understanding of federation that seems to be largely imaginary.

robin,
@robin@mastodon.social avatar

@dsalo Except I don't see the overreach? Anyone could expose AP streams over RSS, or make Matrix replies post as comments on AP. Maybe someone else is using unsecured HTTP 1 as their transport as they read this exchange.

If I've missed something I'd be happy to look. I spent some time yesterday going through a bunch of comments looking for what point of governance people thought it breaks. I found nothing.

robin,
@robin@mastodon.social avatar

@dsalo @boris Everything that people accuse Bluesky of doing (all of which is, as far as I can tell, imaginary) is something that any federated server can do. If people have a mental model whereby just by being here they are protected from those things, then they have the wrong mental model for fedi. The only reason the fedi isn't being stripmined for data or captured by corporate interests is because it's too small (and clunky) to matter. But someone could do that almost overnight.

robin,
@robin@mastodon.social avatar

@dsalo Most of the comments were absolute drivel being completely wrong in GDPR mansplaining. A lot of it was conspiracy theories about Bluesky. Some of it was just vanilla NIMBYism. A few compared bridging protocols to rape, which is a totally normal thing to say.

If this is using federation differently from how federation was designed to be used, I haven't seen that case being made.

robin,
@robin@mastodon.social avatar

@0x1C3B00DA @dsalo @boris You might be right and I think you could be on to something with "ignoring federation". I've had a few cursed discussions over the past months about the level of control that people want to have when they post on social — they basically want DRM over all their posts.

More than once I tried to point out "what you want is basically a server to talk with your friends" but no, they insist it's still social.

maegul, to fediverse
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

Decent Decentralisation

https://berjon.com/decent-imaginaries/

Good counter to the focus on protocols.

> a protocol needs to achieve two things: it needs to prevent the accumulation of power imbalances between parties … and it needs to make it easy for users to cooperate in building the the rules they want for how the protocol's operation affects them … the success of decentralisation and … of a democratic digital world rides not only on liberation but also on organising.

@fediverse

By @robin

robin,
@robin@mastodon.social avatar

@astrojuanlu @maegul @fediverse Thank you!

robin,
@robin@mastodon.social avatar

@maegul @poVoq I'm well aware of democratic work at the instance level, I just don't think that it's the right granularity and I don't see how it doesn't get captured. I'm interested in solutions that work even for people who use Gmail.

I don't understand the Bluesky comment, it doesn't sound related to anything I've said or even to reality?

robin,
@robin@mastodon.social avatar

@poVoq Cloud providers aren't commodified, they're not interoperable. You're comparing a protocol with specific design to enable commodification with proprietary platforms. If you don't understand the properties of ATProto that target that, your critiques are going to go well wide.

robin,
@robin@mastodon.social avatar

@poVoq For instance, I think it would make a lot of sense to manage PDS infra with coops the way it's done in plenty of places for energy provision. Things become a lot harder to manage when the people who are good at providing a commodity also have to be good at CoMo. For completely different topics. In completely different languages. Etc. Decoupling really helps here.

robin,
@robin@mastodon.social avatar

@poVoq Look, no offence but I'm almost at three decades working on web standards. I lost interest in people picking sides for one tech just for the sake of it a long time ago. Happy to discuss if you have better than vague and inaccurate analogies to unrelated tech or "seems to be" aspersions about documented architectures, but if not I'll just get back to my weekend!

robin,
@robin@mastodon.social avatar

@poVoq I used to think that treating the server as a cityish thing made best sense. But cities are dense, they are used for everything including many things we often don't think about (see Jacobs, etc.). The mapping doesn't work very well, except perhaps for people who are very much in one community rather than overlapping ones.

The ATProto approach is credible exit and all the properties that make servers into commodities. It means that you have better flexibility in dealing with infra.

robin,
@robin@mastodon.social avatar

@poVoq Except that there is no necessary requirement to reproduce the constraints of IRL infrastructure specifically at that location. A good question is why pick a server instead of, say, people who use the same undersea cable? Typically that's because cables are a commodity whereas servers provide a single point of capture. But there are two options: make the server democratic or make the server a commodity (a real one, with no power and near-zero switching costs).

ntnsndr, to random
@ntnsndr@social.coop avatar

I wish more people used @matrix with me. It really is a beautiful blend between Slack and Signal, except federated and secure.

robin,
@robin@mastodon.social avatar

@ntnsndr Which client do you use? I tried a few but they were quite painful. I trust Signal enough that it wasn't worth it.

tonofcrates, to random

I wrote some ideas for how to actually make HTML documents a viable replacement for PDFs.

https://willcrichton.net/notes/portable-epubs/

robin,
@robin@mastodon.social avatar

@dginev @tonofcrates Whoa blast from the past!

robin, to random
@robin@mastodon.social avatar

Ever since I was a little child, I've wanted to be on "Internet Exchange". Ok, so maybe it hasn't been running quite that long but it's one of my favourite newsletters and I'm absolutely delighted that @mallory invited me on to talk about GPC!
https://internet.exchangepoint.tech/cybercrime-gpc/

robin,
@robin@mastodon.social avatar

@LillyHerself @mallory Oh no, sorry to hear that!

robin,
@robin@mastodon.social avatar

@LillyHerself That said, it almost came out way worse. I was supposed to do a karaoke version instead, but sadly there was a problem with the label so @mallory had to scrap that.

robin,
@robin@mastodon.social avatar

@LillyHerself @mallory Not a friend to green macaroons? :)

ntnsndr, (edited ) to random
@ntnsndr@social.coop avatar

Thought experiment: Would you use email if you couldn't interact with Gmail or Outlook accounts? Who would not be on email were it not for a Gmail or Outlook account?

robin,
@robin@mastodon.social avatar

@ntnsndr It would seem hard to make it work? That's 90+% of correspondents gone, meaning probably 100% of mailing lists. Most people wouldn't be able to write to colleagues at work!

ntnsndr, to random
@ntnsndr@social.coop avatar

Okay, I'm supposed to be writing a digital privacy guide for normies. What would you put on it?

robin,
@robin@mastodon.social avatar

@ntnsndr Things in the basics that I often see forgotten:

  • If you use Chrome, there's no point in ad blockers, you're done for anyway. It has to be another browser.
  • You also want app tracking protection, like DuckDuckGo offers.
  • Permission Slip from CR!
  • If on Firefox, you can turn on GPC too.
ben, to technology
@ben@werd.social avatar

I've called myself a technologist for over a decade, but the definition in this post is better than anything I've offered. Thank you, Robin. https://berjon.com/chimeralogist/?utm_source=werd.io&utm_campaign=mastodon&utm_channel=mastodon

robin,
@robin@mastodon.social avatar

@theblackbunny @ben Thank you!

freakonometrics, to random French
@freakonometrics@mastodon.social avatar

questions aux parisiennes et parisiens... il existe des lieux sympas, gratuits (ou pas trop chers) pour bosser tout un dimanche...? idéalement du côté de Denfert, mais j'imagine que je peux bouger...
dans 10 jours, je vais aussi chercher des endroits pour bosser entre 14h et 23h (avec une bon wifi pour faire pas mal de réunions zoom), le soucis est que mon bureau sera à Saclay, et l'hôtel à Denfert....

robin,
@robin@mastodon.social avatar

@freakonometrics Ça ne colle pas totalement à ton cahier des charges mais au cas où tu ne trouves pas un truc qui colle mieux: https://www.letank.fr/ il y a plusieurs années c'était top et animé par une équipe très sympa. Ce n'est pas sur le site mais à l'époque il y avait moyen de louer un coin de table pour quelques jours moins cher que le tarif pour un vrai bureau, je pense que tu peux demander!

robin, to random
@robin@mastodon.social avatar

I've been talking with a bunch of people (and am one myself) who all have a particular set of skills but whose job titles are all over the place. I think that set of skills and the need for this position aren't random — but it needs a name. (Click to find out!)
https://berjon.com/chimeralogist/

robin, to random
@robin@mastodon.social avatar

If you have experience with or knowledge of international schools in Brussels, or know someone who does, I'd really appreciate some advice!

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