For what it's worth I just did a successful follow from streams thinking it might shed light on something, but instead it just deepens the mystery. Oh well. I tried.
But what about those #MS_Windows users out there? How about a gzipped tarball, all nicely packaged up so you can distribute around, of a custom built #PuTTY client that will securely connect people to your #Synchronet_BBS over telnet?
Hehehe.... I suppose this is my opportunity to plug Joshua's free domain name service here that's been a trusted mainstay for over 20 years :p
Perhaps one of the best parts is that you can see how many days (years) the domain has been part of the service, to dissuade concerns over whether there's a likelihood of it suddenly disappearing :)
Aside from lotech #Sneakernet schemas, there's also several FOSS based community driven initiatives. There's been a lot of real-world, ad-hoc development since my years of participation in the IRTF/IRSG DTNRG. Full disclosure, I was also formerly employed by Semtech. The notion that there's a use case for communications that can take months, even decades to arrive (or never at all) is a valid concern for many practical applications.
More immediate, and relevant communications systems for most folks here on Terra Firma include projects like Lokinet, which has some great info HERE, and also aspires to the same level of, um... disconnectivity (sneakernet-like) or operability that @silverpill mentions above - the value of having a client/server architecture that is prepared to exploit this out of the box is much relevant that one might think.
Some of these semi-production or production ready real world initiatives and communities are:
CellSol - It is noteworthy to mention that Texas is the only state in the USA that sports an (actually only mostly) autonomous electricity grid (not dependent upon the national grid), although it's not publicly managed, and has been criticized as such due in part to nearly 1000 deaths occurring in the winter of 2021. The repo is HERE. Here's a PoC for one such use case from the PoV of a native Texan: Apologies for directly linking to an article in the monolithic silo space.
During my years living quite literally off-grid in the wilderness of the forested mountains in Northern California, I had the privilege of meeting and contracting for several farms and individuals deeply steeped in what is generally referred to as the prepper movement. These weren't cray cay militants (at least not most of them) or paranoiacs calling for revolution or believing the end is nigh, but rather, farmers and families who were, rightfully so, extremely concerned with security and safety for their small communities and loved ones. To survive in places like that, which exist all over the world, one must begin with self-sufficiency that covers 4 seasons; beyond that, protecting the 'me and mine' aspects of your assets and property are very real considerations.
The work I focused on led me to developing microwave surveillance systems using inexpensive, solar powered Ubiquiti Nanostations with ranges capable of exceeding 10KM, strategically placed in almost inaccessible locations overlooking entire valleys as well as within small perimeters of their farms and households. This included off the shelf PTZ cameras, many of which were capable of license plate and facial recognition, but more importantly, being able to determine the difference between things like Bears, Deer, and Humans - false positive intrusions detected are quite frustrating, lolz.
All of this was coupled together with Shinobi, which can be monitored and controlled from anywhere, on any device. The repo is here.
With the extreme threat levels of thievery and other concerns in those regions, and continuous incidents of such, a comprehensive #FOSS based, #solar powered communications and surveillance system is an in demand market. Internet access is of course, problematic in such regions, which creates the market for WISPs operating in the unlicensed microwave bands a high demand commodity as well.
This is merely demonstrative of the need for another niche type computing arena - community networks completely unconnected to the Internet:
All of these projects, protocols, and initiatives have solution based choices for the various kinds of Delay Tolerant Networking standards and communities actively developing for connectionless, intermittently connected systems, or autonomous networks that aren't neccessarily interdependant upon a classic, traditional, Internet connection.
Not sufficient to just eschew the deprecated, privacy disrespecting monolithic silos, it's also not prudent to depend upon clearnet aspects of the Internet either. In practice, it's possible to take pretty much any platform technology that listens for packets and fashion the ability to be accessible and available via I2P, Tor, IPFS Yggdrasil, and other IP routed constructs, yet moreover, the majority of people only consider intercommunication in terms of the IP routed packet switched network we call the Internet (powered almost entirely by Cisco IOS and the like), without due consideration given to the fact that this single common denominator is also a single choke point - kludgy platforms like masto that can't even keep up with the contemporary movements in the social networking landscape aren't going to fare well when it comes to the expanding horizons opening up with movements like those above, while others like Sreams, Mitra, and perhaps protocols such as Nostr that exhibit the ambitions to explore and exploit emerging technologies in communication will fare much better, adapting (and embracing layer 1 & 2 networking) along the way.
@tallship@thenexusofprivacy thing is though there are also many existing alternatives to Mastodon already on the Fediverse, so why fork it? GoToSocial looks interesting and they don't have a central instance, you host your own even on a Pi.
Okay first I should state that I've never actually said that masto isn't a solid and capable platform. It is, but at a severe cost - the design of masto, notwithstanding the insistence on maintaining a historically lackluster feature set when compared with almost any other Fediverse software, is such that it really isn't built for #DeSoc - it really strives to be some sort of unachievable ideal for the monolithic silo model.
No one but me seems to site this nowadays, but masto doesn't even really shine with respect to cost in terms of system resources and stability until you approach the 20,000 user account mark. What? Why would you do that? Back when these stats were being bandied about, Pleroma was showcasing its new #Gopher protocol (browsing) support, and reminding people that it felt perfectly at home on an #rPi. No such claim was ever made for masto, lolz. That doesn't mean that the other platforms aren't just as capable of scaling vertically... but... why? Who's going to foot the bill? Who's going to manage all of those un-vetted people creating accounts on your machines? Why would someone bother with that in the first place?
Community? Nope - there's no sense of community on masto servers, and I'll get to that later. Because you want to create your own private Idaho? Probably. mastodon.social is one of, if not the, largest deprecated monolithic silos existing in the Fediverse today. Why? What possible benefit could be derived by driving a million people into a single funnel under the auspices of telling them that they're escaping that very same model? It's ludicrous.
No matter what happens in the short term, Eugen is assured of his parachute and comfortable retirement fund, except for the part where he forgot to have his new significant other sign a pre-nup - that might dash his net worth later, but that's another consideration entirely. I hope his marriage is actually a long and fruitful one that lasts forever, he's not a bad guy, he's just been courted and corrupted by the "Ooh shiney" phenomenon of financial entrapments that come with relative success in the media and pop culture.
The reason masto needs to be hard forked (several times, IMO) is not to create a better masto that will lend itself to DeSoc, #smolweb, and self-hosting on people's home networks, but rather, to further dilute the trademark, and especially the brand, effectively killing it if possible, supplanting it with Fediverse instead. People like to bounce around that term inclusivity, well, this accomplishes that.
Forks of masto aren't going to create a better masto. No way. Sure, some improvements on this one, other features on that one, but dilution of the brand until it is only as significant as any other deserving Fediverse platform is and should be the ultimate goal. It's not well suited, architecturally for horizontal scaling anyway, unless you don't mind throwing all those system resources at it that could better serve you elsewhere with something like #GoToSocial or one of the #Misskey and #Pleroma family fork members.
True leaders in the Fediverse will initially be those platforms that have planned ahead and accommodate other DeSoc protocols, arguably Fediverse protocols, at this time, #Diaspora, #OStatus, #Nomad, #Zot, and even others that some #Fedizens turn their noses up at, like #nostr and #Bluesky's #ATP. #ActivityPub is NOT the end-all, be-all for the future. It is the golden calf of today, and just as others that have come before, it will morph and evolve or be obviated by others that will be plugged into the platforms currently running it - #Friendica, #Hubzilla, and Streams are prime examples of this, and Friendica especially, considering it's the only extant original member of the Fediverse for all intents and purposes. One could say that Friendica is the #Slackware of the Fediverse, lolz.
With respect to Friendica in particular, but also Hubzilla and others that have arrived at this obvious conclusion, ActivityPub is merely the major vehicle by which it communicates with other decentralized social communications systems on the Internet. I don't think it has ever lost sight of that, like another of its contemporaries, #GNU_Social did.
Hemming large masses of people onto a single (and at this time appearing to be) and open walled garden has the immediate effect of control over large swaths of population - you can say this, but not that. You can think this, but not that. You can be this, but not that. You can believe this, but not that - under penalty of excommunication.
In reality, we don't have strong friendships with our neighbors - that's why we have fences. We wave to them and say hi, call the cops when their on vacation and see someone suspicious lurking about their property. That's about the extent of being a neighbor. We invite our friends and coworkers over for BBQ's and to swim in our pools, not so much our neighbors.
The current masto social architecture is the antithesis of that, and so is it's physical architecture - put all the lobsters in the same pot of boiling water. Turn on and off their ability to speak all at once. Force them en masse to endure advertising blitzes (Oh, mark my word that's coming) decided upon by the server admin. It's like Baba O'Reilly by The Who - "Meet the new boss, Same as the old boss".
That's not the promise of Fediverse. it's the antonym.
masto also hinders innovation, attempting to define, dictate even, what should and should not be available - Nomadic identity is but one emerging facet of what is fracturing the masto monopolistic initiative - and that's a good thing, because with the help of FEPs, already, others are adopting various cooperative models for this as well, but discussing that now, and here, at this time, is more of a tangent so I'll get back to the point.
Jupiter:
> That's why people still fork Mastodon to add features that are available just about everywhere else.
Indeed it is, and why it has managed to enjoy a reasonable level of notoriety. There's also the wholly undeserved notion of community that actually, in direct opposition to, masto has continually sought to break and in a very big way, break.
There are certainly platforms (mostly forumware) that curate a sense of community, but those days are largely past. Whether it was #gplus, #Myspace, #Faceplant, #InstaSPAM, or #Twitter; because just as it is in real life, #COMMUNITY is that which you define for yourself through your connections - your follows and those who choose to follow your account. The biggest failures in the Fediverse that I've personally observed are those that seek to localize, geographically or by shared interest, a monolithic ivory tower of sameness and similarity amongst people.
I felt so awful for one guy who, so enthusiastically upon discovering the Fediverse, started registering domain names corresponding to several states, thinking that he would be successful in launching a geographically oriented family of masto based servers tending to the shared interests of people by offering them a place to congregate. He quickly discovered the fatal flaw in his model, but was stuck with hefty data center bills to maintain all these masto servers that were largely uninhabited.
Trying to get rid of your masto subscribers when you figure out that you need to egress from it is not an easy task without disenfranchising your user base. I know, because a few years back, not long after @Gled archived his #mastodo fork and urged everyone to adopt Pleroma instead, I face the daunting task of trying to convince my user base to migrate elsewhere - it took more than a year to accomplish!
Danie:
> thing is though there are also many existing alternatives to Mastodon already on the Fediverse, so why fork it?
In a nutshell, because it serves to, at the very least, dilute the masto brand, and more likely kill it. It has served its purpose and now that it has been exposed as a vehicle antithetical to #DeSoc, it's time to deprecate it.
My introduction to the #Fediverse occurred when I stumbled upon an earlier incarnation of #Friendica, started looking at #Red_Matrix, and discovered that the monolithic model, if not having been shown the door, had at least been handed its hat.
The problem at that time, was the effect of Prettiness, and of course, UX. Friendica wasn't too bad in that latter sense, when compared to that of Faceplant, but it sure didn't even come close to being as pretty as Faceplant - or even Myspace, which had only recently fallen into the abyss. That's changed A LOT, even in just the past year, with respect to Friendica and Hubzilla - they're much more intuitive for a layperson parachuting to the ground after jumping from the cesspit over at Faceplant.
I think that more than anything, not being pretty enough for the subjugated chattel coming from Twitter and Faceplant, was the most difficult thing for onboarders to embrace. Mike placed all of his focus on functionality and forward thinking vision with respect to what these and later efforts could provide the masses, but the "prettification" was left to others who didn't step up for the challenge for many years. I'm all for features six-ways to Sunday, but I also feel that many things need to be hidden from the landing page a new user sees upon account creation - the very basics they expect should be there, akin to those available in the deprecated monolithic space; users expect this, but they don't yet know they not only want, but really need all of these other feature sets too, yet some things should left, IMO, to be discovered later by the user.
And in my conversations years ago with Mike, I gleaned as much from him: "Here's this really bitchen gift for the masses, it does all this kewl stuff, now I leave it up to others to make it pretty" (and with a sense of coherency that these former subjugated chattel can initially get their heads around). Putting all that stuff right in their face was awe inspiring, but foreboding at the same time for many.
Well, finally, people are making it pretty :) And they're also moving much of the overwhelming busy-ness elsewhere in the UI. As a result, there's been an explosion of adoption - not even primarily from former masto folks either.
I'd like to touch on the notion of community one more time in closing. It might be convenient for n00bie onboarders to glean a bit about how a particular platform functions, but just like in your own neighborhood where you live, you make friends elsewhere mostly - at work, at functions of the hobbies you engage in, with friends you meet at the grocery store or libraries, and the beaches or on hiking or 4x4 weekend excursions. It's the same way in the Fediverse, you make your friends through connections here and there through people you discover along the way, and 99% of them ARE NOT on your particular server instance.
They don't need to be either, because this is the Fediverse :)
Okay it's one of those, "What's peculiar here?" kinda things.
Consider the source itself. And I certainly don't mean code of any sort. 'Why' would 'They' cite Wikipedia, as good a resource as anyone might think it to be?
Why not cite yourself? Instead of citing someone else - who will merely turn right around and cite you as the ultimate source reference?
Up until that time, #LAMI operated and sailed the 70' gaff-rigged topsail schooner, Swift of Ipswitch (previously James Cagney's personal yacht) for it's youth sailing program. It took a few years to complete the Irving and Exy Johnson, sister Brigantine vessels built and outfitted by dozens of volunteers over the duration of the program. At some point, another gaff-rigged schooner was borrowed and enlisted, the136' Bill of Rights filling the need for accommodations of a youth sailing program that had greatly expanded over time, with many ups and downs, achievements and disappointments, but building two square rigger tall ships for and by a non-profit organization dedicated to youth educational programs for the community, a truly novel pursuit, eventually came to a close as a great success.
This photo shows the 113' brigantine Irving Johnson, on 23 March 2005, and which, after less than three years of service, she had run hard aground on a sandbar following several storms that affected local charts, leaving them partially obsolete - in short, on her way into the Channel Islands harbor, well... sadly, the pic speaks for itself.
Another year and two million dollars later to repair structural damages and flooding, the #Irving_Johnson once again joined her sister ship, #Exy_Johnson, in the pursuit of education as #school_ships, something that Irving and his wife Exy (Electa), following no less than 7 circumnavigations together, pioneered and championed in the 20th century aboard their three successive sailing ships - a #schooner, a #brigantine, and a #ketch - each named the #Yankee.
This image or file is a work of a United States Coast Guard service personnel or employee, taken or made as part of that person's official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image or file is in the public domain (17 U.S.C. § 101 and § 105, USCG main privacy policy)
For more info on Irving and Exy, their circumnavigations of the globe, and love of life together living aboard and blue water cruising, There's this National Geographic, as well as a several books that together and separately have published about their lives at sea.
Questions always follow after such, 'salty talk', or 'nautical nomenclature', or in #Star_Trek terms, #technobabble.
What's the difference between a mizzen topgallant sail and a main royal staysail? Just a few rules is all it takes, but in today's world, one need only avail themselves of the basic Marconi rig on a single masted sloop. There's a mainsail (the big triangular one aft of the mast), and a jib, or foresail. Typically, when speaking about a jib (the one forward of the mast), people will typically categorize them into about three classes:
a #Storm_jib - smallish, for reduced sail area in high and gale force winds.
If you're rigged to run one jib, you're a #sloop; two, and you're #cutter rigged.
tl;dr: Unlike elections, rigging is a good thing. Without standing rigging you have nothing to hold your masts up in place and they'll just snap or fall over. Without running rigging you have no way to control your sails, hoist them up, or catch the wind.
So when it comes to sailboats, it's a very good thing that they're rigged :p
This Should be *a huge conversation in the #Fediverse - really.
@jupiter_rowland certainly paraphrases much of the sentiment here in the Fediverse where many conversations are taking place, albeit briefly, and then dismissed, but why? Are people too busy to care? Are people too apathetic to take seriously anything that begins with the letters, masto...? Do those 5 letters really invoke such categorical dismissiveness that cuts into topics that would otherwise likely gain immediate traction were it not for mention of that corporate monolithic silo brand?
Probably; likely; perhaps - take your pick. There is indeed a general apathy amongst especially long term Fedizens and also Lemmy users who are refugees from Reddit, but it's okay to dismiss masto as the neo-corporate EEE platform conceivably threatening the UX for millions of Fedizens. And like it or not, there does need to be a viable shitposting platform, which is exactly what masto is, inhabited in very large ways by people who, as Jupiter raises the question, "are incapable of actually engaging in textual conversation. There's something to that.
Well, #A11Y is a very real concern, perhaps for the FEPs, considering there are projects that are very close in architecture to completely ignoring anything that isn't part of the W3's official specification, and that's okay.
It is, however, a misnomer that one must insert alt-text into media on the masto platform, at least at this juncture. Forcing the hand of refugees from the deprecated, #Privacy_Mining, monolithic silos is yet another complication that those poor souls need to be gently nudged into accepting - but even more importantly, ... "Why".
Some popular Android clients will complain if you try to post media without also including alt-text, some have no facilities at all for doing so. This is an adoption phenomenon, slowly being rolled out, as awareness increases (awareness of the WHY - not the HowTO) with respect to the reasons it is an important design consideration.
Do people actually get unceremoniously banned for not including alt-text for attached media on masto? Yes, On some instances they do, as if it will have any affect at all on the wider Fediverse - I have heard on several occasions that this does indeed happen - there aren't many things that piss people off more than having something that is important to them getting yanked out from underneath them in rug-pull fashion than that of an #instabanhammer, and yet childish, juvenile moderators and admins on several masto instances are truly guilty of such dystopian tyranny and abuse of privilege.
Those types of adversarial, clickish masto instances are much of the reason Fediverse gets a bad rap in some silo social networking circles, and it isn't a fair characterization, but the offensive behavior persists. More than an impetus for the deployment of #smolweb, single-user instances, it is indeed primarily a masto phenomenon.
Not a pretty thing, but masto always has been a caustic cauldron of cacophony of enmity and active vitriol, and that's just one more reason to expedite the outreach programs popping up all over the place to entice the good folks to ditch it in favor of many other good social networking platforms mentioned by Jupiter in his cw-LONG article (I wish he wouldn't bother catering to those mastoblasters with that sentiment, they should at least be smart enough to see that it's more substantive than their shitposting personas are capable of parsing).
@tallship Okay, let me explain this because it's obviously hard to understand unless you really know the Fediverse, its various projects and their cultures.
On Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams), people hate Mastodon because Mastodon is outdated, lacklustre and utterly, utterly underequipped intentionally by design.
For example, all three can produce full-blown long-form blog posts with absolutely all bells and whistles of long-form blogging. All kinds of text formatting, all kinds of lists, tables, any number of embedded in-line images, what-have-you. If you can do it on WordPress, you can do it on Friendica and Hubzilla and (streams).
And then comes Mastodon and staunchly, flat-out refuses to support anything that isn't old-school, original gangsta, Twitter-like, bare-bone, minimalistic microblogging. It uses an "HTML sanitiser" to completely mangle your precious posts before showing them. It even strips the embedded in-line images out.
If you want your images to make it to Mastodon, you have to automatically attach copies of them to your posts as file attachments because that's something that Mastodon understands. And what does Mastodon do? Only import a measly four of them and throw the others away anyway.
It's a wonder that Mastodon introduced support for a select few text formatting elements, including quotes, with version 4.0 last year. But I kid you not, there are Mastodon instance admins who stubbornly refuse to update to Mastodon 4.x because they reject even these features, because they're "un-Mastodon-like". Oh, and Mastodon 4.x still doesn't know things like strikethrough, text colour, text size, numbered lists or tables. And it still strips in-line images out.
This is not a case of "we'd like to, but unfortunately, our engine can't be made capable of that, sorry". It's a case of deliberate refusal. Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) perceive this as Mastodon flipping them the bird. Like, "Fuck you bitches, what you want ain't no old-skool microblogging, we ain't gonna do that!"
On top of that come masses of ignorant and obnoxious Mastodon users. My estimation is that 50% of all Mastodon users think the Fediverse is only Mastodon, and so does everyone in their respective bubble. Most of the rest only knows the Fediverse outside of Mastodon by a bunch of names, but no more than that. Many of them actually believe that Gargron has invented the Fediverse, and everything that isn't Mastodon is bolted onto Mastodon as an add-on or actually only an alternate UI for Mastodon with some extra features. Like, whether you use Mitra or Hubzilla, or whether you use Mona or Tusky, it's all Mastodon underneath.
They don't know that there's stuff out there in the Fediverse that's nothing like Mastodon. And they don't really care. And they don't know either that this other stuff has its own culture that differs from Mastodon's. Many of those who do know that there's more to the Fediverse than Mastodon want to force Mastodon's culture upon all the Fediverse. And with that, I don't only mean that all posts that end up on someone's Mastodon timelines have to conform to Mastodon's culture, but that everything that happens on non-Mastodon instances has to conform to Mastodon's culture.
If Mastodon users don't like it, you shouldn't be allowed to do it on Mitra or Friendica or Hubzilla or wherever. For some Mastodon users, this includes limiting all posts and comments to no more than 500 characters. Even if what you use doesn't have a character limit. Oh, and no quote-posts and no text formatting etc. etc., even if your kin have done that since times when Eugen Rochko was still a school kid, six years before Mastodon was made.
At the same time, Mastodon users are fully convinced that the reason why Mastodon is the biggest is because Mastodon is the best Fediverse project, even feature-wise.
Now, if you want to discuss the whole Fediverse, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams), in spite of being amongst the best places in the Fediverse to discuss anything by underlying technology, you can't do that on either. The reason is because their users actually don't know that much about Mastodon and its culture. Most of them have never come into touch with it that much or at all. You first have to explain it all to them. Many won't even want to hear anything about it even then, and those who do still can't believe what you're telling them.
The case with Lemmy is a different one. Just like Mastodon almost entirely consists of former Twitter users who escaped when Musk bought Twitter, Lemmy almost entirely consists of former Redditors who escaped when Reddit was enshittified by trying to charge third-party frontends $20,000,000 to access the Reddit API.
However, all they really know is Reddit where they used to be and Lemmy where they are now. They haven't also been on Twitter, and thus, they haven't also fled to Mastodon.
There's a Lemmy community named "Fediverse". "Community" means "subreddit" on Lemmy. And this one is named "Fediverse". One should expect there to be people who are at least halfway competent about the Fediverse, right? People with whom you can discuss the Fediverse, and who know what you're talking about?
Hahahaha... no.
Nobody in that Lemmy community knows anything about the Fediverse outside Lemmy and maybe the rest of the Threadiverse. They know that Mastodon exists. They know the name Mastodon. But that's all. They absolutely don't know anything else about Mastodon. They literally don't even know what the default Mastodon Web interface looks like because literally not even a single one of them has ever even been bothered to go visit mastodon.social and take a look at it, not even only once.
If you want to discuss Mastodon matters with them, you first have to take a deeeeeeep breath. And then you have to explain everything to them, down to the very very basics. And you probably have to explain certain things several times over because they're too hard to grasp from a Reddit/Lemmy point of view.
If you want to discuss the Fediverse beyond Lemmy and the Threadiverse and Mastodon, forget it. You'd have to explain even more.
At least the Lemmy users don't try to force Lemmy's culture upon the rest of the Fediverse. For one, most of them know that the Fediverse is not only Lemmy. And besides, nonetheless, the idea of Lemmy connecting to something that isn't part of the Threadiverse is still alien to them.
So why is it impossible to discuss accessibility in Fediverse posts?
Because Mastodon users have the Mastodon way set in stone in their minds. Because they cannot imagine that it could possibly go any other way. Or why it should.
And everyone else either takes Mastodon's approach for another Mastodon-specific fad that they're going to ignore like all the other fads that came from Mastodon. Or they have never even heard of it. See Lemmy where the idea of adding alt-text to anything if you aren't a Web developer is completely out of this world and utterly unimaginable.
#e2ee is a goal, not a promise. As far back as I can remember, forums like those supporting #Enigmail and #gpg were staffed with volunteers from the privacy community who repeatedly insisted on answering questions, like, "Is <this> (whatever this might be) totally secure?" with stock questions like, "What is it that you consider 'totally secure?" or answers such as, "Secure is a relative term, nothing is completely secure, how secure do you need your mission's communications to be?"
Phrases such as, reasonably secure should be indicators of how ridiculous it is to assume that any secure platform isEVERcompletely, and totally secure.
That begs the question, "Exactly how secure do you require your communications to be?" The answer is always, ... relative.
Which means that you should always believe Ellen Ripley when she says, "Be afraid. Be very afraid!"
My experience is that state actors won't even try to decrypt your communications. That's old school - and a horribly inefficient use of resources. They'll come after you with a keylogger or manufactured legal nightmares or torture - to either or both sides of the communication; depending on the perceived value of your secret.
It all comes down to 4 fundamental questions:
What is the value of your secret to you
What resources do you have available to protect it
What is the perceived value of your secret to your adversary
What resources do they have available to divulge it
Going back to Konversation for GUI stuffs. DCC file send/receive is kinda important to me. For everything else, including a lot of Matrix usage, WeeChat is still the Kewlist :p
Honorable mention goes to Halloy, which I think looks really good, supports tiling, and says it supports DCC Send - I don't mind manipulating config files by hand, and I might check it out with a FlatPak, but if I'm sufficiently impressed it looks like I'll have to build the .deb and SlackBuild myself, ... Well? Somebody's got to! Right?
Okay I thought I'd share this recent post here on the #Fediverse. To give it some context, it's an answer to a common question, often a misunderstanding (even by many knowledgeable folks) as to just how we got here.
There's a lot of apples and oranges here. And everyone had a lot of good points made, but your question is simple, and has a very simple answer. I'll endeavor to address that directly, but do need to tend to some of what has already been said.
Scroll down to the tl;dr for the succinct answer of your question
Ethernet, ARCNET, Token Ring, Thick net (RG-59), Thin net (RG-58 A/U), and UTP (Cat 3, Cat 5, and Cat 6 unshielded twisted pair, Etc.) really have zero bearing on your question insofar as IP is concerned. All of these specifications relate to the definition of technologies that, although are indeed addressed in the OSI model which is indeed very much in use to this day,but are outside the scope of Internet Protocol. I'll come back to this in a minute.
It's quite common to say TCP/IP, but really, it's just IP. For example, we have TCP ports and we have UDP ports in firewalling. i.e., TCP is Transmission Control Protocol and handles the delivery of data in the form of packets. IP handles the routing itself so those messages can arrive to and from the end points. Uniform Data Protocol is another delivery system that does not guarantee arrival but operates on a best effort basis, while TCP is much chattier as it guarantees delivery and retransmission of missed packets - UDP is pretty efficient but in the case of say, a phone call, a packet here and there won't be missed by the human ear.
That's a very simplistic high level-view that will only stand up to the most basic of scrutiny, but this isn't a class on internetworking ;) If you just want to be able to understand conceptually, my definition will suffice.
Networking (LAN) topologies like Token Ring, ARCNET, and Ethernet aren't anywhere in the IP stack, but figure prominently in the OSI stack. I'm not going to go into the details of how these work, or the physical connection methods used like Vampire Taps, Thin net, or twisted pair with RJ-45 terminators, but their relationship will become obvious in a moment.
The OSI model unfolds like so, remember this little mnemonic to keep it straight so you always know:
> People Don't Need To See Paula Abdul
Okay, touched on already, but not really treated, is the description of that little memory aid.
> Physical, Data Link, Network, Transport, Session, Presentation, and Application layers (From bottom to top).
The physical and Data Link layers cover things like the cabling methods described above,and you're probably familiar with MAC Addresses (medium access control) on NICs (network interface controller). These correlate to the first two layers of the OSI stack, namely, the Physical (obvious - you can touch it), and the Data Link layer - how each host's NIC and switches on each LAN segment talk to each other and decide which packets are designated for whom (People Don't).
In software engineering, we're concerned mostly with the Session, Presentation, and Application layers (See Paula Abdul). Detailed explanation of these top three layers is outside the scope of this discussion.
The Beauty of the OSI model is that each layer on one host (or program) talks to exclusively with the same layer of the program or hardware on the other host it is communicating with - or so it believes it is, because, as should be obvious, is has to pass its information down the stack to the next layer below itself, and then when it arrives at the other host, it passes that information back up the stack until it reaches the very top (Abdul) of the stack - the application.
Not all communication involves all of the stacks. At the LAN (Local Area Network) level, we're mostly concerned with the Physical and Data Link layers - we're just trying to get some packet that we aren't concerned about the contents of from one box to another. But that packet probably includes information that goes all the way up the stack.
For instance, NIC #1 has the MAC: 00:b0:d0:63:c2:26 and NIC #2 has a MAC of 00:00:5e:c0:53:af. There's communication between these two NICs over the Ethernet on this LAN segment. One says I have a packet for 00:00:5e:c0:53:af and then two answers and says, "Hey that's me!" Nobody else has that address on the LAN, so they don't answer and stop listening for the payload.
Now for Internet Protocol (IP) and TCP/UDP (Transmission Control Protocol and User Datagram Protocol):
IP corresponds to Layer 3 (Need) - the Network Layer of the **OSI Model.
TCP and UDP correspond to Layer 4 (To) - the Transport Layer of the OSI model.
That covers the entire OSI model and how TCP/IP correspond to it - almost. You're not getting off that easy today.
There's actually a bit of conflation and overlapping there. Just like in real life, it's never that cut and dried. For that, we have the following excellent explanation and drill down thanks to Julia Evans:
Layer 2 (Don't) corresponds to Ethernet.
Layer 3 (Need) corresponds to IP.
Layer 4 (To) corresponds to TCP or UDP (or ICMP etc)
Layer 7 (Abdul) corresponds to whatever is inside the TCP or UDP packet (for example a DNS query)
You may wish to give her page a gander for just a bit more of a deeper dive.
Now let's talk about what might be a bit of a misconception on the part of some, or at least, a bit of a foggy conflation between that of the specification of the OSI model and a Company called Bolt Beranek & Newman (BBN) a government contractor tasked with developing the IP stack networking code.
The TCP/IP you know and depend upon today wasn't written by them, and to suggest that it was the OSI model that was scrapped instead of BBN's product is a bit of a misunderstanding. As you can see from above, the OSI model is very much alive and well, and factors into your everyday life, encompasses software development and communications, device manufacturing and engineering, as well as routing and delivery of information.
This next part is rather opinionated, and the way that many of us choose to remember our history of UNIX, the ARPANET, the NSFnet, and the Internet:
The IP stack you know and use everyday was fathered by Bill Joy, who arrived at UC Berkeley in (IIRC) 1974), created vi because ed just wasn't cutting it when he wanted a full screen editor to write Berkeley UNIX (BSD), including TCP/IP, and co-founded Sun Microsystems (SunOS / Solaris):
> Bill Joy just didn’t feel like this (the BBN code) was as efficient as he could do if he did it himself. And so Joy just rewrote it. Here the stuff was delivered to him, he said, “That’s a bunch of junk,” and he redid it. There was no debate at all. He just unilaterally redid it.
Because UNIX was hitherto an AT&T product, and because government contracting has always been rife with interminable vacillating and pontificating, BBN never actually managed to produce code for the the IP stack that could really be relied upon. In short, it kinda sucked. Bad.
So! You've decided to scroll down and skip all of the other stuff to get the straight dope on the answer to your question. Here it is:
> What were the major things that caused TCP/IP to become the internet standard protocol?
The ARPANET (and where I worked, what was to become specifically the MILNET portion of that) had a mandate to replace NCP (Network Control Protocol) with IP (Internet Protocol). We did a dry run and literally over two thirds of the Internet (ARPANET) at that time disappeared, because people are lazy, software has bugs, you name it. There were lots of reasons. But that only lasted the better part of a day for the most part.
At that time the ARPANET really only consisted of Universities, big Defense contractors and U.S. Military facilities. Now, if you'll do a bit of digging around, you'll discover that there was really no such thing as NCP - that is, for the most part, what the film industry refers to as a retcon, meaning that we, as an industry, retroactively went back and came up with a way to explain away replacing a protocol that didn't really exist - a backstory, if you will. Sure, there was NCP, it was mostly a kludge of heterogeneous management and communications programs that varied from system to system, site to site, with several commonalities and inconsistencies that were hobbled together with bailing twine, coat hangers, and duct tape (for lack of a better metaphor).
So we really, really, needed something as uniform and ubiquitous as the promise that Internet Protocol would deliver. Because Bill Joy and others had done so much work at UC Berkeley, we actually had 4.1BSD (4.1a) to work with on our DEC machinery. As a junior member of my division, in both age and experience, I was given the task of, let's say throwing the switch on some of our machines, so to speak, when we cut over from the NCP spaghetti and henceforth embraced TCP/IP no matter what, on Flag Day - 01 January 1983.
So you see,the adoption of Internet Protocol was not a de facto occurrence - it was de jure, a government mandate to occur at a specific time on a specific day.
It literally had nothing to do with popularity or some kind of organic adoption, the erroneously described, so-called demise of the OSI model, or any physical network topology.
DARPA said 01 January 1983 and that's it, and that was it - Flag Day.
Sure, it took a few days for several facilities to come up (anyone not running IP was summarily and unceremoniously cut off from the ARPANET).
And one also needs to consider that it wasn't every machine - we only had some machines that were Internet hosts. We still had a lot of mainframes and mini computers, etc., that were interconnected within our facilities in a hodgepodge or some other fashion. Nowadays we have a tendency to be somewhat incredulous if every device doesn't directly connect over IP to the Internet in some way. That wasn't the case back then - you passed traffic internally, sometimes by unmounting tapes from one machine and mounting them on another.
There was a lot of hand wringing, stress, boatloads of frustration, and concern by people over keeping their jobs all over the world. But that's why and when it happened. Six months later in the UNIX portions of networks we had much greater stability with the release of 4.2BSD, but it wouldn't really be until a few years later Net2 was released that things settled down with the virtually flawless networking stability that we enjoy today.
Really now, why do people stubbornly adhere to the belief that Government entities require warrants to determine anything about you - like, where you are at this particular moment or the GPS coordinates of your location last Tuesday at 17:42hrs UTC? ... And pretty much anything else you can dream up about yourself: The content of conversations with others, everything you've purchased at anytime, what you are likely to eat for dinner this coming Friday, your medical records; you name it!
All without a warrant, even for local law enforcement.
And why would they bother, when they can just buy it from the#privacy_miningcompaniesthat you already gave it to for free?
Prolly explains why, everytime I felt burnt out and sought out a different career path, then threw the switch and continued to clackity clackity clack down that other track...
I always came back. In fact, Looking back, it should have been obvious - why would someone go to bed with a technical journal or some textbook on IT by choice when they've left (or so they thought) that career for a new and unrelated one?
@tallship interesting read. I retired 4 years ago and realised after that, especially for men, we are often defined by our work. Stop working, and suddenly you're no longer called about everything, etc.
My hobbies tho are also technology, so I've been kept really busy with now just pursuing my own interests around IT, minus having to clock in and out, fill in time sheets, do reports, etc.
It is essential to have challenging hobbies to get involved with, and to make friends around.
@tallship
It's a retro digital mode being a binary format. Like today's digital modes CW gets through the noise floor when voice can't be made out clearly...
@tallship
> I recall Sandra Bullock telling Sylvester Stallone: "All restaurants are Taco Bell Now!"
When Demolition Man came out we didn't have Taco Bell in Aotearoa yet, so in the cut played in our cinemas and released to VHS, the (deeply ironic) product placement dialogue was;
Reprinted from the Fediverse-City Matrix room, with permission from the author (myself):
I was just participating in another discussion elsewhere on the connotations and perceptions relating to a global feed of the entire known Fediverse, as it pertains to what various platforms call it (in their selector tabs).
Lots of suggestions, and every platform uses a different nomenclature. Some use 'global', some use 'live', and there's a few others as well that try to convey that type of extremely busy feed.
But then I touched on the subject of Local feeds - not all Fediverse platforms utilize this type of concatenated feed. I related that the Hometown fork of mastopub was [at least one of] the first to incorporate this as both a feed, and a type of post that is localized to only that particular instance.
I also, because I've read his contention, included the Dev's reasoning on having such a utility as a feature - because he intended Hometown to be a Fediverse platform that could encourage a Highly localized "community".
So you can select the other various, common types of scope for a post when making a post, as well as posting something that is only viewable to other users on your local instance - thereby supporting the 'local community only' aspect that has eluded and mostly deluded users on other platforms.
Why "deluded", because having a Fediverse account in the minds of most folks coming from the deprecated, monolithic silo space is something that has been heavily promoted by Fedizens as one of the reasons why it's better to use the Fediverse instead of those impersonal deprecated silo systems.
And that's simply not true.
Take me, for example. I have several accounts and interact using them with different circles of people (I won't get into the power of recursive circles as they were implemented in gplus). So I'mma just use mastodon.social, one of the biggest monolithic-like silo instances in the Fediverse, as an example here.
People there, most often n00bs from the November Rain or later) talk about the sense of "community" they have there, when they're really only speaking of the connections they have by following and being followed by not just people on that instance, but across the entire Fediverse.
The sense of community that almost everyone in the Fediverse perceives is mostly a compilation of the follows and followers that they each have, and is unique to themselves alone.
For example, I prolly know 4 or 5 people on each instance I have an account on. My community is comprised almost entirely of the direct connections I have made with others across the Fediverse at large, and yes, people on platforms with 'local-only' feeds to see my posts, know them to be local, but so do folks on other instances watching their 'global feeds' (or home feeds where someone they follow includes a follow of my account).
So to me, in my experience, my community is comprised of those who I've made connections with and the people they are connected to, with very little traffic from the local instance I am on at any given time.
To think that you're going to have a community on mastodon.social consisting of people primarily from that instance is a bit naive, IMO, coz your default feed grows exponentially with foreign user's posts the more you connect with anyone - not just the people you follow that are local to your instance. You see something, you interact because it's interesting, pertinent, or relevant to you - you don't do that because you've discerned that you will only interact with local accounts... that just ain't natural, human tendency.
So the creator of the Hometown fork realized that one type of vehicle in the feature set to mark this kind of delineation was that of the ability to post and see in your feed, local only posts, with the overt assertion that Hometown is a fork that in part, is a platform that can facilitate the social diaspora consisting of a 'mostly local' community.
Even entire instances, named or stated as localized geographically or topically, as having publicly open registrations miss this mark in a big way - people for whatever reason, want a Fediverse account, pick a host/instance, by whatever criteria, and then inadvertently end up creating their own diaspora of social connections across the entire Fediverse anyway.
nostr, Bluesky (when it eventually fully supports other instances), Threads (yeah, I know, it's a bastard, lolz), Minds, and other, bigger instances or monoliths, don't try to capitalize on this notion of "Your instance is your community" because overwhelmingly, it just isn't the case in reality.
I'm not saying that there aren't Fediverse instances are successful in cultivating small communities consisting of connections with others on those particular instances, but the most successful of those are the instances that have actually disabled Federation on those instances, lolz.... There's lots of examples of that, which is kewl - to each their own.
But the tendency of everyone to follow the Ew! Shiny! paradigm of simply liking and following what you like irrespective of whether it's on your local instance or not is the lions share of how people interact with each other.
Your thoughts, observations?
Attached graphic attrib: A Jack Russell, happy as can be, sitting in the pilot's seat flying a Cessna, not knowing WTF he's doing.... but he's really happy! The caption reads: "I have no idea what I'm doing".
John, I thought of you when I first saw this little doggy - not the caption, but the puppy is just so happy in the pilots seat, in a sort of, "Look Ma, No hands! w00t!", way.