thirtyfold8625

Maybe the author meant to express, "Regardless, if the global system of interconnected computer networks is functioning properly and you have a connection to it, you can host a document on the web." since a "global system" and "your connection to it" are separate things, and either can have a problem while the other does not have a problem. That's me being charitable though, and I agree that it's more likely that they were being redundant.

I also find it interesting that the original sentences reference "the internet" (with a lowercase "i") rather than "the Internet". "The word is sometimes still capitalized to distinguish the global internet from smaller networks", so it's interesting that the author might be referencing an internet that is not global rather than a global network. They probably are referencing "the Internet" though, since "many publications, including the AP Stylebook since 2016, recommend the lowercase form in every case".

I'm not sure that your reply is directly related to my comment. The full sentence I quoted is "Under these definitions, Bluesky and ATProto are not meaningfully decentralized, and are not federated either." by Christine Lemmer-Webber, but Daniel Holmgren talked more directly about "decentralised distribution of data".

Because of what I quoted, I don't think that "Bluesky" or "ATProto" are decentralized or federated, so it's extremely unlikely that I'll interact with them anytime soon. The particular reason that they are not decentralized or federated is not really interesting to me.

To get specific: it is a significant issue for me if "everyone can access the data but before it reaches the end users it goes through centralised applications". A "centralised application" is able to restrict my ability to contact other people, whereas with a federated and/or decentralized/distributed system, it's more likely that I will be able to contact someone that I want to communicate with. For comparison, consider how people would feel if using the United States Postal Service meant that all physical mail had to pass through the District of Columbia or if sending an email message required interacting with BBN-TENEXA just because that was the first machine to be capable of sending networked electronic mail. In the ideal case, the recipient of a message I send would not have to coordinate with me at all before they receive the message: "The first use of network email announced its own existence."

"Reconciliation must come before economic cooperation", and I doubt that there will be imminent "reconciliation" between Bluesky and people who want to spend less than $100 for each month that they want to back up content shared using the AT Protocol. This is not impossible (since "Bluesky is a Public Benefit Corporation"), and there is a documented goal to have "multiple independent Relay services", but it seems that having one would cost well over $100 each month. In the meantime, trying to cooperate with a person is harder to justify when you don't know if they are actually willing to help you or not.

As a relevant example, consider that there are a notable number of people who wish to avoid cooperating with threads.net even though I would describe it as being part of the Fediverse.

My initial thought about this is that it'll probably be interpreted as a person arguing on one's own behalf rather than having representation from counsel or an attorney ("pro se legal representation") while using a computer, since one party wasn't represented by an attorney. The fact that the computer can generate a video or text probably isn't very relevant, although that probably wasn't happening in the past.

This is interesting, but I don't yet entirely understand it.

My first thought after trying to read the entire document was that the author seems to suggest that "AT Protocol" is a natural result of the movements they describe, but I find it hard to believe that the "peer-to-peer (p2p) movement" could naturally result in things that "are not meaningfully decentralized, and are not federated".

This seems to describe my answer to this question in more detail than I'd be capable of right now: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

I believe you're quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse

It seems that document currently expresses that "the AT Protocol, which powers the Bluesky social network" is "[a] major protocol in competition with the Fediverse", which suggests that neither "the AT Protocol" nor "Bluesky" are included in the Fediverse.

Moreover, "AT Protocol" and "Bluesky" are conspicuously absent from the second paragraph of the article content / lead section.

The majority of Fediverse platforms are based on free and open-source software, and create connections between servers using the ActivityPub protocol. Some software still supports older federation protocols as well, such as OStatus, the Diaspora protocol and Zot. Diaspora* is the only actively developed software project classified under the original definition of Fediverse that does not support ActivityPub.

There discussion related to this around https://thebrainbin.org/m/[email protected]/t/705694/-/comment/5682529

I believe you're quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse

It seems that document currently expresses that "the AT Protocol, which powers the Bluesky social network" is "[a] major protocol in competition with the Fediverse", which suggests that neither "the AT Protocol" nor "Bluesky" are included in the Fediverse.

Moreover, "AT Protocol" and "Bluesky" are conspicuously absent from the second paragraph of the article content / lead section.

The majority of Fediverse platforms are based on free and open-source software, and create connections between servers using the ActivityPub protocol. Some software still supports older federation protocols as well, such as OStatus, the Diaspora protocol and Zot. Diaspora* is the only actively developed software project classified under the original definition of Fediverse that does not support ActivityPub.

There discussion related to this around https://thebrainbin.org/m/[email protected]/t/705694/-/comment/5682552

How was the embedded nickname "the Iron Kidney" established?

Thank you for reminding me about times Buddhists were violent in an organized way. Things related to that are probably documented around https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_and_violence#Violence_against_religious_minorities

It was surprising to learn that any Buddhist advocated for or enacted violence, but it has happened, and surprisingly recently. Luckily, it seems that there aren't many cases of that in the 2020s.

In my experience, I find it difficult to change what communication network I use to talk to each friend of mine. This has been especially difficult for networks that don't use a phone number to identify people. For a few relationships, we are beginning to shift to a new network (in part due to following advice and the fact that we're passionate about security), but most relationships get "stuck" on whatever network we first used to communicate.

So far, my solution has been to do a complete hard reset: I told people that I'm changing my phone number and that my contact information is available from my website (which is just a static page hosted for free using a public Git forge website) and that I'm not sharing my phone number with anyone who knows what my legal address is (since if they really need to get in contact with me, they can just show up or send me mail, and if they have any technological problem, I'd give them an old laptop I have and help them set it up and/or let them use my WiFi to bootstrap getting their own internet connection). After I did that, everyone who actually talks to me regularly set up their phones so that they can contact me using networks I actually pay attention to. I believe part of the reason this was effective is that I usually wouldn't communicate using SMS or the public switched telephone network even if someone tried to contact me using them and would instead wait to talk to people until we met in person at regularly scheduled events, and it's well known that depending on the public switched telephone network makes me uncomfortable. Also, I am much more communicative using the networks that I'm comfortable with, and when I point that out to people, they agree.

Hopefully the "hard reset" method works for switching between Internet-based networks rather than only from the public switched telephone network, but I haven't tried that yet.

In general, to transition people from using one network to another, I would describe how to contact you using a profile for an internet service you're comfortable using (for me it was a static website, but it could be anything that has high uptime and can be updated (like the "About" field for an Mbin profile or a LinkedIn profile)), and then give that profile provenance (like by linking to it from an "About" section or changing your display name to be a URL for your "contact me" profile), and then tell people that you're not going to send messages using networks that you don't like using. That means that people who actually want to contact you will still be able to figure out how to do so, even if it's been a long time since you stopped using the old communication network.

In the future, I'll avoid sharing any contact information directly, and instead I'll share the URL for my static website (which is essentially just my name (so it's unlikely anyone will forget about it)) and help anyone that's actually interested in talking to me set things up. This means I avoid advertising networks that I don't actually want to use, so even if a new relationship still gets "stuck" on a particular communication network, it will be one that I'm comfortable with using instead of one that I'm not comfortable with using, and people will know how to get in contact with me in case something changes.

Initially, when I navigated to https://ibis.wiki/ I saw "502 bad gateway". That is not a good first impression...

Reloading the page let me see more useful things though.