Assembly Four announces closure of sex-work-friendly social platform Switter
assemblyfour.com
assemblyfour.com
> anti-sex work and anti-LGBTQIA+ legislative changes
Don't get me wrong. The laws are incredibly stupid and entirely pointless. Some silly age check won't stop a teen from accessing porn. Decloaking won't stop people being assholes online.
However, I find it hard to characterise the laws as anti-LGBTQIA+ without making questionable links and using suspicious statistics.
You could potentially link any legislative change to harming gay people if you look hard enough, but I really don't think that's the motivation of these dumb laws, nor does it seem like it particularly harms gay people over any other group in society.
The narrative running through the article is that this is something white men are pushing through. At least in the UK, most of the push for deanonymisation and against encryption has come about because of men, probably mostly white, saying incredibly disgusting and illegal things to women, gay and black people anonymously online. Consequently women's groups in particular (see https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/society/201...) have been pushing for ways to decloak users and punish them. I still think it's misguided, but this isn't some imperialist project to oppress minorities.
Maybe I'm being overly cynical, but I feel like there is a trend to invoke gay people, women and minorities any time someone wants to get their way. On both sides of the spectrum: the people trying to bring these laws in are doing the exact same thing.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiewareham/2022/01/19/92-of-t...
A private company managed block list is very different in nature to requiring that adult content providers implement age verification, with a human regulatory process that kicks in if they refuse.
Indeed one could argue that by making this a requirement of the website, and making the web safe by default, it negates the need for these overly puritanical 3rd party blocklists and actually increases access to non-pornographic LGBT material. It's a weak argument, but two can play at that game...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/mississippi-mayor-withhold...
You might have heard of a queer-majority community stepping up to help raise funds to replace what he denied: https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxdpen/mississippi-furry-boo...
Given that similar systems have disproportionately affected LGBTQIA+ groups in the past (whether that's maliciously or not), I think it's a fair point to bring up in response to this new legislation (in addition to it being an expensive waste of time and resources)
If you all would like to move it offshore and keep it alive, I've been looking into ways to decentralize similar projects.
Would like to know what kind of servers are needed for the 400k mastodon accounts. Are we talking a couple of quad core processors and a few TB or hard drive space?
Curious what size the DB is too.
So yeah godaddy and cloudflare would be out from the start.
ddos sucks - been there deal with that a time or two.
but yeah, if servers could be replicated in many places, and plans for multiple ways to move to a new domain name, or dns, or ip or whatever and such are already laid, and this info is already given to the users so they can move to new X when Y happens..
I really want to deploy a keybase-like blockchain kind of thing that is auto replicated - and if someone has an individual account blocked in country A then friends of that person would know that another account is already active via service/infrastructure B.
I dunno, it seems there are many pieces already out there that could make these things happen - and it's not going to be easy to get it setup at first, and some of the pieces would be blocked in various regions - but give the end users the tools to jump to E F or G... it can be done.
The internet is already going in this bifurcated (trifurcated / qua..) direction anyhow and I see no way to stop it, might as well replicate for it.
See: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16876040 * https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xk78x/switter-down-cloudfla... * https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/19/17256370/switter-cloudfla...
but they also said they are going to get proactive in inspecting data that your site and your visitors send through the pipe and proactively send info about your site and visitors to agencies with letters and guns..
and they are also going to start lobbying gov'ts to make new laws so that they are more easily compelled to give even more data to different govs. (I mean, microsoft kind of did the same thing with the cloud data thing not long ago - so meh on them too)
At least that's how I read the blog post from the head guy in charge a while back.
I warned that this was going to happen a while ago and that cloudflare would either have to bifurcate and create a cloudf-japan, cloudf-uk, cloudf-blahblah - or they would end up being a prime target for court data from all over the world and would be helping to send guns with fingers on triggers to places for all sorts of things eventually.
well here we are years later - where instead of splitting it up - they are consolidating even more of the web instead.
They will readily shut down anything that might expose them to legal liability (i.e. CSAM, credit card fraud). Daily Stormer and the various xChan projects are vile, but mostly legal under US law, in contrast.
Well.. yeah, and so will anyone.
We're talking about pedophiles and fraud here. Stuff that is illegal everywhere in the civilized world.
As for the Daily Stormer and the xChan projects: the stuff hosted there also violates laws, holocaust denial or many forms of antisemitism are a crime in most of the European Union. And the only people calling that "censorship"... well, they tend to be Nazis or have no problem supporting Nazis.
Also, I do not believe that the ACLU are nazis.
The leader of the ACLU at that time was a Jewish guy. He didn't like the American Nazis, but he recognized that the bureaucratic machinery used to prevent them from assembling was almost entirely identical to the bureaucratic machinery used against the civil rights movement in the South.
The original Nazis were nobodies in the roaring economy of the Weimar Republic. Their support soared when the Great Crisis hit. This is a familiar story; Lenin got to power in Russia after the country was almost destroyed in a senseless war.
Contemporary Germany seems to have the worst neo-Nazi problem in bleak places like Hoyerswerda or Chemnitz, where the local economy doesn't have any good jobs for less qualified youths.
But this is an order of magnitude harder to solve than banning fora online.
But I guess their issue wasn't technical, but that they are an organization subject to Australian law.
Even online, you are either at the mercy of the legal system that can project force onto your body or you push yourself outside the law and are at the mercy of people exploiting you and the fact that you cannot seek recourse in the law.
Outside the law, might makes right (inside the law, might also makes right, but one can hope it is at least a right that some large group of people have reached loose consensus on).
No talk of politics.
I've been on it from near the start. I really can't understand how you got the idea that it was anything more than a roll-your-own-Twitter from the outset. His own feed is 99% cats. If he's especially focused on politics, it doesn't show.
Yes, but didn't we used to be in favor of free speech as an abstract dignity of humans?
You're redefining free speech. Free speech is freedom to speak without fear of consequences from your government.
What you're asking for is freedom to speak without consequences from your fellow citizens and your standing in the social community. That's never been how humans have worked, ever. And I doubt even you would want to live in a world where you could not ignore, walk away from, remove from your property, mock, or shout down speech you disagreed with.
I used to think of it that way, but nowadays I think of it more as a good principle to underpin effective government. For starters, lots of governments have a different comprehension of it than mine does and they do well.
It's the same principle as "your right to swing your fist ends where my face begins," and it used to be commonly understood as a necessary, fundamental building block of civil society.
Unfortunately we seem to have somehow spontaneously forgotten this and now, if anyone doesn't simply accept a punch to the the face they're infringing on your rights.