Recaptcha already requires a Google-certified Android device today. That does heavily restrict what websites a browser can access.
12,610 karma · joined September 8, 2013
Hobbyist videographer. Volunteering as video/broadcast engineer at CCC events.
https://github.com/justJanne
That still wouldn't affect projects like Debian or Arch, but going even further, they can't push through updates anyway. Nothing forces me to install updates, it's an active choice to do so.
One of the core tenets of truly free software is that I as user must be able to run, access, edit, and view everything.
Sounds like a very expensive lawsuit waiting to happen (GDPR allows fining up to 4% of global revenue, not profits)
If you're a startup, you won't be making a profit anyway.
Once you make a profit, 25k€ on the books (not necessarily cash) isn't a lot, especially as it doesn't have to remain in the company, you can use it to pay wages once converted to a GmbH.
In the end, this is a question about whether you need something to be exactly the same for some ideological reason, or whether it's enough that two things are practically the same for all intents and purposes.
And while in this case the German system requires a codified workarounds, in many other cases the US/UK/Commonwealth systems use significantly more complicated workarounds than the German system.
If you additionally want to avoid being taxed when you sell stock, the entire company, or transfer it to another country, you'd create two UGs, one as the primary company, the other as a holding. That takes 2-3h for both and costs typically around 800€, but can be had for as little as 400-500€.
This is what previous German YCombinator startups have gone with and recommended in the past.
Going one step further, because a UG is so easy to start, banks will refuse to loan you money in the first year, so you can only raise money by selling shares. If you want to avoid that, you can start a GmbH with an UG as holding instead. This will take a month and requires you to sign over at least 12500€ of assets to the GmbH.
Now, what if you want all of that, but you also want a shell corporation to hide the owners and investors? Then you'd start a GmbH & Co KG, where you set up a limited liability corporation, a shell corporation with multiple special classes of stock, and potentially additional holdings. This is what OP went with.
That's what Germany calls an "UG". Which is what OP actually ends up doing.
The intended path for the upgrade from UG to GmbH is that once the UG makes a profit, this should be used to save up the 25k€ and convert to a GmbH once it's reached.
I couldn't afford to replace my current NVMe drives (which is why I'm very happy I set everything up with the Samsung 970 Pro, as they're 2-bit drives that will outlast even my grandchildren).
I actually had to RMA some RAM yesterday, and even that has gotten so expensive that it now costs more than my entire computer cost in 2020.
And in both machines a similar percentage of their price is caused by these components.
That's set the steam machine at either $650 or $800, depending on which interpretation you're using.
I've seen countless vibecoded implementations that look exactly like that. Especially painful is agents adding the same utility functions in each and every file instead of properly reusing or splitting things.
And then I have to fix them.
Well everyone's data that was stored on the bluesky PDS is also gone, but at least for a few ten thousand dollars a month I can keep my own instance running?
Self-hosting mastodon is about the same amount of effort as self-hosting your PDS.
But you get a lot more for it. And that's just not an option you have with ATproto.
> Plus, whenever I’ve gone to create an account I’ve been presented with a huge list of servers to chose from, many of which seem to be focused on a specific topic, which makes me think I need to pick which community I want to be tied to with minimal knowledge.
As you're already self-hosting ATproto anyway, why not self-host a mastodon instance as well?
You're constantly looking at it from the wrong perspective. I don't care about the instance I'm on banning me because I am the one that hosts my instance.
What I care about is that I am able to connect with any of my friends without the data going through any central arbiter that can decide what we get to see or not.
And on mastodon, if one instance defederates from me, pretty much everyone else will still be able to interact with me anyway, it's not the end.
My self-hosted mastodon server continues working, and can continue federating with e.g. chaos.social
With bluesky it's different.
If I am fully self-hosting the entire bluesky app, I need to spend ten thousands of dollars a month, but it'll keep working.
If I self-host my own app, it's cheap and keeps working, but I can only see content from my users in the best of times.
If I use bluesky's relays, it's cheap and shows everyone I follow, but it'll stop working if bluesky disappears.
Well, it's where we used to be — and it solves most of the issues of the modern web. Forums, blogs, IRC, teamspeak, gaming servers, etc, it all used to work relatively well with that approach.
What steps do I have to follow to get the majority of users to see my content?
Another example. Let's define decentralisation in terms of bus factor:
How many companies could go bust today before most users would notice?
> To make the comparison fair
Okay, so let's build that, then we can actually talk about building a decentralized network on atproto.
How do I build a relay that fetched all content from people I follow, plus all replies to those posts (no matter who sent them), plus automated backfilling if I click on the profile of someone who I'm not following yet?
From what I understand, in bluesky the PDS does not know about replies to a post. So I'd need to scrape the entire network anyway, no matter what, even if I only store some of it.
And every blue-stodon instance would have to scrape every single PDS. So it's a much much worse O(n²) issue, isn't it?
A good measure for decentralisation is: Can your community continue using the service if the rest of the world disappeared? Can you still federate with other communities that might still exist? What else needs to remain for the service to remain useful?
With mastodon, all of that is trivially answered. With AtProto, I'm either 100% reliant on bluesky, or I'd need to spend tenthousands of dollars a month minimum to self-host the relays and app view.
> because you don’t want to teach each app to crawl PDS’s and subscribe to them
Why not?
If I want true decentralization, that means no central component. For the same reason that communities and individuals host their own RSS readers, each community will in the end also have to host their own relay and app view.
The benefits of decentralisation, including fault-resistance and censorship-resistance, can only manifest once every community is self-hosting their own relay and app view.
- 221 with over 5 accounts
- 74 with over 20 accounts
- 19 with over 250 accounts
- 8 with over 1000 accounts.
And only a handful of those have open signups (13 with open signups have >50 users).
Many of them are actually ActivityPub instances with a PDS bridge, e.g., https://join.wafrn.net/
And most of the other open signup instances are also primarily designed as their own social network, just using AT proto as a compatibility layer, e.g., https://sprk.so/ https://haruhwa.com/ (which is an invite-based, snapchat-style ephemeral social network), https://surf.social/, https://pckt.blog/ (a microblogging platform), aesthetic.computer (a collaborative programming/art platform)
That leaves only bluesky, blacksky, eurosky, selfhosted.social, self.surf and npmx.social.
Even during Facebook's heyday, the unsuccessful diaspora/friendica/gnu social/etc networks had more decentralization than that.
Blueksy holds all the power, while the users hold none, whereas with Mastodon has many separate communities, similar to the old-school BBSes, forums, IRC and teamspeak servers.
And even if it were true, how would that justify making the situation worse? We should be doing something to make the world a better place instead.