rakoo

The identity of a repo is its url so yes, the identity part is decentralized

You'll have to explain how diverse forms of wealth are formed then, rooted in a scientific analysis of the thing

Do you have some data on that ? Because the majority of people inside far-left organizations are just not, and I don't base that on superficial myths but on actually talking with people

I'm sorry but this is just too naive. There is no honesty in most people working for a wage that is barely enough to survive, while capital owners don't actually do anything and still receive an inconsiderate amount of money. There is no trading here, just a good old theft of all the produced value with just enough redistribution to buy back the stolen value. No billionaire ever became billionaire by trading anything only by stealing other's work.

That's assuming that the population has any power, which in pretty much all countries in the world is not true. "Democracy" isn't just a value to behold, if the population has no power, it has no power and a country can't be called as such out of nowhere. Now, the people might have no actual power, but it's in their hands to get it.

> Western-style billionaires do the former, as their wealth is created by providing services to people

I'm sorry but this is just not based on reality. Wealth has always been formed by taking away from those who produce value. No one asked for 1000 new phone models every year, no one asked for 1000 new car models every year, no one asked for a million new kind of clothes every year. Services aren't provided, they are forced on people who just are not allowed to function without them and must work with and in those services, while billionaires don't produce anything, don't do anything yet get all the money.

No, the snapshotting and restore is manual

Then you have to do your research on whether domestic roles have an equal status to non-domestic roles, and not rest on your preconceptions

If it's a common enough occurrence to have _all_ your nodes down at the same time maybe you should reevaluate your deployment choices. The whole point of multi-nodes clustering is that _some_ of the nodes will always be up and running otherwise what you're doing is useless.

Also, garage gives you the possibility to automatically snapshot the metadata, advices on how to do the snapshotting at the filesystem level and to restore that.

> Ahead of the International Women's Day, a UNESCO study revealed worrying tendencies in Large Language models (LLM) to produce gender bias, as well as homophobia and racial stereotyping. Women were described as working in domestic roles far more often than men ¬– four times as often by one model – and were frequently associated with words like “home”, “family” and “children”, while male names were linked to “business”, “executive”, “salary”, and “career”.

https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/generative-ai-unesco-stud...

> Our analysis proves that bias in LLMs is not an unintended flaw but a systematic result of their rational processing, which tends to preserve and amplify existing societal biases encoded in training data. Drawing on existentialist theory, we argue that LLM-generated bias reflects entrenched societal structures and highlights the limitations of purely technical debiasing methods.

https://arxiv.org/html/2410.19775v1

> We find that the portrayals generated by GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 contain higher rates of racial stereotypes than human-written por- trayals using the same prompts. The words distinguishing personas of marked (non-white, non-male) groups reflect patterns of othering and exoticizing these demographics. An inter- sectional lens further reveals tropes that domi- nate portrayals of marginalized groups, such as tropicalism and the hypersexualization of mi- noritized women. These representational harms have concerning implications for downstream applications like story generation.

https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.84.pdf

Why would you not talk about your divorce ? It's also a part of your life

The internet and the web were, and still are, made by and for white rich men. It's not about who can be a prick, everyone can. It's about what the ecosystem pushes towards, and it's not the safety and general good life of women, black people, handicapped people, etc...

That's why you need to go to other regions, not remain in the same area. Putting all your eggs in one basket (single area) _is_ stupid. Having a single shutdown command for the whole cluster _is_ stupid. Still accepting writes when the system is in a degraded state _is_ stupid. Don't make it sound worse than it actually is just to prove your point.

I disagree that it's bad, it's a choice. You can't protect against everything. The team made calculations and decided that the cost to protect against this very low probability is not worth it. If all the nodes lose power you may have a bigger problem than that

Oh, read-your-writes is definitely not a solution to all problems, but to ditch it and go directly for strong consistency is... a bit radical

I don't understand this article and It's like the author doesn't really know what they're talking about. They don't want eventual consistency, they want read-your-writes, a consistency level that's stronger than EC yet still not strong.

https://jepsen.io/consistency/models/read-your-writes

Read-your-writes is indeed useful because it makes code easier to write: every process can behave as if it was the only one in the world, devs can write synchronous code, that's great ! But you don't need strong consistency.

I hope developers learn a little bit more about the domain before going to strong consistency.

Except it's only imap->maildir. ImapGoose also does the reverse

> When you run a business, you can’t realistically perform background checks on every partner or contributor

You can, and that depends on whether you want to or not. No one forces you to run a business. You're not absolved of the chore of having a look at your supply chain just because you're disinterested in it

AP, even in its purest simplest form, already allows to "revive" and "remix" data: you have the JSON of the data, you can do whatever you want with it. You can build a product injecting JSON of this data, just like in AT, but those product don't really exist so even if I can say "yes you can fork them" it's all talk.

There's no talk about migration in the core spec, but how is it in ATproto in practice ? Does everyone carry their entire repository, live from their own PDS, ready to be remigrated somewhere else ? It does feel like in AT-in-practice people just have a PDS and that's it ? (I've never used it, I might be totally wrong)

Really, if you want a simplistic view of AP, it's easy: it's an INBOX where you receive content, and an OUTBOX where you send content, and the content is activitystreams-formatted JSON. Anything else just makes it easier to work with.

That's ok, because "self-hosting" is not a goal in itself, it's a means to an end

That's a purely personal point of view but I don't think the AP people claim that "people want the wrong things", but rather that "the things you want have a cost and we're not hiding it".

The fact that likes count and half the replies are missing is not specific to AP but to implementations not willing to actually follow the AP community: in fact the SocialHub (https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/) community is the place where all coordinated development happens, and solutions to those issues have already been designed and implemented in multiple softwares, with the notable exception of Mastodon. Maybe that's the issue: people keep looking at Mastodon to understand AP, but Mastodon is one of the worst examples of AP, even when talking only about the technical domain. It doesn't implement the C2S API, it doesn't have portability, likes counts and missing replies as you said, ...

The subtext of my comment is that the people doing and pushing for atproto are not building for small networks but for big networks. Yes, technical solutions can be found; the problem is, as usual, not technical but rather social. What kind of organization can build and maintain world-scale indexes ? What kind of people can be in those organizations ? There is very little reason to believe that those intermediaries will not behave the same way intermediaries have always behaved, if we don't also challenge the socio-economico-political system they are developed in. Which developers have an automatic reaction to not do. That's where ActivityPub changes: the social aspect of what it takes for viable communities cannot be evaded. Sometimes with bad consequences though.

If we're talking strictly ActivityPub, they're exactly the same: servers where your data lives. AT's PDS give you access to your data, but proper AP servers also do that: you have your collections, and all your activities in them. The trick is to recognize which software is actually a proper ActivityPub software, and unfortunately Mastodon isn't one of them. The current issue is not with ActivityPub.

This is a beautifully written introduction to the architecture of AT, but after much consideration I will still remain on ActivityPub for the time being.

I love the idea to define data formats first, and then build on top of that. It's the only way we should do everything, because if you have the data, everything can be re-built on top. Unfortunately the way AT works is all contained in here:

> Social aggregation features like notifications, feeds, and search are non-negotiable in modern social products. [...] Coincidentally, that’s the exact mechanism you would use for aggregation. You listen to events from all of your app users’ repositories, write them to a local database, and query that database as much as you like with zero extra latency. [...] This might remind you of how Google Reader crawls RSS (rip).

In order for the social aspect to work, all data must at some point or another be aggregated in a single place. Said single place must then be huge, as it scales linearly with the activity of the network; in a still-capitalist world this means that this single place will always be run and led by money, unless some extraordinary volunteers-based project like Wikipedia springs up. The example of Google Reader is to the point: it was the biggest tech company at the time, provided a service for free, and decided to stop because it didn't care anymore.

In fact Google Reader is a very good comparison. AT works exactly as if you had websites, each with their own RSS feed, and then a big relay called Google, providing search, feeds, notifications, ... but as we all know by being the middleman between producers and readers Google gained an astonishingly high power. That is the business model described by Cory Doctorow when he talks about enshittification. Put yourself in the middle, and everyone will depend on you.

The only way an AT based product works at scale, ie with everyone easily talking to everyone, is with one or a few mega intermediaries between everyone of us. I fear this is not going to solve any of the issues we have.

What is different in ActivityPub ? Intermediaries are definitely useful for some services, but once your network is built you don't need them anymore: content flows directly between the repository, no middlemen needed.

In short: if we want a single network at large scale, AT requires large scale centralization points, while AP certainly needs them but could survive without them. Either we face that, or we start exploring and living within small-scale networks

Deltachat is still alive and well, you can see it evolve on their blog: https://delta.chat/en/blog

The thing is, deltachat really focuses on encrypted-first, and if possible encrypted-only communications in tight-knit groups: servers have no authority, they're merely relays. Mailing lists are not built for that, they're the central authority point where all moderation happens, and being forwarders they can't work with e2ee. In the current setting deltachat isn't built for mailing lists but group or 1-1 communication work very well.

Turns out AI isn't based on truth

It does sound similar to ideas in Tahoe-LAFS: https://tahoe-lafs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/architecture.htm...

Which has already thought about attacks on the scheme you described: https://tahoe-lafs.org/hacktahoelafs/drew_perttula.html

You probably want to combine that with filespooler <https://www.complete.org/introduction-to-filespooler/>, a tool to write packets to be handled sequentially. It will convert everything into files that can then be transported however you want, by mail, by syncthing, by nncp, ...

> This is also a category of app that I believe could be better served by local-first native apps.

I don't think you even need apps for that. I don't need to save everything forever but I do want to save articles to read offline, after transferring them to the phone:

- I transform the page into an epub thanks to browser extensions (for example this one: <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/saveasebook/>) - I save the content in a special "toread" folder that is synced with syncthing - From my phone I can open all files in pretty much any epub app - With a few scripts I can search in them

Absolutely, which is yet another reason why this abstraction from the conditions of creation of anything tech-related is something that should be eliminated