This would be way easier to implement without blockchain. Data portability doesn’t require any of the consensus mechanisms or distributed computation, even if they would result in user data being portable.

One of these is proprietary, so one option is good

Nix really has a kickass way of doing this. Won’t conflict anywhere and always let’s you know what is managed by Nix.

Great username

This is why we need federated comms.

Each instance has a low-activity community under instance.tld/c/community. For most instances and most topics, this will mean checking a comm yields maybe a few new posts a week, and if you want to see all the content related to that topic, you’ll have to check every instance your server federates with individually.

Having a single instance.tld/f/community that aggregates all the per-instance comms so there’s one topic-specific place with everything would be far more enjoyable of an experience.

This functionality is probably the biggest benefit that could be facilitated by federation, since we already have federated post comments. Activity is high enough now that posts feel lively, and the main feed has enough interesting stuff, but the one thing that still feels lacking compared to reddit is being able to browse a sub and find a reasonable amount of fresh content if you haven’t checked back in the last week or so.

Subscriptions are also far less useful if you have to manually find and subscribe to every instance’s comm with the same name. Being able to sub once to the federated comm and sub to all the instance comms would make the subscriptions feed go from my least used feed to my most used.

You can’t even get on Reddit in China

Oh no, the horror!

Signal or other encryption

Weird, that’s how I kept in contact with my family when I was there.

It has nothing to do economic prosperity or anything like that

plugs ears LA LA LA LA LA

China is an authoritarian government who doesn’t want to lose control.

wet_fart_noise.flac

You’re both completely wrong. This is the narrative the five eyes and three letters need you to believe.

More important and more funded than domestic spying, US intelligence exists to facilitate regime change. The objective is to have both dragnet and targeted surveillance to obtain leverage (for strategic leverage, blackmail, or comms interception) over foreign political, social, and business leaders so they can maximize the unequal exchange between the US & developing countries.

Keeping Africa, South America, the Middle East, and South East Asia from developing through political and social instability not only prevents them from competing with US exports, but more importantly keeps their economies dependent on natural resource exports, which they need to sell for cheap because they are dependent on technology imports.

China as a manufacturing powerhouse threatens these unequal trade arrangements by supplying these undeveloped or developing countries with manufactured goods and technology, and thus is one of the primary targets of US covert regime change operations. (Also why you see news media crying bloody murder about China’s “dept trap diplomacy”). Much of this also applies to other developing powers that resist being imperialized or oppose US geopolitical goals like the USSR/Russia and Iran.

So purpose #1 of the great firewall is to prevent the US from controlling its social and technology sphere and using it to cause instability.

Purpose #2 is economic protectionism for China’s high tech sector. China knows that as long as it remains primarily industrial / low tech manufacturer, it will always be threatened by US intervention.

By moving to high tech, China can eliminate its reliance on Western technology imports, eliminate threat vectors for adversaries to slip in, and let other rising nations like Vietnam, Brazil, Malaysia, and Mexico take some of the heat off them by outsourcing its manufacturing there. China also gets to benefit by having cutting edge tech that will benefit its public health, increase education levels, strengthen its military, and form the basis of its post-industrial economy.

China “enforcing the official narrative” insofar as controlling public opinion is of far lower importance than denying the west avenues to destroy its society. China is incredibly diverse and a quick peek into Chinese social media reveals no shortage of western culture fetishizers, religious quacks, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, capitalist enthusiasts, shit talkers about political figures, and people pushing back on “the official narrative”. VPN usage is widespread. People read, share, and meme western news and social media.

Yes they censor posts, no they don’t do that great of a job at it…because the goal isn’t censorship, its about denying the West the ability to exploit discontent to destabilize the country.

See also:

• Tibet in the 50s & 60s (notice the gap here, when the US thought China would be a useful bludgeon against the Soviet Union & allies)
• Student protests in 1989
• Honk Kong in 2019
• Xinjiang when the US was in Afghanistan
• Taiwan tensions and weapons sales ramping up now

All of these being natural internal tensions exploited with great effort and to great effect by the US through mass media campaigns, radicalizing extremist and separatist groups, weapons transfers, and direct involvement in helping people commit violence.

And the US isn’t Russia buying $10 million worth of Facebook ads and running not farms, this is the most developed, most funded, and most sophisticated intelligence apparatus in history. One so large, people with an interest in politics and spying, cannot name all the publicly known agencies without missing 5-10.

You can quote me on this, if the US were to fall in the coming decades, the firewall would also fall within the year. Though, I suspect the US will just languish with internal infighting once the petrodollar loses reserve currency status and China takes the firewall down around 2035 once there aren’t powers posing a credible threat to its security.

Ik I’m late to the party, but I think this would be soooo much better than Wikipedia for finding useful information on niche or controversial topics.

Instead of being limited to Wikipedia’s contributors and having to accommodate or guess their biases, and have a terrible, incomplete “controversies” section on every page, you could browse the same page across instances whose biases are much more explicit and see what each group determines is most important about the topic.

Instead of having to find a single mutually agreed upon article where each “faction” has their own set of issues with the content, you can now browse pages that each of those factions feel best represent their POV, and use the sum of them to form an opinion where no information is omitted.

Obviously lots of instances will have complete bullshit, but it’s likely enough that you will find instances that have well-sourced material from a diverse breadth of viewpoints, and can pick an instance that federates to your preferred criteria for quality. Misinfo will exist regardless, and if they get it from a federated wiki, it will probably be at least marginally better quality or better cited than the Facebook or Reddit posts they were getting it from before.

It would be useful for the “what does X group think about Y” aspect alone.

There’s also nothing stopping diverse, consensus-based instances from popping up. Or lots of niche academic instances with greater depth on their areas of expertise.

bruh, I think I agree with most of your conclusions, but you gotta work on your delivery, as it definitely doesn’t serve your message well. I think you receive a lot more pushback because you use so many harshly negative words to describe people.

Just in this comment, you use:

• disease
• sewer
• “security” clowns
• pure snake oil
• disgusting sole developer
• minions
• witch hunt
• maliciously
• trained monkeys

which makes this comment sound more like a Donald Trump rally than a well-reasoned argument. It’s understandable given your history of conflict with members of the project, and I usually hate tone policing, but I think this word choice severely hurts your argument. Remember, most people here are just passerby and have no idea about the drama or your experiences with their community. Their first impression is gonna be you’re the flip-side to Micay.

I think your thesis is largely correct, that the project does a suspicious amount of shilling for big tech and Google and pushes a lot of anti-FOSS propaganda and has a toxic social media presence that silences good people geniunely asking questions or voicing opinion in good faith.

I don’t think it has improved that much. The current social team just repackages the same opinions and behavior with fewer meltdowns. I see the change as purely symbolic.

Would be nice if it would pull short vids from PeerTube or other fedi platforms.

Never really used tiktok, partially because I don’t get addicted to video like I do reading text. Video is too slow for my ADHD brain, and you can’t choose your content beforehand.

But I’d still pick up this platform to help it get traction.

I think the ActivityPub sphere needs to transition from “fedi replica of X service” to “Y component that would be useful to existing fedi services”.

Event planning is one of them. Simple, encrypted one-to-one DMs is another. Moderation tools is a big one too.

Would be a shame if each software has to independently reimplement the same features desired by each flavor of threaded reply service.

I like this as an idea, but there’d need to be some sort of automatic hooking for me to want to use it. eza/lsd are good enough for ls output for me.

Doing stuff like this is much more cozy in nushell, since piping is a lot less messy

I find myself writing way less stuff like this since making the switch…partially because they output of a lot of builtins is already pretty.

is there a tool that also works with other git forges like GitLab and Forgejo?

rare blur setup that both looks good and practical without being super tacky. What is the blur algo?

Sounds good in theory.

But I’ve had so many issues with D-Bus fucking shit up on my systems that I’d be very reluctant to hinge my only way of recovering from failures upon something so brittle.

Granted, D-Bus hasn’t given me any trouble since moving to NixOS. The hell of trying to recover my arch systems from a perpetually failing D-Bus would make me very apprehensive to adopt this. I could see myself using run0 by default, but keeping sudo-rs or doas around with a much stricter configuration as a failsafe until the run0 + D-Bus + PolKit is absolutely stable and bulletproof.

I completely agree, but I do find the anti-systemd crowd to be more annoying than helpful in most contexts.

"disregard the last message“ is the new sudo for Windows

I read their message as a joke that AD was an easy vector for an adversary

No you don’t