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Cake day: July 15th, 2024

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  • As someone from Russia, we have Ozon and Wildberries and Yandex and Mail.ru, neither of which exists in all business niches of Amazon, but in the overlapping ones seem close.

    It’s not that they are really bad, but I don’t like monopolies.

    I think for all of these - marketplaces with delivery, social networks, cloud hosting, - there has to emerge some standard, some global system. Similar to the Internet or maybe to the postal service. Something has to be done, because these unfortunately work in a way encouraging monopoly.

    Even when I was almost unconditionally ancap, infrastructure was a special case (and it still is for most ancaps, theoretically unconditional private property applies to hypothetical things fully created by a person, and for territory, infrastructure, discovered ideas it’s closer to the other extreme). These things are infrastructure.

    In the Internet one person can host their stuff on one hosting, another on another, and their email on different providers, but they’ll be able to interact. A buyer on Ozon and a seller on Amazon are not.

    That’s because email and web hosting require only the Internet the functioning system to exist. A social network requires more (if we want it to be interoperable and global),

    I think the missing part to make such a standard is automated payments in the Internet. The platforms’ inner management of resources is hidden from us, but for a global system computing and storage resources are necessary, and they are neither provided by governments nor pooled by enthusiasts, it’s impractical to rely on pure altruism for such. And to have a global system with monetary encouragement of providing infrastructure means that we need payment for resources as simple and general as how we pay for landline or Internet service. ISP’s no longer provide shell accounts and web hosting, but even when they did, this wasn’t quite the thing.

    The platforms emerged because it’s bothersome to pay for infrastructure and maintain it, there’s not even a straightforward way. You need a humongous service with plenty of computing, someone should pay for it.

    So - there was Usenet at some point solving a lot of the similar problems, except, of course, a news server would store lots and lots of stuff for each hierarchy. But that wasn’t reimagined for the new things we do in the Internet.

    For twiddling and various kinds of power abuse to be impossible they should be technically impossible in the system. So:

    1. Various functions of platforms should be decomposed into different pooled untrusted services (to pool anything you have to design for untrusted) in the Internet. Pooling can be done the way similar to bittorrent trackers - a service comes online, announces itself and repeats that regularly. A client needing a service requests a few trackers and picks a few services from the results. Services might be, say, storage (anything, like FTP servers even), computation (submit bytecode, receive result, or something like that), indexing (a search engine, returning results in standard machine-processable format), notification (like NOSTR relays). Maybe trade for resources can be a separate type of service. And user identity caching.

    2. It should be possible to provide a paid service and pay for that service, easily enough, like MMORPG scripted marketplaces - a setting like “buy no more than 2G of storage, by price no more than N per K, stop if remaining money less than K”. Or same for selling on a service you host.

    3. The history of platforms in the last 20 years shows us that the Internet is for the machines. The user representation should be in a local application, and the logic combining those non-application-specific services should work on the client machine. Say, aggregating results of a few indexing services, or aggregating trade offerings from a few trade services, or online users from among friends from a few notification services.

    Shit, I wrote this again.




  • Well, I live in Russia, but I’ve read there were changes about taxes calculation logic for people of low enough income too. Maybe they are smiling about that?

    It’s still funny how the supposed problem of US state debt going is apparently not a problem when it’s your side inflating it beyond the year 1946 record against GDP. Or so they say.

    BTW, when people say that US state debt is being misinterpreted and it’s not a problem, - basically any country’s state debt is, until it isn’t. That would work like, well, loss of trust into US ability to support the debt, which means loss of the value of USD, which together may form a positive feedback loop. Not hard to see that if such thing were to happen, you’d have rapid inflation and probably default.

    (Also maybe that talk about bringing production back to USA, Musk’s political ideas and funding for military structures, all that stuff, are being done in preparation for the inevitable, - it’s technically possible to avoid it, but politically may not be, cause both main sides just promise more spending to own the other side. Because their plans that don’t make sense now look kinda better in a hypothetical scenario of post-default USA. It’ll still have enormous human capital, and its economic situation would allow to use that for building industries anew.)


  • That actually follows from the traditional argument against possibility of welfare - if the state can do such help, it’ll first give it to closest to it, which are the people who need it the least.

    But I think with direct democracy it’d be fine. At least some middle ground would be found between those voting for “free money” and those voting so that others wouldn’t get “free money”. Unlike now when depending on who you are it’s either always free money or always fuck you.

    EDIT: In general radical political models are better thought through fundamentally. Real world ones work in arcane ways, usually not the ones publicly declared, and rely on lots of inertia to be functional. But both radical marxism (direct democracy and full on social involvement) and radical ancap (no common decisions at all, no common social involvement at all) lack such vulnerabilities. That’s unfortunately the reason people with real world power don’t need them. If you have real world power, you’d support the change that gives you more power or preserves what you have. So for a model to be plausible it needs to have vulnerabilities, to attract real-world support. Only disadvantaged people really want a perfect model, and they are not the ones deciding.

    Hence another radical variant - radical agnosticism of political systems, try to always keep as variable and diverse mix as possible, so that power, advantage and disadvantage were more or less equally spread, allowing people to live maybe not in heaven, but not in hell too. Decision-making systems as mixed as possible, legal spaces as diverse as possible, and so on.



  • Yes.

    Because all the ideas of “national character” and “nation” are worth about as much as the paper to write them on, or electricity to transmit and display them, you get the idea.

    Only the life itself matters.

    And the life itself becomes the better the wider is the participation in the government and the society’s life by all people in it, with which citizenship helps a lot. And people having a baby on some territory are obviously sufficiently firmly present there to be its inhabitants in fact, and all inhabitants of a territory should be citizens. They already, directly or not, pay taxes and work. Citizenship is (should be) just the other side of the coin.

    It’s not acceptable for two people to work in one country and one of them to not have citizenship. From labor interests, from ethics, and just from plain dignity, why the hell should someone living in a land not have citizenship? It’s not a privilege. It’s a set of rights and responsibilities, someone having a different set is segregation.

    Also cultural diversity (not the artificial bunching together into protected groups, like that bullshit Americans do) is precious, having an influx of immigrants that become citizens without any fear of being stripped of that citizenship or being deported is a blessing. There are countries like Argentina, Brazil, USA, that once were close to becoming better and richer than Europe, US still is by inertia. They all had such a trait.

    At the same time the education system should guarantee that such a citizen will really be a member of the society when they turn 18. Speaking the language, knowing the constitutional law at least. Not a ghetto dweller.


  • What I’m speaking about is that it should be impossible to do some things. If it’s possible, they will be done, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

    To solve the problem of twiddled social media (and moderation used to assert dominance) we need a decentralized system of 90s Web reimagined, and Fediverse doesn’t deliver it - if Facebook and Reddit are feudal states, then Fediverse is a confederation of smaller feudal entities.

    A post, a person, a community, a reaction and a change (by moderator or by the user) should be global entities (with global identifiers, so that the object by id of #0000001a2b3c4d6e7f890 would be the same object today or 10 years later on every server storing it) replicated over a network of servers similarly to Usenet (and to an IRC network, but in an IRC network servers are trusted, so it’s not a good example for a global system).

    Really bad posts (or those by persons with history of posting such) should be banned on server level by everyone. The rest should be moderated by moderator reactions\changes of certain type.

    Ideally, for pooling of resources and resilience, servers would be separated by types into storage nodes (I think the name says it, FTP servers can do the job, but no need to be limited by it), index nodes (scraping many storage nodes, giving out results in structured format fit for any user representation, say, as a sequence of posts in one community, or like a list of communities found by tag, or … , and possibly being connected into one DHT for Kademlia-like search, since no single index node will have everything), and (like in torrents?) tracker nodes for these and for identities, I think torrent-like announce-retrieve service is enough - to return a list of storage nodes storing, say, a specified partition (subspace of identifiers of objects, to make looking for something at least possibly efficient), or return a list of index nodes, or return a bunch of certificates and keys for an identity (should be somehow cryptographically connected to the global identifier of a person). So when a storage node comes online, it announces itself to a bunch of such trackers, similarly with index nodes, similarly with a user. One can also have a NOSTR-like service for real-time notifications by users.

    This way you’d have a global untrusted pooled infrastructure, allowing to replace many platforms. With common data, identities, services. Objects in storage and index services can be, say, in a format including a set of tags and then the body. So a specific application needing to show only data related to it would just search on index services and display only objects with tags of, say, “holo_ns:talk.bullshit.starwars” and “holo_t:post”, like a sequence of posts with ability to comment, or maybe it would search objects with tags “holo_name:My 1999-like Star Wars holopage” and “holo_t:page” and display the links like search results in Google, and then clicking on that you’d see something presented like a webpage, except links would lead to global identifiers (or tag expressions interpreted by the particular application, who knows).

    (An index service may return, say, an array of objects, each with identifier, tags, list of locations on storage nodes where it’s found or even bittorrent magnet links, and a free description possibly ; then the user application can unify responses of a few such services to avoid repetitions, maybe sort them, represent them as needed, so on.)

    The user applications for that common infrastructure can be different at the same time. Some like Facebook, some like ICQ, some like a web browser, some like a newsreader.

    (Star Wars is not a random reference, my whole habit of imagining tech stuff is from trying to imagine a science fiction world of the future, so yeah, this may seem like passive dreaming and it is.)






  • The mod ego problem will exist as long as there’s moderation, unfortunately.

    It was present in the web even before it was expelled from heaven.

    But it’s not necessary to remove all moderation, just global identifiers of posts and many different “moderating projections” of the same collection of data can be enough to change the climate for most of the users. Not moderation itself really matters - the ability to dominate, to shut someone’s mouth matters. If the only way you see a post is without such at all - then maybe it’s too rude. If it’s removed on the instance level on most of instances - then maybe it’s something really nasty that shouldn’t be seen. But if in some projection it’s visible and in some not - then we’ve solved this particular problem.

    In such a hypothetical system.


  • tuning its algorithm to promote the most divisive material possible. Because that is what will increase engagement

    But at the same time in every case I described on Lemmy an experience not maximizing engagement by maximizing conflict, I was downvoted to hell’s basement. Despite two of three modern social media experience models being too aimed for that, that’d be Facebook-like and Reddit-like, excluding Twitter-like (which is unfortunately vulnerable to bots). I mean, there’s less conflict on fucking imageboards, those were at some point considered among most toxic places in the interwebs.

    (Something-something Usenet-like namespaces instead of existing communities tied to instances, something-something identities too not tied to instances and being cryptographic, something-something subjective moderation (subscribing to moderation authorities you choose, would feel similar to joining a group, one can even have in the UI a few combinations of the same namespace and a few different moderation authorities for it), something-something a bigger role of client-side moderation (ignoring in the UI those people you don’t like). Ideally what really gets removed and not propagated to anyone would be stuff like calls for mass murders, stolen credentials, gore, real rape and CP. The “posting to a namespace versus posting to an owned community” dichotomy is important. The latter causes a “capture the field” reaction from humans.)