Paco Hope #BLM

@django I obviously didn’t know that. Thanks for taking the time to explain.

@araquen @TheBaldness This only makes sense when the ratio of computers to users is exactly one. If more than one person uses the same computer, you don’t want person A’s favourite settings interfering with person B. On the flip side, a person who uses more than one computer wants to easily bring their settings with them from one computer to the next. The bits that personalise the experience should be stored in the person’s personal space.

There is no good answer. Put the configs in the app’s location, now every ordinary user needs write access to where programs are stored, just to store their preferences. Virus-writer’s paradise. Put them in the personal folders and now you have all this cruft and crap leftover from programs long since forgotten and uninstalled. It’s neither sloppy note careless. It’s a hard problem that doesn’t have a simple elegant answer that’s perfect for everyone.

@ffmike A subsequent step will be to charge extra for human authored content. You’ll shout “representative!” At your search engine like you do a phone support line today.

@django Yeah. I’m just using the reader view in the browser. Is it that web sites have reader views for individual articles but no longer update an index of some kind?

@BananaTrifleViolin @curt @iter_facio In what way has it “died”? I visit all sorts of web sites using a mobile browser, tap the “reader” button, and get the RSS version of the page, minus ads as expected. Are there lots of sites that have removed it? I haven’t run into them….

@elevenant @hedge One possibility is that we, fedizens, generate content that can be fed into Facebook feeds. People on Facebook can follow the fediverse. And all that content gets interlaced with ads when it comes to a Facebook user. All Facebook wants the average user to do is produce reasons for the other users to come to Facebook and to consume ads. If the fediverse becomes a source of compelling content that it can use to keep users interacting with the FB fees, that’s a straightforward way to make more money the way it makes money now.

@Shhalahr if everyone has a good faith obligation then that includes Meta, too. I don’t think anyone familiar with their history should think they act in good faith. Isn’t that the essential question? Why should we even believe them at first, given how many promises they have broken and how consistently they change their mind?

@smokinjoe An interesting reaction to react is Svelte: https://svelte.dev/. Instead of sending an entire application to the browser and making the poor client run all of it, do a crap ton of compute and calculation at build time. Send minimal code and computation to the browser. Totally different paradigm.

@tinselpar @sdx I disagree. I’ve been self-hosting my email since 1998. I routinely end up on blacklists and low-reputation IP lists and other situations that limit my email from reaching people.

The big players like gmail, outlook, yahoo have absolutely no method of appeal or explanation. You can submit to an opaque form and maybe email starts getting delivered again. But you’ll never get a reason or even a notification that they made a change. It is a constant labour: So much so that I pay a monitoring service to alert me if my server ends up on a list somewhere.

Look at paco.to and look for issues. It’s “right” in terms of SMTP standards and compliance. This stuff happens to me ALL THE TIME.

I was emailing my local government office and had to call them to find out why they weren’t replying. All my mail was going into a junk folder for no reason that I could see or control.

When big players adopt something, small players must also, or we lose the ability to send email to massive numbers of people.

So while it is “possible” to run your own small email server, the dominance of a few absolutely massive players makes it a lot of work for the small operator.

@hedge doing the math is one thing. Deciding on the semantics of what it MEANS is something else. If it verifies, what does that mean? Does it mean the contents of a file are “good” (valid, trustworthy, not malicious, complete, etc)? Does it mean you know WHO signed it? And what does that WHO really mean? A person, an organisation? Was the user that caused the signature authorised to do so? What do you believe about the identity, knowing that the certificate validated?

And if the certificate DOESNT verify…what does it mean? Does it mean the contents were modified? Does it mean the contents are invalid? And HOW does it fail to verify? Was the signature made before the NotBefore date? Was the signature made after the NotAfter Date? Is the certificate fine and the signature valid, but the certificate who signed the certificate who made the signature somehow untrustworthy? Or maybe the certificate you have is a tampered certificate where the identity has been modified, but the cryptographic math of the signature on your file checks out. So the contents of the file are probably fine.

We don’t ask these questions. And we definitely don’t answer them. As James Mickens says in his talk about computer science, “The stuff is what the stuff is, man.”

@st3ph3n @c1b0 @priapus @JelloBrains I run a 20-year old vbulletin system. It is minimally changing but they do still release fixes and updates. No major feature changes in years.

@jamesw In the old days, if you bought a dvd, it was your job to make sure it didn’t get scratched up, lost, etc. You had to make sure you kept a DVD player in working order if you wanted to watch it. Likewise for books. You buy the book and it’s your responsibility to keep it intact to read it. So if they let you download it once and keep it forever, that seems reasonable. If they make you download it every time you want to watch it, that’s a service, not a purchase. Asking them to maintain an online service so you can download it again if you lose it, though, doesn’t match the idea of “buying” as much as it matches the idea of “renting”.

@Rentlar yeah. I use it that way too. But I think discord is as useful a “knowledge store” as iMessage. I mean, nobody would think of iMessage like a knowledge store. I joined an open source thing I bought of a kickstarter-like site. They had no FAQ. No wiki. Just “join our discord”. So every technical question was either buried in random chat, or pinned at the top of the “general” channel. Terrible way to support users.

@Rentlar when information is not open to indexing and search, I don’t think it qualifies as knowledge. I hate that aspect of discord

@assbutt @Cipher @maynarkh @freeman (replying from mastodon in case this looks weird)

Many ActivityPub services allow you to seamlessly transfer your profile from one instance to another. It even sends messages that let your followers update so they follow you at your new address. Moving profiles isn’t a big deal. It’s Ok if they join a big instance at first, and move later.

There are compelling reasons why new folks join big instances and it’s not definitely a bad thing. Although this blog focuses mostly on the #twittermigration and #mastodon, it does discuss the #redditMigration and I think it makes strong points.

https://blog.bloonface.com/2023/06/12/why-did-the-twittermigration-fail/