Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

drewdevault.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 174 posts

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#141

Post by gglitch »

lifty wrote: post #106
CookieMon wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Take twister for example Y'all got any more of them "examples" I'm now aware of two social media alternatives that aren't dead accounts walking. Twister is in beta, but that looks interesting enough to play with and keep an eye on.

Scuttlebutt is a pure p2p social network. Active and lovely https://www.scuttlebutt.nz

I got excited about Scuttlebutt but was troubled by my inability to remove old content. It created a chilling effect. I hope I just misunderstood that.

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#142

Post by snvzz »

daveid wrote: post #118
snvzz wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Can you tell me how and where you would broadcast your location via Mastodon? For a network observer, your IP address, associated with your account name. >I don't think restricting a message to followers is an applicable model for e2ee But requiring TLS between clients and servers, and between servers (for the federation), is applicable. >Direct messages yes, I can see the point in that. The average joe expects dire…

TLS is required in Mastodon for all transport. And of course your IP address is not included in any payloads leaving your server. >The average joe expects direct messages to really be private. If they're not, that's bad. They're not "really private" in Twitter DMs and Facebook Messenger and PMs on phpBB and Discourse forums, they were not "really private" in ICQ, AIM and XMPP (unless you installed the OTR plugin on t…

>TLS is required in Mastodon for all transport.

Citation needed. I was told it's optional in a recent thread.

>They're not "really private" in...

Doesn't address the argument you quoted:

>The average joe expects direct messages to really be private. If they're not, that's bad.

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#143

Post by concerned_user »

gglitch wrote: post #141
lifty wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scuttlebutt is a pure p2p social network. Active and lovely https://www.scuttlebutt.nz

I got excited about Scuttlebutt but was troubled by my inability to remove old content. It created a chilling effect. I hope I just misunderstood that.

It is just the reality of the situation, when you publish something on the internet and then delete it, even if it is an entry in your private blog that runs on a Raspberry Pi on your desk if you had at least one visitor you can't guarantee they didn't save a copy and that hey won't distribute it again later.

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#144

Post by d0lph »

warkdarrior wrote: post #134
Barrin92 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds to me like rearranging deck chairs on the titanic. Corporate culture is the direct result of the business model of the company. You won't see facebook promote decentralised privacy, it's not going to happen just like you won't find anti-oil protests within the management of Exxon-Mobile, or a push for rail based public transport within the headquarters of Uber. Corporate culture is a structure build on-to…

> Corporate culture is the direct result of the business model of the company. That's clearly incorrect. Both Walmart and Costco are in the same retail business, but their corporate cultures are quite distinct.

Those are pretty different though, Costco is a "membership-only warehouse club" who sells through wholesale.

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#145

Post by d0lph »

notyourday wrote: post #138
Lazare wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It might not be strictly true in a legal sense, but it hits close to the mark in the case of facebook et al There's a difference between "we did it because we were legally obligated" and "we did it because Zuckerberg wanted to". The myth of profit maximisation being an absolute legal duty is much too kind to Facebook here; they're not just a victim of our late capitalist system. > It simply would not be a billion d…

It is not a myth what so ever: the company does whatever those that control the majority of the shares want it to do. Absolutely no one else, unless the company engages in illegal activity has any say. Corporations are democracies with the rules of majority that are spelled out in their documents.

This line of reasoning seems to forget that the ultimate control belongs to the customer. Thus we see Facebook taking a big hit for collecting personal information people assumed was private.

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#146

Post by d0lph »

osteele wrote: post #29

The post repeats the myth “There is no promise that a company can make to its users that outweighs the fiduciary duty that obligates them to maximize profits by any means. The only defense of this is legislation and consumer choice.” As a counterpoint, see, for example, [1], that quotes the Supreme Court Hobby Lobby decision[2]: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the ex…

Any company that places the wants of the shareholders above the customers risks losing their customer base (see Facebook).

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#147

Post by WorldMaker »

d0lph wrote: post #144
warkdarrior wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Corporate culture is the direct result of the business model of the company. That's clearly incorrect. Both Walmart and Costco are in the same retail business, but their corporate cultures are quite distinct.

Those are pretty different though, Costco is a "membership-only warehouse club" who sells through wholesale.

So is Sam's Club and that's owned by Walmart?

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#148

Post by WorldMaker »

d0lph wrote: post #145
notyourday wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not a myth what so ever: the company does whatever those that control the majority of the shares want it to do. Absolutely no one else, unless the company engages in illegal activity has any say. Corporations are democracies with the rules of majority that are spelled out in their documents.

This line of reasoning seems to forget that the ultimate control belongs to the customer. Thus we see Facebook taking a big hit for collecting personal information people assumed was private.

The trouble being that customer is 1) an aggregate (there likely is no the customer, just some customers, maybe a lot of them), 2) fuzzy (Facebook's real customers are advertisers, they pay the bills). How do non-ad-buying users matter as customers to Facebook? Only so far as they are aggregate eyeballs to feed to the real customers, advertisers?

The sad specter of case law dating at least as far back to Dodge v Ford [1], is that legally the only relationship that has to matter to a (US) business is its relationship with its shareholders. Consumer protections have only ever barely been carved out with regulatory action.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#149

Post by WorldMaker »

daveFNbuck wrote: post #135
osteele wrote: post #29

The post repeats the myth “There is no promise that a company can make to its users that outweighs the fiduciary duty that obligates them to maximize profits by any means. The only defense of this is legislation and consumer choice.” As a counterpoint, see, for example, [1], that quotes the Supreme Court Hobby Lobby decision[2]: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the ex…

Hobby Lobby is a private company, and this was critical to the ruling. The fiduciary duty myth is about public companies, so Hobby Lobby does not work as a counter-example.

The same fiduciary duty legal precedents still matter to private companies. Even private companies have shareholders (we don't have a model for companies that do not have shareholders), and the fiduciary duty of a private company is absolutely a factor in any "corporate breakup" when Founders come to disagreements, dissolve companies, et cetera.

I agree with your implication in using the word "myth" that fiduciary duty as a concern is overblown in the collective world of public corporations (the decision in Dodge v Ford was hugely problematic and its shadow haunts us all), but it's not a myth in that it doesn't exist.

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#150

Post by WorldMaker »

d0lph wrote: post #146
osteele wrote: post #29

The post repeats the myth “There is no promise that a company can make to its users that outweighs the fiduciary duty that obligates them to maximize profits by any means. The only defense of this is legislation and consumer choice.” As a counterpoint, see, for example, [1], that quotes the Supreme Court Hobby Lobby decision[2]: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the ex…

Any company that places the wants of the shareholders above the customers risks losing their customer base (see Facebook).

So far Facebook's paying customers, the advertisers, seem unworried?
Post reply on HN