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Cabal: A peer-to-peer, off-grid, community-first, hackable chat platform

cabal.chat

81–90 of 337 posts

Re: Cabal: A peer-to-peer, off-grid, community-first, hackable chat platform

#81
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evolution will take care of that. A lot of them will simply fizzle out.

Beware evolution's pruning. It optimises for survival (and as a consequence, reproduction and ruthlessness), which is often at odds with what people value.

I picked up The Selfish Gene because I was hoping to figure out how JavaScript got so popular.

Re: Cabal: A peer-to-peer, off-grid, community-first, hackable chat platform

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not a coincidence that this gets posted with no context the day that Parler gets kicked off AWS. I presume it's someone trying to offer Cabal as a Parler alternative.

I doubt that https://github.com/cabal-club/commons/blob/master/values.md#...

But if architected for openness without central censorship chokepoints, such affinity declarations can’t alone prevent participation. Mastodon’s tech is used by Gab, for example.

At best this can:

* influence the observable qualities of the closely-collaborating dev community – who’ll have to outwardly project these values.

* lead to the prioritization of decentralized user-driven moderation features, which still allow the disfavored groups to communicate with other willing audiences, with minimized impact on unwilling audiences.

Re: Cabal: A peer-to-peer, off-grid, community-first, hackable chat platform

#83
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Briar only works on Android so it's inherently flawed. Of course, Cabal being written in javascript is also a major minus. As an oldschool Unix hacker, I don't really get the node.js fixation for command line tools. It's a certainty that they'll never be used by a significant chunk of knowledgeable, expert Unix users that want nothing to do with node. Finally, there is no protocol documentation anywhere that I can se…

No knowledgeable, expert Unix user I know brushes a Node program aside just because it is Node.

We've all taken some git precommit hook that a coworker has helpfully provided, and rewritten it in bash so you don't need the entire node runtime to append a ticket number to a string.

Re: Cabal: A peer-to-peer, off-grid, community-first, hackable chat platform

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beware evolution's pruning. It optimises for survival (and as a consequence, reproduction and ruthlessness), which is often at odds with what people value.

I picked up The Selfish Gene because I was hoping to figure out how JavaScript got so popular.

Any insights?

Re: Cabal: A peer-to-peer, off-grid, community-first, hackable chat platform

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beware evolution's pruning. It optimises for survival (and as a consequence, reproduction and ruthlessness), which is often at odds with what people value.

I get your point, but a product is only bought or used if people value it in some way (whether for good reasons or bad reasons), so product evolution has people’s values built into the process.

Product evolution has people's actions built into the process. Who, before playing Farmville, would value spending $1000 on digital sheep?

Re: Cabal: A peer-to-peer, off-grid, community-first, hackable chat platform

#86
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I picked up The Selfish Gene because I was hoping to figure out how JavaScript got so popular.

Any insights?

Probably not. JavaScript's so popular because the web is the universal cross-platform target, and Node.JS has a slightly lower barrier-to-entry to Hello World than learning a new language. You'll want to study energetics to understand that.

Re: Cabal: A peer-to-peer, off-grid, community-first, hackable chat platform

#87
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MAGA folks looking for platforms for their "free speech". This is not a target demographic you should strive for.

I am not really a big fan of end-to-end encryption for solving society’s main communication problems, I think people (pseudonymous or not) should be accountable for their speech. But I do believe in empowering people and uniting communities. If you want to run your own social network out of your own servers, you should be able to. The fact that the software to power user friendly communication platforms is scarce is…

> I think people ... should be accountable for their speech.

There is certainly some speech which is and should be illegal, but if you optimize communication systems for "accountability" you might end up in a situation which is worse than what we have now.

“There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech.” ― Idi Amin

Re: Cabal: A peer-to-peer, off-grid, community-first, hackable chat platform

#88
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MAGA folks looking for platforms for their "free speech". This is not a target demographic you should strive for.

I am not really a big fan of end-to-end encryption for solving society’s main communication problems, I think people (pseudonymous or not) should be accountable for their speech. But I do believe in empowering people and uniting communities. If you want to run your own social network out of your own servers, you should be able to. The fact that the software to power user friendly communication platforms is scarce is…

I agree, and that's why I work on Scuttlebutt.

But I also think we should do everything in our power to dissuade dangerous folks (example: violent extremists) from using these tools.

Re: Cabal: A peer-to-peer, off-grid, community-first, hackable chat platform

#89
No full forward secrecy.

>All traffic is encrypted using a symmetric key, meaning that anybody who has the cabal://abcdef key can read cabal network traffic.

If you're even considering this, look at https://tox.chat/ instead. That one's been around for a while (thus mature) and actually has full forward secrecy.

Re: Cabal: A peer-to-peer, off-grid, community-first, hackable chat platform

#90
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I picked up The Selfish Gene because I was hoping to figure out how JavaScript got so popular.

Any insights?

Only about a third of the way through, but I've picked up some great insights in general. Nothing about JavaScript (yet).
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