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

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

#141

Post by jv22222 »

nostromo wrote: post #135
jv22222 wrote: post #125

For clarification: The 1st amendment ensures that the government may not stop you from saying what you want. This is a separate issue from private companies removing/banning you. Each company has their own right and freedom to be as dickish as they want with regard to deleting your account etc - but that is not related to the 1st.

Freedom of speech is a guiding principle that predates the United States, and the first amendment, by a few millennia. And yet every discussion about free speech online contains a few comments about the first amendment’s narrow legal scope. Sure, that’s right, but freedom of speech does not have a narrow legal scope; it’s a much broader concept, and it is global in nature. In almost every case online, the discussion…

My clarification was just to try to bring clarity to the discussion because a lot of times (as seen in the thread) there is some confusion.

I’m curious how what you just said translates into real world application?

Not trying to argue I am genuinely interested to hear more!

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

#142

Post by s17n »

jv22222 wrote: post #125

For clarification: The 1st amendment ensures that the government may not stop you from saying what you want. This is a separate issue from private companies removing/banning you. Each company has their own right and freedom to be as dickish as they want with regard to deleting your account etc - but that is not related to the 1st.

"Freedom of press" can and should be interpreted to proscribe deplatforming by the big tech companies.

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

#143

Post by camdenlock »

It’s incredibly disheartening to see how quickly people are warming to the practice of coordinated top-down gagging of certain individuals and groups.

You won’t be so happy to cheer on such behavior and policies when in the future the one silenced turns out to be you.

The power to censor should be given solely to the individual to curate their own information diet; it should never belong to the medium itself (whether government, private company, autonomous network, etc).

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

#144

Post by readflaggedcomm »

jhardy54 wrote: post #62
EGreg wrote: post #60

Why are there so many threads today about alternative platforms?

MAGA folks looking for platforms for their "free speech".

Which is incompatible with cabal's values, so they'd be in trouble. https://github.com/cabal-club/commons/blob/master/values.md#...

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

#145

Post by erichocean »

jv22222 wrote: post #125

For clarification: The 1st amendment ensures that the government may not stop you from saying what you want. This is a separate issue from private companies removing/banning you. Each company has their own right and freedom to be as dickish as they want with regard to deleting your account etc - but that is not related to the 1st.

Try duck typing "the government" sometime. I think you'll find the paperwork doesn't match the power centers, and that the most powerful parts of "the government" are completely unaccountable to voters, and in fact, aren't even listed on the founding documents…

It's a nice way to be in power if you can manage it.

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

#146

Post by alexeldeib »

nostromo wrote: post #135
jv22222 wrote: post #125

For clarification: The 1st amendment ensures that the government may not stop you from saying what you want. This is a separate issue from private companies removing/banning you. Each company has their own right and freedom to be as dickish as they want with regard to deleting your account etc - but that is not related to the 1st.

Freedom of speech is a guiding principle that predates the United States, and the first amendment, by a few millennia. And yet every discussion about free speech online contains a few comments about the first amendment’s narrow legal scope. Sure, that’s right, but freedom of speech does not have a narrow legal scope; it’s a much broader concept, and it is global in nature. In almost every case online, the discussion…

> In almost every case online, the discussion is about the global ideal of freedom of speech, not about US law.

In the recent events in the US, a lot of people have (mistakenly, IMO) cited the first amendment for protection of speech many others don't like. But those protections afford no help against private actors. In that context GP makes a lot of sense bringing up this point.

Example: a US senator cites the first amendment when discussing free speech after a publisher refuses to run his book: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/08/josh-hawley-...

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

#147

Post by metadaemon »

tachyonbeam wrote: post #92
creamytaco wrote: post #8

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…

> I don't really get the node.js fixation for command line tools. It's simply because most developers are web developers. They use the programming language and tooling they're familiar with. I do also wish that there wasn't so much of a move to webify everything, particularly since web dev is so prone to constantly changing fads and dependency sprawl. It tends to lead to code/software that breaks all the time.

I’d say that JS desktop/web applications are becoming more prevalent due to most alternative GUI frameworks not being as simple and feature rich. I’d also say that this is most likely a side effect of most UI resources being targeted towards JS and therefore reducing the attention all other GUI tooling receives.

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

#148

Post by djtriptych »

WClayFerguson wrote: post #110
antris wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>BigTech has just now gone nuclear in their censorship efforts Who's being censored? Twitter, Facebook etc. are private platforms and they've been banning users who break their TOS throughout their histories.

I started using the term "nuclear" once Amazon Cloud Services decided to terminate the Parler web server hosting. If internet service providers can shut down speech they disagree with, by going after the servers, then we're no longer living in a democracy.

when the "speech" consists of active planning of mass violence it's obviously no longer protected.

The whole point of Parler is to be a safe haven for speech that has already been banned elsewhere, for the same reason. It was doomed from the start.

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

#149

Post by kova12 »

alexeldeib wrote: post #146
nostromo wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freedom of speech is a guiding principle that predates the United States, and the first amendment, by a few millennia. And yet every discussion about free speech online contains a few comments about the first amendment’s narrow legal scope. Sure, that’s right, but freedom of speech does not have a narrow legal scope; it’s a much broader concept, and it is global in nature. In almost every case online, the discussion…

> In almost every case online, the discussion is about the global ideal of freedom of speech, not about US law. In the recent events in the US, a lot of people have (mistakenly, IMO) cited the first amendment for protection of speech many others don't like. But those protections afford no help against private actors. In that context GP makes a lot of sense bringing up this point. Example: a US senator cites the first…

Freedom of speech specifically applies to offensive speech. You don't need any legal protections to talk about flowers and butterflies

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

#150

Post by WClayFerguson »

antris wrote: post #122
WClayFerguson wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started using the term "nuclear" once Amazon Cloud Services decided to terminate the Parler web server hosting. If internet service providers can shut down speech they disagree with, by going after the servers, then we're no longer living in a democracy.

>If internet service providers can shut down speech they disagree with, by going after the servers, then we're no longer living in a democracy. You present this as if Parler is being shut down because people there have the wrong opinion on tax rates. People on Parler are planning violent fascist overthrow of government, which is illegal. Why would Amazon be obligated to host sites that cater to terrorists?

The social media purge began long before Parler even existed. Yes people are getting banned from Twitter for life for having the wrong political opinions. It you deny that everyone knows you're either dishonest or uninformed.

People on the left are allowed to call for violence and say all kinds of racist things hate filled things, but if someone on the right even says something like "There are only two sexes" that's enough to get banned for life. The only reason the democrats all deny the existence of any double-standard is because MSM and BigTech happen to be in their tribe, so they all dare not call out one of their own.

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