Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize • Hacker News Board

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#171

Post by black_puppydog » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 1:30 PM UTC

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.

as cornered_user also stated, that's just a reflection of what "publish" means. You could also see it as the other side of "censorship resilience".

On twister, you could regularly see people having their "oh shit" moment when they published a post with a typo or such for the first time. You get used to it.

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#172

Post by snvzz » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 7:00 PM UTC

confounded wrote: post #54

snvzz wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but does that include followers-only and private messages? Also, lack of encryption allows for selective censorship on the fly.

Development resources are pretty limited, for now it seems fine to use the right tool for the right job; there are plenty of E2EE chat services that can be used, and if there’s significant interest, a norm for favoring one will likely develop (like with imgur and Reddit, for example).

Fair. In this case, do the right thing and disable private messages.

Either offer it properly or do not offer it at all. It's irresponsible otherwise.

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#173

Post by zaarn » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 6:34 AM UTC

snvzz wrote: post #166

zaarn wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A powerful enough observer will be able to observe two of the three properties no matter if TLS is used or not. Most Mastodon servers have TLS, exceptions usually included instances deployed to localhost. Mastodon doesn't technically require it but all clients I've seen do and the web interface relies on some features that are only available in a trusted context (HTTPS and localhost) I don't really see the problem th…

>Mastodon doesn't technically require it That's a serious issue. If plaintext is allowed, then expect getting people to downgrade to plaintext will be trivial, because "it just works". It's a serious mistake, but a well understood one by today. Mastodon is relatively new, and they should have known better than to do this.

There is no downgrade. Mastodon will in it's default configuration not allow non-HTTPS connections. The protocol doesn't require it, so Mastodon technically doesn't. With a few code changes you can do that.

So yes, Mastodon did know better but it's not an inherent property of ActivityPub to use HTTPS.

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#174

Post by zaarn » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 6:42 AM UTC

warkdarrior wrote: post #137

zaarn wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see no problem in someone writing an archival activitypub implementation; a crawler that attempts to save and index the fediverse into a permanent record. Of course, you'll need permission (though sometimes asking for forgiveness can be good enough)

> sometimes asking for forgiveness can be good enough You do not want to start there, Facebook's MO is exactly that.

web.archive.org has been archiving webpages for decades and I don't see anybody making a fuss about it since they are primarly archival. If you are a website owner you can easily opt out or have your data deleted.

Facebook's MO is "store all the shit and never delete it", an archival project should have an MO of "archive everything we can get and delete it when somebody complains".

Otherwise you'll never be able to archive any significant portion of the internet or fediverse.