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

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

cabal.chat

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 337 posts

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

#301

Post by monoideism »

deeviant wrote: post #285
monoideism wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If QAnon is truly "pretty common" on HN, then I'm sure you could easily point out, say, 3-4 QAnon posts on here from the past week. That should be easy if QAnon is common on HN, right?

I specifically said (Trump|QAnon). It's pretty hard to tell the average trump supporter apart from the average QAnon supporter. And you could look at my comments and those who commented in return to find your 3-4 posters. That's pretty easy, right?

QAnon, as malignant as it is, is a relatively small movement even among Trump supporters - probably around 1/4 of his followers.

Don't believe me? Go read thedonald.win. After you recover from the shock of realizing that many of them are planning/hoping for another assault on democracy on the 17th, you'll see that the attitude toward QAnon is not one of approval .

And I've never seen a QAnon-related or -influenced post on HN. Clearly, there are Trump supporters, although they're a very small minority here.

So yes, (Trump|QAnon) evaluates true on HN, but only because of the first term in the expression.

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

#302

Post by webmaven »

tachyonbeam wrote: post #93
orblivion wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It got so popular because it was the only available language to do web scripting. It's not that complicated. It's easy to "win" when no competition is allowed. You can argue that there's CoffeeScript, etc, but every other language is still a second-class citizen in the web ecosystem. WebAssembly may change that once it's stable and mature enough, though again, you have the problem that the DOM APIs were designed for…

> WebAssembly may change that once it's stable and mature enough, though again, you have the problem that the DOM APIs were designed for JavaScript, which will create an impedance mismatch with other languages.

Although the DOM itself likely isn't going anywhere unless you manage to swap out HTML, an alternate set of APIs might be achievable.

That said, the impedance mismatch would have to be particularly painful for a domain targeted by another language for such a set to gain traction.

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

#303

Post by webmaven »

orblivion wrote: post #90
swirepe wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any insights?

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

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

The next book you might want to read looking for the same sort of insights ought to be "The Plausibility of Life", which explores the mechanisms of evolution's generativity.

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

#304

Post by t0astbread »

torstenvl wrote: post #226
t0astbread wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without getting into JK Rowling, a site that has the technical means to but willfully ignores transphobia or homophobia certainly is not "cool".

It isn't transphobia to object to female erasure. Not every women's issue is also a trans women's issue, and it's sexist to insist otherwise.

I agree that cis women and trans women (and trans men!) have distinct problems but I've never heard of the concept of "female erasure" outside of people claiming that it exists (usually accompanied by other opinions that are definitely transphobic). Trans people are usually very mindful of the differences between them and cis people of their gender, sometimes so much that it causes them self-doubt.

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

#305

Post by fishtacos »

WClayFerguson wrote: post #185
fishtacos wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of analogy is that? Tweets vs. water? Also, yes, you would not be provided water/electricity/cable/internet/pudding if you broke their terms of service. Apart from not paying your bill and perhaps willful destruction of their equipment, I'm having a hard time trying to come up with how else one breaks the terms of service for utility services. That sounds completely normal to me. Additionally, people do go…

Well if big companies get to just set arbitrary rules that discriminate against one set of political beliefs, what does that say about "Civil Rights" then? I guess you're not a big fan of civil rights... Or, more likely, is it only when companies are doing things you agree with that you'll claim they have absolute power and authority? If you understand history, you might see the flaw in this logic.

These companies are not "discriminating" against any particular political view. Calls for political violence and extremism/terrorism have and continue to be moderated on these platforms from both sides.

It is unfortunate that you don't understand the distinction between inciting violence via either direct calls for such or indirectly by repeating the same unfounded lies of "a stolen election" VS political speech/civil rights, which have not been abrogated (there are plenty of conservative commentators on Twitter, some of whom I follow).

As for my background, I am an immigrant from a post-communist Eastern European country, live in the US in the South and finished with political science and journalism degrees. Can assure you my appreciation of civil rights is intact.

As a general rule, even when situations like this occur, I lean on the side of caution, so I understand the slippery slope argument you're making. There will continue to be a national discussion about what the limits are in the still-uncharted world of social media and the limits of expression vs. platform and publisher rights, but your alarmist view is, IMO, over the top.

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

#306

Post by webmaven »

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.

> 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.

It isn't quite as cut and dried as that.

"Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one." - H. L. Mencken

An illuminating analogy may be thinking about what would happen to people's freedom of movement (which, BTW, isn't explicitly enumerated in the US Constitution, though it was in the Articles of Confederation) if most roads were privately owned and operated and/or most cars were rentals.

To some extent, this legal territory was explored WRT transportation as the common law concept of a common carrier, and then applied to communications through Title II of the Telecommunications Act, and then applied to ISPs in 2015 but revoked in 2017.

The question we then need to ask is to what extent do the strong network effects of social media justify similar constraints upon the rights of owners to exclude users as the natural monopolies of physical infrastructure constrain their owners.

All that said, it is clear (to me anyway) is that the situation WRT Trump et al. being excluded from these platforms blows WAY past all such nuance and lands right in the middle of "falsely yelling fire in a theater" territory, frankly justifying outright bans on some speech not merely by the platform owners, but by the government as well (IOW censorship). This is not a conclusion that I am particularly comfortable with as I am sure it will be abused, but I have reached it nonetheless.

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

#307

Post by djtriptych »

WClayFerguson wrote: post #257
djtriptych wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL the best web app in the world according to who?

The User Guide and screencasts only show about 10% of the functionality, so you really don't have any way to judge it, but you can still guess can't you.

Right so according to you and no one else. Any reason you're keeping it under wraps? Trying to build up that mystery?

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

#308

Post by khawkins »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #298
khawkins wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the definition of Nazi is applied so liberally that Winston Churchill himself would receive the label from those who use it in today's discourse.

I don’t think the fact that some people call everybody nazis should lead us to decide that actual nazis are now OK.

I don't trust that your definition of an "actual nazi" isn't significantly colored by your own prejudices. That we could actually agree on who are the extremists in society who are equally damaging.

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

#309

Post by oftheoaks »

supermatt wrote: post #288
jakswa wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Currently searches across and advertises on the Bittorrent DHT, centralized DNS servers and Multicast DNS simultaneously."

Oh yeah, I understand that bit - but how does it connect to the DHT in the first place. I couldnt see any information on where it connects when you arent yet peered (i.e. how does it bootstrap).

There are a collection of hyperswarm bootstrap node IPs that can get the discovery process started for new peers.

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

#310

Post by webmaven »

deeviant wrote: post #43
ehayes wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool, we've jumped right into "if you want to be independent from FaceAppAmaGooMicroTwitBookTube, it's just because you're a right-wing fascist plotting an attack." Way to go everyone.

To be fair, at this moment in time, the vast majority of likely users for a project like this, *are* the Trump/Qanon crowd that feel dejected that they will be held to any sort of accountability for their inflammatory rhetoric, lies and conspiracy theories.

> To be fair, at this moment in time, the vast majority of likely users for a project like this, are the Trump/Qanon crowd that feel dejected that they will be held to any sort of accountability for their inflammatory rhetoric, lies and conspiracy theories.

There are a few other social niches that could be addressed without catering specifically to that crowd, and a few even have attractive enterprise-y plays attached that leverage various privacy-focused value propositions. Pseudonymity, for example, isn't usually given enough attention IMO (SecureDrop is a notable exception to this).

Post reply on HN