Which is itself kind of suspicious - why can't they say "yeah we pay for Colo in such-and-such region" if that is what they are doing? Why should that be a secret?
I don't have a problem with an open source project I use (and I do use F-Froid) hosting a server in a basement. I do have a problem with having the entire project hosted on one server in a basement, because it means that the entire project goes down if that basement gets flooded or the house burns down or the power goes out for an extended period of time, etc.
Having two servers in two basements not near each other would be good, having five would be better, and honestly paying money to put them in colo facilities to have more reliable power, cooling, etc. would be better still. Computer hardware is very cheap today and it doesn't cost that much money to get a substantial amount of redundancy, without being dependent on any single big company.
This sounds reasonable. But this is a build server, not the entire project infrastructure.
I bet the server should be quite powerful, with tons of CPU, RAM and SSD/NVMe to allow for fast builds. Memory of all kinds was getting more and more expensive this year, so the prolonged sourcing is understandable.
The trusted contributor, as the text says, is considered more trustworthy than an average colocation company. Maybe they have an adequate "basement", e.g. run their own colo company, or something.
It would be great to have a spare server, but likely it's not that simple, including the organization and the trust. A build server would be a very juicy attack target to clandestinely implant spyware.
I concur, and given the amount of apps they build it makes sense to spend the money on a good build server to me, especially if it is someone with experience hosting trusted servers as mentioned as well as a contributor already. If people do not want to use it, the source code to build yourself is still available for the apps they supply.
It is not your bank. You don't need 99.999999999999999% availability of the build server of an app store. Especially if the apps packages can still be downloaded from regular https servers.
As long as you don't need RAM or hard drives. It's getting more expensive all the time too. This isn't the ideal moment to replace a laptop let alone a server.
> In a literal sense that can't be true, since upon change of government, the hate speech definition does not suddenly change. In contrast, Putin and Khamenei are very literally able to personally define the definition.
Well it might if people systematically vote for politicians who promise to change the hate speech definition.
> Putin and Khamenei are ruthless, brutal dictators. You don’t need to like Starmer, but he’s none of that. He’s a proper democrat. The implication that they’re all somewhat the same delegitimises democracies and legitimises these dictators. That’s how they win.
Someone who is a citizen of the UK who has no connection to Iran or Russia is legitimately much more concerned with the ways in which Starmer governs the UK, than in whether Putin or Khamenei "win". I don't even disagree with you that Putin and Khamenei are ruthless dictators, and certainly plenty of people in Russia or Iran or countries in the Russian or Iranians sphere of influence have plenty of good reasons to politically oppose both those dictators. But a democratically-elected official can wield the power of the state against you and harm your interests just as much as a dictator can, and people in the UK who oppose Starmer and his party shouldn't let up in that opposition just because it makes Starmer seem closer to Putin or Khamenei than Starmer's supporters would like.
> a democratically-elected official can wield the power of the state against you and harm your interests just as much as a dictator can
Really? Can they? Because in a functioning democracy you generally have recourse to courts, tertiary adjudication of various forms, a (relatively) free press that you can try and interest in taking up your story, etc. In a brutal dictatorship you're likely to have none of those, and to go missing in the night if you try and suggest that you should.
It's absolutely right to oppose politicians you disagree with - that's what political engagement is all about! But beyond a certain level, hyperbole (and the general sense of "they're all the same") simply does serve to undermine not just democracy, but any rationale for political engagement vs. simple rioting.
Mastodon doesn't do enough to prevent centralization of control - when you make an account to use the network, you're making that account on some specific server. This ties your ability to communicate on the network under that identity both to the server operator, and to the domain name of the server. A fediverse server can go down because its maintainers deliberately shut it down or lose interest and stop maintaining it; a domain name can be lost or taken by a government (see the queer.af debacle). The administrators of a fediverse server can also decide to censor your posts or remove your account if they don't like what you post - and it's hard to argue that they don't have the right to do so because they're the ones running the server and storing your account as a row in their database.
If you run your own single-user fediverse server, you are the admin yourself so most of these aren't problems (although you still don't control your domain name). But it's difficult for most people to maintain their own social media server, so most people don't do this, meaning that they are still subject to the petty tyranny of their social media provider. It's just that instead of Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, it's whatever random person runs the server that they randomly picked to put their account on.
Regarding your first paragraph. Everything you said is true, but that's better than centralizated platforms like twitter and facebook. Yes or no?
And let me add: no model will prevent against everything. Yes, you're tied to an instance and XYZ - ok, so just pick one of the largest N instances to mitigate that. That's better than having 1 to pick from.
> Regarding your first paragraph. Everything you said is true, but that's better than centralizated platforms like twitter and facebook. Yes or no?
Yes, the fediverse ecosystem is strictly better than using one monolithic social media platform run by a world-famous corporation. The fundamental fediverse account model is still fatally flawed though, and can't be a final solution for self-sovereign social media.
> Yes, you're tied to an instance and XYZ - ok, so just pick one of the largest N instances to mitigate that. That's better than having 1 to pick from.
The fundamental problem isn't having instances to pick from, it's being able to switch instances if and when the people running your instance stop allowing you to use their compute resources to post. Your fediverse identity is tied to whatever specific instance you make the account on, and you effectively can't switch it to another instance - you just make a new account and tell people about it manually. Again, strictly better than having no choice other than Twitter, but it doesn't really free you from someone else's control over your social media posting.
> As a result, the popularity of Matrix in public sector has resulted in focus there - which is somewhat different to the expectations of folks looking for a Discord replacement or a privacy-at-any-cost solution.
Unfortunately, a Discord replacement is the sort of thing that the free software world actually needs, because in its absence people are just using Discord, even for free software projects.
I think you could get pretty close with OAuth2. You could also have the frontend be a centralized app, but allow people to host their own servers. If the entity controlling the frontend goes off the rails you still have a pretty simple exit strategy.
OAuth2 is a failed protocol - it's more of a set of guidelines for vendors to implement proprietary authentication systems, all incompatible with each other.
I looked into Zulip a couple years ago and they didn't support this. Have they implemented OAuth2 or something since then? Specifically being able to log in once and be able to jump between any number of self hosted servers.
Why not compare America against all countries instead of just Western ones? Which countries do and do not count as part of the West in any case? People hold different opinions about whether e.g. the entirety of Latin America counts as Western or not, and the choice to include or exclude those countries makes a big difference in how the US compares in terms of relative violent crime rates.
You make a good point! The US isn’t really civilised enough to compare it to countries with proper modern and safe societies, so why should it aim to those heights? If we just compare the US to other countries with issues of violent crime we don’t have to solve any problems at all to look acceptable.
> Why not compare America against all countries instead of just Western ones?
Oh indeed, but what I am referring to is the "knife crime in London" comparator that right-wing gun groups use. Knife crime in London is not as bad as knife crime in any comparable US city. It's about 40% as bad as New York and only 10% as bad as Dallas.
> While the FBI did break these down by weapon type, they didn’t differentiate between AR-15s or similarly patterned rifles, and grandpa’s bolt action deer rifle. All told, in 2019 there were 364 rifle murders, out of a total of 10,258 firearm murders, accounting for approximately 3.5% of total firearm murders. Nobody uses rifles to murder people because they’re big, bulky, difficult to conceal, and a handgun can do the job just as well.
> There is no clear correlation whatsoever between gun ownership rate and gun homicide rate. Not within the USA. Not regionally. Not internationally. Not among peaceful societies. Not among violent ones. Gun ownership doesn’t make us safer. It doesn’t make us less safe. A bivariate correlation simply isn’t there. It is blatantly not-there. It is so tremendously not-there that the “not-there-ness” of it alone should be a huge news story.
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