Morlock Elloi on Tue, 30 Apr 2019 00:15:30 +0200 (CEST)


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Re: <nettime> Unlike Us links on social media and their alternatives

This is a promising direction. It's impossible to guess/infer at the first attempt what the platform should do, but it's almost obvious what it shouldn't. What we need is a requirements document, the one not produced by techies, as for one reason or another they tend to make bad choices. At this point I wouldn't worry what's 'possible' or 'impossible'. Just imagine the ideal system and then work back to MVP. It may take some time, so the stamina is paramount. 


is not technical (see above).  However, I am not sure that the problem is
'solved' even technically.  Consider how difficult it is to manage a system at
the edge in a way that avoids centralisation.  For example, no cryptocurrency
network is decentralised; such networks can always be captured by those with
the means.  Organisations such as Sovrin, which ostensibly supports a
self-sovereign identity scheme, often include in their design some kind of
foundation or governing body whose interests are not necessarily well-aligned
with those of its users.  And so on.  Some networks are better than others, but
let's face it, decentralisation is hard.  The only potential solution I see is
diversity, and that is hard to cultivate.  (Witness how project funding works
within the United Nations, for example.)
I agree. End points should have diverse implementations but contribution gating has to be a principle adopted by participants and locally policed at each end point, not (non)enforceable centralized policy. The concept of miners can not exist, as it leads to obvious centralization. Each node has to be able to evaluate every other node (whose contribution it accepts) locally.
How can this be done? I would postpone this discussion at this point, as it leads to multiple dead-ends due to diverse (in)competences of participants. Instead, we should reach some kind of consensus how the ideal system should behave. The rest is a technical problem. 


this function in the past, although I am concerned about a rising
anti-intellectualism intrinsic to the argument for 'user friendliness'.  Rather
working to the glory of divine (in either the secular or religious sense)
goals, such architectures seek foremost to attract parishoners to the exclusion
of others who might seek to do the same.  It isn't right.  We should instead
call upon users to work with us, using concepts that are just 'friendly' enough
without excluding the 'users' from their design, governance, and management.
I see 'user friendliness' as enabling idiots, but I may be biased. This is a fine line that should be carefully threaded. User unfriendly may imply certain amount of intellectual/physical effort that can serve as moderator. It should not require years of training in particular technology. So this is actually a great question: what is background-agnostic "user unfriendliness" ? An artificial example would be having to turn a mechanical crank to run the dynamo to power the contraption. 



No.  Systems designed for 'Sybil-resistance' (PoW, geolocation) necessarily
lead either to blacklisting or to plutocracy.  Think about it.  We need to
leverage our institutions, as you started to say earlier but somehow drowned in
the melancholic argument that we can never again have institutions powerful
enough to resist the current interests of a certain set of global, unregulated
corporations and the private, concentrated set of plutocrats behind them.
So we need PoW that doesn't scale. Yes, this leads back to traditional institutions, but it could be the least bad alternative. Institutions can control voting fraud, maybe not 100% but it seems enforceable. What I see sorely (and likely intentionally) missing is blinded proof of identity based on government IDs. It's trivially easy to implement, yet it's not done. With something like that, each individual cannot artificially multiply itself into bots etc. 



I'm not sure about Jitsi, and if the core maintainers 'will soon end the
support', then what option will remain to keep it from becoming yet another
rent-seeker?  Personally, I'm much more excited about Nextcloud, which provides
self-hosted chat, H.265 voice calls, filesharing, calendaring, and more.  I
only hope that its open mainfestation can remain adequately funded and
supported by a development community that is committed to developing a free and
open tool that will be audited and maintained by a broad diversity of
interests.
Nextcloud is promising, but there is an infrastructural anomaly that has to be fixed first - direct addressability of every human (smartphone, home computer, etc.) without intermediaries, directories, assistants. Without it, only users with real IP numbers can freely participate (DynDNS is a centralized service prone to corruption). It's explained in the paper I peddled earlier ( https://cryptome.org/2019/02/elbar.pdf ) 


that one day we'll have something like Tox that is more private.  I have no
reason to believe that Briar is that something, based upon its design choices,
which in my view tend to stand in the way of user control.  And user control,
in my view, is the best form of user friendliness, and the one that matters the
most, for all of the reasons articulated by Richard Stallman and then some.  If
a user is not in control, then who is?
Exactly. Let's do the effort and come up with white paper describing what the hell we think would work. No one else will do it. 


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