Fuck Work

The problem with you techbros is you can’t imagine anything at smaller scales. But what you just said… Jabber is here for 25 years. That means it is good enough for tons of people. Not everybody needs a shiney new toy and if free software doesn’t scale, then who cares. It can and will still work for those of us willing to share the burden and for those that can’t, each one of me can accommodate at least a few such users and those that just won’t… Fuck em. We don’t have to capture every use case to be of value. I use jabber. I have plans to self host it. It works and has done so for 25 years. Furthermore AIM captured everything a chat needs to do, why do we keep reinventing this wheel when there are much more interesting problems that need to be solved.

If they open sourced all the server code, we could be helping them to operate it potentially, but they want to control the infrastructure, so I guess we’ll all be using xmpp soon.

Need to replace them with the SRA stat.

I love this idea. Will definitely look into installing on my desktop. I’m working on a searxng instance that filters out all the toxic sources that think they own the internet also. Its also very much a work in progress, but yeah, these putzes get too much attention on the internet and anything we can do for our own peace of mind to delete them from pur lives is absolutely worth doing. I put a lot of filters on mastodon to the same end and it has made my social media experience so much more enjoyable.

I think this is a good use case for creating white lists for federation as opposed to black listing the blocked ones and I figured one day it might come to that. We’ll have to put together some registry where new strains nstancea can sign up to be included. I know that sounds antithetical to federation, but there are solutions to the problems threads is creating.

It could easily be forked if they start fucking around, but that is a real danger.

The problem with federating with anything owned by meta is that it is a data syphon. I don’t think we can fully protect ourselves from that. If they want the data most of it is easy to come by by just having any ol mastodon account or running a malicious instance or just scraping what is public and inferring the rest. However we shouldn’t be inviting a threat like that into our backyard. We should definitely not be federating with them. Furthermore it gives them the opportunity to bloat things down with ads or DOS small instances with amounts of traffic and data they can’t handle and they could make it prohibitively expensive to run an instance that federates with them. Nipping those problems in the bud requires showing them the door early.

I am not worried about this. I think threads is going to end up like all the fascist instances. Perhaps they will have more users… Good for them. But the rest of us will defederate and they will become an isolated instance. Which begs the question, why use activity pub at all? I suppose maybe its so they can run multiple servers themselves and piggy back on the infrastructure that was laid down for free. As long as most of us defederate its not going to change much. You could get about as much data scraping timelines now as they could siphon up with federating. So small instances will continue to federate with each other and that will end up being a smaller amount of the people using the fediverse. The only way this matters is if we obsess about numbers. But honestly most of us can’t afford to run a big instance anyway, so obsessing about unattainable numbers is pointless. It doesn’t change the economics at all, it doesn’t change the fact that small instances will federate with each other and not stuff we don’t like. It may change the privacy stuff, which is something we can fix with some vigilance.