“One more step…”
Nothing like a privacy abusing Cloudflare site to expose privacy abuse. If anyone has openly accessible Cloudflare-free links, or can post the info for the excluded people, plz post.
freedomPusher
joined 3 years ago
MODERATOR OF
eclic.ro is an exclusive Cloudflare site just like change.org is. Exclusivity is obviously quite lousy for democracy. Better alternatives are here:
privacytools.io always was shit show even before the infighting. They put their own endorsement site on Cloudflare. Despite a collossal pile of dirt emerging on #Signal:
https://github.com/privacytools/privacytools.io/issues/779
PTIO continued endorsing Signal non-stop, refusing to disclose the issues. That was also before the breakup. Dirt was routinely exposed on PTIO endorsements and it never changed their endorsement nor did they reveal the findings on their website.
Now both factions are hypocrits just as they were when they were united. The original PTIO site is back to being Cloudflared (nothing like tossing people coming to you for privacy advice into the walled garden of one of the most harmful privacy offenders), and Privacy Guides has setup on a CF’d Lemmy node. The hypocrisy has no end with these people.
Interesting, but that does not help because Mint jails all their docs in Cloudflare.
Also worth noting that #Ubuntu and #Mint both moved substantial amounts of documentation into Cloudflare (the antithisis of the values swiso claims to support). I have been moving people off those platforms.
BTW, prism-break is a disasterous project too. You know they don’t have a clue when they moved their repo from Github.com to Gitlab.com, an access-restricted Cloudflare site. There are tens if not hundreds of decent forges to choose from and PRISM Break moved from the 2nd worst to the one that most defeats the purpose of their constitution.
It might be useful to find dirt on various tech at prism-break, but none of these sites can be trusted for endorsements.
The prism-break website is timing out for me right now. I would not be surprised if they were dropping Tor packets since they have a history of hypocrisy.
If you look in their bug tracker, it actually reveals that they ignore dirt that has been dug up on their suggestions.
As others have mentioned there is little in the way of justification for these suggestions, and while I happen to agree with plenty of them, I’d personally like to see more reasoning, if not to appease people that already have opinions then to help newer users understand their options.
Indeed. In fact it’s actually worse than you describe. Swiso witholds negative information. They don’t want to inform people. They want to steer people. For example, swiso’s endorsements for donation platforms have some quite serious problems:
https://codeberg.org/swiso/website/issues/141
swiso is also aware of the serious issues with Qwant and the serious issues with DuckDuckGo. Not only failing to remove them but also failing to inform. Qwant and DDG are both Microsoft syndicates!
(if anyone is interested, one of the most privacy-respecting search services is Ombrelo¹, which is largely unknown to the world because PTIO, swiso, and prism-break don’t do the job they claim to do)
And swiso is aware because that’s their bug tracker.
/cc @Imprint9816@lemmy.dbzer0.com
¹ https://ombrelo.im5wixghmfmt7gf7wb4xrgdm6byx2gj26zn47da6nwo7xvybgxnqryid.onion/
There are a few good alternatives and swiso has been aware of them for ~4+ years:
I can see that you’re upset about cloudfare being forced on anyone using the large instances.
This implies some kind of emotional drive and disregards the nuts and bolts of the actual problem. The breakage that manifests makes the fedi less usable and more exclusive, which the design rightfully tries to avoid but falls short. CF being pushed on ppl using large instances is not at all the issue. That’s self-inflicted harm. Cloudflare and big instances both independently pose a centralization problem which can easily be condemned together. Neither form of centralisation benefits the fedi. The fact that CF-centralised nodes and disproportionately large nodes tend to be the same nodes is the universe organising the garbage together -- like when Bayar and Monsanto merged. Easier to deal with the baddies when they are consolidated.
lemmy.ml less trivial
The lemmy.ml instance is less trivial because it’s disproportionately large, but they shrunk a bit and ditched Cloudflare. They bring a lot of political baggage, but they are also said to be less tyrannical than they were in the past. So what how to treat lemmy.ml is questionable and messy.
You’re right that the large instances are not democratically governed,
Yes but to be clear, governance is your focus not mine. I’m saying centralized instances are detrimental no matter how they are governed. If they are well-governed then you might say they are more likely to be decentralized, but then of course users could decide to unblock them if they achieve that.
But more importantly, most people just aren’t going to do that.
This is more of the “people don’t boycott” logic. First of all, the perception that people do not boycott does not justify stripping people of their power to boycott. The feature I propose gives people boycott power. And not only that, it gives them a way to function -- a way to get the exclusive junk and broken images off their screen.
how my Twitter boycott paid off
I was on Twitter long before elon took it, and before phone numbers were required. When Twitter started demanding a mobile phone number from me, I walked. Boycotted. Not long after that I got news that Twitter was caught selling users’ personal data which was inconsistent with the privacy policy. Then shortly after that announcement, it was announced that cybercriminals breached Twitter and stole people’s personal info anyway. My boycott was not emotion driven. It was me making a calculated decision not to trust Twitter with my profitable data, and me deciding not to help Twitter profit from their policy of exclusion (people denied access who do not have mobile phones). And it was the right move. It paid off in the form of not being a victim. I’m grateful that I had boycott power. If boycott power is available but underutilized, the idiots who don’t use it can blame themselves.
The solution should be addressed at a system and process level, not by relying on people making personal choices.
This is a bit false dichotomy-ish. People should be empowered with agency to control their own interactions. That empowerment does not obviate system-wide improvements. It complements them.
But again, what I’m driving at is let’s get big, but do so democratically.
It’s defeatist. To grow disproportionately is to be centralised. Good governance is useless if it fails to prevent centralization. Maybe good governance can lead to a detrimentally centralised instance splitting into many decentralised instances, at which point those nodes are participating in the free world.
If some giant node organises a democratic process, it’s not for me or anyone to stop them. The feature I propose does not interfere with that in the slightest.
::: spoiler A democratic process still produces shitty results & cannot be relied on Everyone might decide to save money and use Cloudflare anyway. It’s shocking how many people see no problem with Cloudflare. And it’s mind-boggling how selfish people can be in large numbers. Xenophobic Trump supporters shows at what great scale it can happen on. Another example: a majority of the population has a mobile phone subscription, and a majority is also not ethically opposed to tax-funded public services that exclude non-mobile subscribers (e.g. like a public library requiring SMS confirmation to use wifi). They will vote for what benefits them personally at the detriment of the minority. So if a democratically controlled service opts for Cloudflare anyway, it’s the same problem. People marginalised by Cloudflare still need tools to tailor their view to show venues where they are included.
It’s great to have our little corner of the world that’s sun and roses, but as long as there are giants roaming around we’re at their whim and will eventually get stepped on.
You are literally advocating for the status quo that causes the giants to step on the rest. My searches are clobbered to a dysfunctional extent because these shitty exclusive nodes fill the top results (that’s another bug I already exposed in this community).
Sure, we can boycott mcdonalds, but we’re essentially begging them to make a change.
Not at all. Begging them to change is the position you take when you neglect to boycott -- begging is the shitty option you have. I’m not begging. I walk. McDs can fuck right off. They get zero begging from me. To keep feeding McDs is to be in that disempowered defeatist position of weakness. In the case at hand, enough people made the right decision to put McDs in the begging position; begging for customers to return.
What would be an acceptable outcome for you?
You seem to be asking for a book here. The requested feature is just one facet of a multifaceted problem -- to diminish the centralisation problem. One specific benefit we get from this one feature is the ability to get rid of the exclusive content that pollutes the timeline. Part of living in the free world is getting the non-free world out of the way. I need a view of the free world showing only venues where I am not excluded.
Instances close because people stop running them, not because other larger instances exist.
These two reasons are intertwined in a causal relationship.
Ultimately people vote with their feet, so if you want to see more smaller instances they need to become more appealing than large ones.
That’s not the only way. The small instances are buried in litter. Clearing the litter out of the way is a much simpler and much more effective way to see the smaller instances.
Also not sure what you mean by seven instances under one corporation? Are you talking about cloudflare or are you saying they’re all run by the same entity?
All seven instances are Cloudflare-centralised. They all give CF a view of all traffic (public and private) and they all arbitrarily discriminate against the same demographics of people. If you are denied access to one of them, you are denied access to all of them. Exceptionally, programming .dev has whitelisted Tor. But that’s just one demographic; that instance still blocks all the other demographics excluded by Cloudflare’s blockade. So users are all being controlled by the same entity.
I don’t like Amazon. Why do people use it? Because it’s convenient, it has the stuff they’re looking for, and it has that stuff at low prices. If we want people to use an alternative, we won’t do it by trying to guilt them to use a more expensive and inconvenient option.
You seem to be claiming boycotts do not work, IIUC. When it became widely known that McDonalds was giving free meals to Israeli soldiers, high numbers of people gave up the convenience and pricing that attracted them to McDs. McDs is a franchise, so different shops have different owners. McDs was forced to directly buy all the shops owned by the Israli who was giving away free meals, just to cancel that policy, just to protect the McDs brand.
Of course there are always unethical consumers. Some consumers continued eating McDs non-stop. Ethical consumers have integrity, a spine/constitution, and they practice it. They should be equipped to empower their ethical choices.
consider Lidl
Lidl was caught relabeling their Israel-sourced produce with the name of a different country in order to deceive consumers who boycott Israel. The feature I’m requesting would be hypothetically comparable to a single button robot.. a “hide Israeli produce” button. If I press it, the Israel sourced food is robotically covered to make it easier for me to find the products I’m interested in. Or along the same lines, a vegan shopper with a “hide all animal-based products” button. Ethical consumers exist and they need to be empowered with good tools.
To change the status quo Amazon can get hit with antitrust law and prosocial regulation
I could write a book on all the reasons to boycott Amazon. Amazon exploits legal loopholes. They are organise their business to get away with murder (legally, or without detection). If you wait for regulators to find some cause to slap them on the wrist, it’d be a pitiful demonstration of non-activism. The very first best move to make is to stop being a part of the problem yourself by not feeding Amazon. From there, there are countless other activist actions you can take without just waiting for them to somehow shoot themselves in the foot.
Be the change you want to see.
The per user cost goes down the more users there are, and the network effect means more users will go towards bigger instances. So fine, let an instance get big, but let it be democratically controlled and funded.
The best thing you can do is walk away from the instance, not feed it or participate in any way. AFAIK, none of the seven have this democratic structure. But if they did, it’s still a harmful force because you still have a centralised policy that affects a disproportionate number of people and which also keeps smaller instances small.
Mastodon is not niche. Mastodon is a diverse community of nerds and low tech people, artistic brains and analytical brains, white collar workers and blue collar workers. A substantial portion of Mastodon is from Reddit refugees. Reddit is no more niche than Facebook.
The greater Mastodon venue who that poll reached lacks right wing conservatives, who tend to stay in their bubble of extremist networks. That does not make Mastodon “niche”. Running the same survey on a right wing Mastodon node might be interesting, but we can see from the linked poll that political affiliation is generally orthoganol on this issue.
Wish I could see it. www.onem.be seems to be dropping my packets.