rysiek

A couple of weeks ago a billionaire, whose skin is apparently as thin as his wallet is thick, took over one of the important public squares on-line. It is a good moment to explore and recognize other dangers, in addition to failure to moderate the public debate, such centralized control creates. Twitter’s tumultuous transition to a privately held company became a lens, focusing — at long last — our collective attention on them.

These issues are hardly new or unexpected. Activists and experts had been warning about problems related to centralized control of our daily communication tools for years. But by and large, our warnings went unheeded. Today, as we mourn the communities disrupted and connections lost, and grapple with the fallout, we have to recognize this is about more than just Twitter. And use the opportunity to learn not to make the same mistakes again.

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We can also build systems that allow people to switch providers without losing contact with their friends and coworkers — e-mail and mobile networks are good, familiar examples of these. The fact that the big social media services, or the huge online productivity providers, do not allow this kind of compatibility is a business decision, rather than a technological necessity.

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“Never let a good crisis go to waste”, Winston Churchill once said, and it would serve us well to lean into that wisdom today. A centralized, closed, monopolistic platform’s agony is a good opportunity to reconsider our over-reliance on Big Tech walled gardens in general.

Edit: as @poVoq@slrpnk.net points out, this photo might have been taken during the pandemic lockdowns.

In a world where a single company, which controls the conversations, news feeds, and personal connections of almost two billion people, considers it a good idea to base its post promotion algorithm on how angry a post makes its readers, we can perhaps conclude that the time has come to decentralize our digital communication spaces. Users of a recently-bought social network seem to agree.

Those with vested interests in the cryptocurrency space claim to have a solution ready: web3.

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web3 is less a technology project for decentralizing the internet, and more an economic project for a select few to profit from: those who acquire crypto-assets early or have the resources and knowledge to run Ethereum validators

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When radium was first discovered at the end of the 19th century, a whole slew of snake oil products emerged capitalizing on the sensationalism surrounding the new element and its radioactivity. Perhaps the most absurd product was the Doramad Radioactive Toothpaste, whose promotional materials used naïve and distorted notions of “energy” and “radioactive rays,” to market radioactivity as a solution to the very real problem of tooth decay.

The analogy is quite compelling. Like radioactivity, blockchain as such can be a useful tool in solving certain kinds of problems. Like dental hygiene, the decentralization of global communication platforms is an important problem, but not necessarily the right application for the instrument. Like Doromad Radioactive Toothpaste, web3 has little to do with solving the stated problem, and everything to do with profiting off of a buzzword, resulting in more harm than good in the process.

The thing about potential is that you can say it about anything if you don’t really have to back it up.

As more and more people are asking me about Mastodon I felt a need for a picture to point at, showcasing how the software known as Mastodon fits into the much larger concept of the Fediverse. I made this visualisation to help myself and others explain the many different use-cases and benefits of different services that can exchange information.

Context: https://spectrum-os.org/

cross-posted from: https://szmer.info/post/149799

In the latest illustration of our marvelous new decentralized, resilient blockchain future, one single Solana node apparently was able to take down the entire Solana network. Solana outages are nothing new, and tend to end (as this one did) with Solana issuing instructions to the people who run their validators, asking them all to turn them off and on again.

A validator operator reported that "It appears a misconfigured node caused an unrecoverable partition in the network." It's a bit startling that, in a supposedly decentralized network, one single node can bring the entire network offline.

In the latest illustration of our marvelous new decentralized, resilient blockchain future, one single Solana node apparently was able to take down the entire Solana network. Solana outages are nothing new, and tend to end (as this one did) with Solana issuing instructions to the people who run their validators, asking them all to turn them off and on again.

A validator operator reported that "It appears a misconfigured node caused an unrecoverable partition in the network." It's a bit startling that, in a supposedly decentralized network, one single node can bring the entire network offline.