• 5 Posts
  • 717 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

help-circle

  • You’re legally obligated to pay taxes and you have some say in how they’re spent in the form of state and federal elections (or your country’s equivalent). If you’re doing everything in your power to make sure that money isn’t used for evil then ultimately you can’t be faulted for what happens beyond that point.

    But on the other hand you’re voluntarily choosing to pay Mullvad knowing full well that your money will be used to prop up far right extremism and you have no say in it beyond your choice to give them your money.

    How you rationalize that to yourself is a personal matter but it certainly and absolutely does not give you a moral high ground over people who choose not to fund evil.


  • He doesn’t even work at the company

    He does, he’s the CEO and owner.

    And you guys are like “FUCK THEM”

    I think people just don’t want their money being used to fund far right extremism. As is their right.

    Are you suggesting that people are somehow morally obligated to continue funneling money into a company when they know for a fact their money will be used for evil?





  • Kind of, but that’s what every creator of every protocol in existence did, including ActivityPub. Thats just how stuff gets made. One thing to appreciate about ATproto is that they made the protocol extensible so that you can shape the standard to fit your own needs in a way that other protocols like ActivityPub don’t, at least not as easily. Since the base of ATproto isn’t your home instance but rather your own personal PDS which is just a database, anyone can define a new schema for records on your database and stand up new functionality, like with Standard.site.

    This means that you can connect practically anything to ATproto by simply creating records that match the same schema other ATproto apps expect. Like you can connect a simple blog that is just a static site to the “Atmosphere” (ATproto’s term for fediverse) with a simple script that adds a record when you make a new post.


  • So a couple things here.

    But everything is open, and everything is indexed.

    Even who you block, who blocks you, when you usually use an app, your daily time, what your previous usernames were, etc… and more are all recorded.

    You really can’t have an open, decentralized social media system without things like this. Privacy was never a promise of the decentralized web because privacy is more or less a result of there being fewer people with keys to the kingdom and you trusting those people not to share your data. But by its very design federation and decentralization protocols need there to be more than one entity with the keys to the kingdom because all the kingdoms have to interact with each other. The only alternative here would be running your own social media service that doesn’t federate with any other à la Truth Social, so you can have total control, but then that wouldn’t be very social or decentralized.

    However, actually understanding it and managing it is far from easy for most ordinary users who know little or nothing about programming or technical systems.

    Does this mean that Bluesky and the entire AT Protocol community are ultimately designed only for programmers, developers, engineers, digital experts, and people with technical expertise?

    No, the opposite. The AT protocol was designed specifically to combat this issue because ActivityPub is so unintuitive and complicated for less technical users. A standard user will pick a PDS service hosted by someone else and unlike with ActivityPub, they really only need the one and can switch between them without losing all their followers and follows with ease.

    If I were to sum up your grievances, I would say that your issue is that you don’t like social media and don’t appreciate how social ATproto is, but that’s what it’s designed for. And in fact that’s what Lemmy and Mastodon and all these ActivityPub apps are designed for. It sounds to me like what you want is to just not use social media. Or at the very least, you want a centralized private platform where you can be in total control. Those exist, but ActivityPub and ATproto are antithetical to that goal.