Hacker News

I like his vision. Can you recommend a pod? The UK based Solid Community ones (and others, apparently) are 'experimental'.

"To use this system, you must understand that we cannot make any guarantees regarding the security and privacy of data that you may store in a solidcommunity.net Solid pod, or concerning the system's functionality and availability."

You win. Cloud repatriation engineer.

Better job titles than any AI CEO could come up with!

You won’t have decentralisation on Atproto because the protocol itself incentivises centralisation.

But... if Waag are not self-hosting, and they're not, how likely is it that normal people will start doing so in relatively large numbers?

>The poor need the rich to start a company as banks are prevented (by the rich) from lending to them.

no. the banks hold the poor's money, and it needs to do so without risk because the poor need their money. lending money to start companies that are completly unsecured is too risky for banks, they lend money to buy houses which is secured debt.

There were famously government and university programs that played important early roles too. But it was largely people working for companies that actually built these systems.

What organizations do you think created the switches, routers, servers, software, fiber optic backbones? Who created the new protocols?

It was companies like AT&T/Bell Labs, Cisco, 3Com, Sun, UUNET, Netscape, AOL, the major telecoms, and a thousand other companies we don't remember.

Something like 1% inspiration from academia and government, and 99% perspiration by people working inside companies.

Yeah that raised my eyebrow as well. "Popularized" maybe, but "largely built" I think is a mis-characterization.

I am sure that DARPA, BBN, USC Information Sciences Institute, and many others will be overjoyed to learn that they've been erased from history by the new narrative that Venture Capitalists Built Everything. (-:

I don't use bluesky, but out of interest is this "intolerance" filter effectively a political filter, or an actual "intolerance" filter?

Like if someone is talking about "white fragility" and being intolerant towards white people, or being xenophobic about American culture, would that be likely to result in them being flagged for intolerance also?

Asking because while I don't mind the concept, I find in practice most of the time platforms add these filters and rules as a way to enforce ideological consensus.

"Censored" I mean "flagged", sure. In practice, they're all hidden from the casual user. But really, I'm interested on why ATProto was touted as revolutionary while in practice it powers a standalone heavily politically biased social network where moderators are extremely active flagging everything that's on the right. In that respect, Mastodon is more "revolutionary" - you handle your instance, you provide your moderation, you optionally integrate with other instances. Mastodon itself is used, in practice, to moderate a highly diverse ecosystem of social networks, from the gay-friendly ones to Gab. Nostr, although it's not so widely used, is even more tailored against sectarism by default.

From what I see, Bsky is a single instance of one of the most politically aligned social media in existence; in practice, you can achieve that with any proprietary implementation, you don't need ATProto. I honestly thought that the protocol was engineered to prevent an echo chamber, but in reality it powers an enormous standalone echo chamber that is not moving anywhere, so I was wondering what's the difference.

'One' joke? It's a satirical website, even a cursory check shows that your tally is off base

My question was in good faith tbh; I see other protocols (Mastodon, nostr) not being really commercially relevant but being much more politically diverse than bsky. I was wondering why is that - is something inherent to the protocol (e.g. I heard that it's extremely hard to set up your "alternative bsky" if you don't have resources, unlike Mastodon instances, so you're not really incentivized to just do it and see how it goes) or is it just bad luck?

I’m not entirely sure if believe a person that writes about “the USAID cuts, which I call a ‘Silicon Valley Genocide’ in my book.” about the specific reason they were banned from X, given how many anti capitalism, left, radical Islamic and even pro Hamas accounts happily exist on the platform.

Threatening violence? Yes you’ll get banned. Being awful? Nobody cares.

I don't mean banned from the site Reddit, I mean banned from subreddits. Go into /r/politics and post an opinion that not far left.

>You have to be pretty spicy if you are getting banned from Reddit, as opposed to being modded.

Not really. You can be banned for stating that transgender people are not the gender they identify as. They consider it “promoting hate based on identity.”

Might you get banned on bluesky for saying that?

Not really.

Few years ago, I replied to a comment asking if a crime in a news story was punishable by death. I replied that yes, the law allowed the death penalty and linked the law in the state where the crime happened. (I also added a parenthetical that I oppose the death penalty.)

I got a two week ban for inciting violence.

I imagine some automod type of tool flagged my comment, no human could have been stupid enough to think I was inciting violence.

You really don't

You're proposing a fiction that there is functionally any difference. Migrating a subreddit is a large community effort and rarely if ever happens over just one ban.

If you're banned from a subreddit for X, which famously happens for often the thinnest of reasonings, you're effectively out of the online community around X. For some subreddits this even has real-world implications. You don't have to be the least bit spicy to do this. Often you just have to have commented (at all) in a different subreddit that a mod doesn't like.

> You have to be pretty spicy if you are getting banned from Reddit

I was banned from Reddit for saying that a (well recognised as terrorists) terrorist group should be destroyed. That is a fairly mainstream opinion.

Other people are banned from Reddit for disagreeing with trans ideology to the same extent as today's supreme court decision. The court decision isn't particularly surprising and neither is people saying the same thing on Reddit.

I got banned from my local subreddit for saying “as an Asian we actually tend to like cars from this brand” in a politically charged post about a certain car brand. Didn’t seem very spicy to me. “If you support this brand you’re supporting Nazis” was allowed and upvoted, of course.

On the bright side that was the impetus for me to finally stop giving my valuable attention to that site.

Did your opinion call for the use of violence ? That is a no go zone.