FreeTrade

I tried very hard to develop for Nostr with the idea it was an inclusive communication commons. Turns out it was a Lightning Network payments promotion project. All of its users (aside from its creator) were very much more interested in Lightning than in Nostr. Dismal experience, still bitter about the effort I wasted on it.

'Writing' covers a lot of creative tasks. You might very well enjoy creating plots, characters, ideas, situations, but find the actual business of putting thousands of words down on a page tedious.

So a book that was “stunningly good, everyone fell in love with it. It’s a book that appeals to absolutely everyone.” now won't be published because AI was used to create it?

Personally I prefer stunningly good over exclusively human created.

Gen AI is at a point now where it can write good chapters. You still need a human editor to make it coherent, plug plot holes and tie it all together. So if you can write a good book, but can't write good chapters, a Gen AI ghostwriter is an ideal tool. Output quality will vary.

Yes, these charts keep popping up on my Twitter and it's always difficult to know what they are really measuring.

And to be extra fair, we might want to subtract tax from those dividends before reinvestment.

The decentralization problem in BlueSky is not filtering out users, but rather hearing from users that BlueSky has decided to filter out.

My local grocery store discontinued the use of plastic bags entirely. They now do a tidy trade in reusable bags at $1 a pop. Many of which are used only once.

Where does the firehose stream originate? From individual PDSes, or from the Bluesky relay that aggregates their repo events?

The lowest hanging fruit are the ones with too good to be true prices.

Those fakes are a real scourge. People lose their data in addition to their money. Very easy to spot fake listings but the platforms allow them to proliferate. I consider the platforms to be criminally culpable because of the wilful neglect.

I was considering creating a censorship free bluesky pds. The showstopper is that bluesky can cut off read access to the content firehose relay. I suspect they would do that, or be forced to do that if a true free speech platform were to emerge.

Could you say more about what you're building? I didn't quite understand from your comment or the website.

Private group chats do not tend to be encrypted. If my theory on what governments are most concerned about (disrupting alternative political organizing) holds true - they never will be allowed to be fully private.

Agreed. That's what the mute button is for. There is no conflict with free speech and a mute button.

Only a fully decentralized system can guarantee free speech. And yes, that even includes letting the Israelis have their say too.

Bluesky prioritized safe-space culture over free speech and decentralization. Interesting experiment but that's not what a Twitter replacement needs to be.

That's my question! If I run that, can I show posts that bluesky has banned? Can I allow people to respond to any post they choose?

It's traumatic to be victim of malevolence. There's the injury, but it is the lack of a motivation which is disturbing - it's a loss of innocence.

Not sure I understand your 'because' here. Blockchain is helpful in making data public and persistent, and not under control on any one individual.

You might also be interested in geohashing as a more user friendly way to group nearby posts, although lat/lon is easier for a cpu.

Is bluesky becoming more or less decentralized over time?

Will I ever be able to host an instance where controversial views can be published?

Nice idea.

I'd encourage you to embrace full decentralization via blockchain technology. Why? Any successful tech that empowers and connects local communities becomes very politically interesting very quickly.

Thanks for the pointer. I had never heard of Kiwi before.

Extensions do give the user more power - I guess that's part of the reason they are not available on mobile.

I think Brave could be a pioneer here and add a further point of differentiation by allowing extensions.

Economic decline fuels resentment towards immigrants and minority communities. Government becomes increasingly repressive to keep tensions from boiling over into riots and perhaps worse. This is why countries are obsessed with growth - many things can be papered over with sufficient growth.

Bitcoin (BTC) was hijacked and oriented away from use as cash. It was quite obvious BTC was no longer capable of functioning this way and that the LN wouldn't help.

There were maybe a half a dozen other networks that might have made a more plausible and interesting experiment in testing crypto as a day to day currency.

There is no doubt censorship is popular. It's not for me though.

That's what your mute is for. 100% support that.

Bluesky preventing users from replying to your posts on your say-so. Yup, there's a word for that.

Nostr is definitely at effort at decentralization. In practice it doesn't have a way to incentive running a node (relay) so became quite centralized. Aside from that, it's quite a privacy nightmare (leaks ip everywhere) and became a vehicle to shill Lightning Network tokens.

From that document -

>creation of reply posts, quote posts, embeds, and mentions are blocked;

This is the unmitigable censorship that can't be removed without decentralization.