timbray

To be fair, from 2022. I would argue that moderation in Fedi is holding together reasonably well. There are a few popular instances that lots of people think are overly aggressive/purist in their moderation policies, but the people using them seem to like what they're getting.

ATProto is an interesting protocol and there is lots of room to argue about its plus and minuses (and about Fedi/Masto's), but lots of people are already doing that so I won't.

My concern isn't technology or culture, it's money. At the moment, ATProto is existentially dependent on Bluesky PBC, a venture-funded startup ($100M from Bain Capital). There are people doing good work to make it more decentralized, more power to them, but at the moment it's still deeply centralized. And it's hard to see what the business model is that will support what Bsky PBC does at a global scale. Eventually Bain will want to see a revenue stream that justifies their investment; maybe there's a way to do that that doesn't involve enshittification but it's certainly not obvious.

You can dislike the instance-centeredness of Fedi/Masto (seems to have worked OK for email over the decades) but it's an actual thing that's actually working. And offers account migration without losing followers if you don't like the instance you're on. And has multiple really excellent client software packages. And seems to be covering its costs through a mixture of Patreon, co-operative & nonprofits, some Euro-gov help, all without any VC input. It can't be bought or owned by anybody.

Put another way, this is a really interesting space. But the technology is less interesting than the culture, and the culture is less interesting than the m money.

My pieces usually get flagged. Presumably I have annoyed some of the wrong people.

I'm highly unconvinced of the proposition that most homeless are severely mentally ill; the data I've seen doesn't support it. That's some of it, and also addiction. But a lot of them just can't make the rent.

Agree on the underbuilding.

I'd like to see a few links to support your assertions in the first paragraph because, with respect, I have not seen evidence which supports them.

On the other hand, multiple jurisdictions have run trials of UBI (universal basic income) and unless I misread the reportage, the results have been good.

Well, healthcare is an increasing piece of government spending all over the world, and the population is aging, so politics and policy aside, that number is going to go up.

+1 on Newsblur. I use it every day and it has flaws but nothing that really gets in my way.

The tests for the go code at https://github.com/timbray/RFC9839 are in effect test vectors.

Yeah, for example it's how Java stores strings to this day. But I think it's more or less never transmitted over the Network.

Relevant: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-bray-unichars-15.html - IETF approved and will have an RFC number in a few weeks.

Tl;dr: Since we're kinda stuck with Uncorrected UTF-8, here are the "characters" you shouldn't use. Includes a bunch of stuff the OP mentioned.

That crossed my mind when I saw the piece show up on HN. But I think they're already running more or less at capacity.

You're right, but I didn't realize that till later. Except for the original "Parable of the Sower" was from Jesus not Olivia. But I also thought of Olivia's first.

A high-quality leather sofa these days is closer to $15K than $1500, ouch.

I dunno, my Wikipedia entry is about right.

Wow, didn't know about that, thanks. But the query has to be "timbray" not tim bray

Got me jobs, helped me hire other people, got me a ticket to some of the big technology debates and then helped me win one or two. Gave me a place to write cat obituaries and heavy-metal reviews. Launched Feb 27, 2003 (20 years last month) and I haven't regretted it for a microsecond.

[https://tbray.org/ongoing/]

Anyone can embiggen me any time they want.

We agree, AWS is a clean break, ads is way more messy.

But ads only works because of Amazon retail's sorta-kinda-monopoly position. It's still a big distortion of the market. But I don't have a bright idea what to do about it.

Hmm? Masto comes with decent self-search now, you don't need to build it.

Everybody's saying "well of course you can't stop people crawling so just give up." I don't buy it - you also can't stop people from driving too fast or smoking in restaurants or torrenting popular movies. That's why we have lawyers and courts and legislation.

If Mastodon gets content licensing right, you'll still be able to ignore it and go ahead and crawl data when the license forbids, it scratches your itch and you're ethically challenged. But then if you do anything with that data in public you're going to get legal nastygrams. That may not even stop you, but it will drive up the cost of your lack of ethics.

Ask any security pro. You can't ever stop all the attackers. All you can do is make it more and more expensive to do bad stuff, and eventually most of them won't have a strong enough incentive to pay the price.

There are plenty of people on Mastodon - the vast majority is my bet - who, when there's a choice of content licenses, will cheerfully say "make it public", and then there will be excellent full-text search.

It's well-known where the Lolicon is (pawoo.net and mastodon.jp and some others) and all the mainstream instances have de-federated from those places.

Email is also full of disgusting stuff but nobody is going to abandon email because it's "full of child porn", although we all know perfectly well that there's lots of that stuff being emailed around.

Well-run Masto instances are actually pretty safe and pleasant spaces these days.

You're not allowed to drive at twice the speed limit, nor to smoke in enclosed public spaces, and, in certain pandemic situations, you shouldn't be allowed to breathe unobstructedly on strangers. Where's the privacy dimension?!

Well, they did manage to cut their energy usage by like 100x. Gotta respect that. Not that I think Eth is currently used for anything but scams.