Notices by Christopher Lemmer Webber (cwebber@octodon.social), page 2

If you are coming to FOSDEM, and will be at the AP panel in the decentralized internet and privacy room (or at my talk in the minimalist languages room) please drop by and say hello. I'll be wearing my GuixSD shirt :)

2) The reason DNS/SSL are so hard is *because* of the coordination with central authorities.
3) If your address was your key fingerprint, no need for a CA; you already know how to make a secure connection (why .onion does not need https)
4) SSL CAs are as weak as the *weakest* CA in your CA list. It only takes one badly acting CA for you to be man in the middled.
5) DNS and SSL CAs centralize the otherwise decentralized fediverse.

Down with DNS, down with SSL CA cartels.

BTW, here is another way to put it, since I think many people here haven't thought about how problematic DNS / SSL CAs are:

1) With DNS, you DO NOT own/control your domain; you lease/rent it. And your landlord can take it away at any time (and this does happen).

(cotd ...)

If Brexit happens, every brit with a .eu domain will probably lose it [german article, via @sl007] https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Brexit-eu-Domaininhabern-drohen-Komplikationen-4294380.html

Oh hi yes hello, have we talked yet about why DNS is bad and we shouldn't be relying on it for our decentralized networks?

The demo I'm working on at this hackathon is for a secure way of hosting content so that if your instance goes down, your content can survive, and if your content becomes popular, the whole network can help balance the work of hosting it. #activitypub #wizardstower2019

Tomorrow through early friday, we are doing this fediverse hackathon https://indieweb.org/2019/Vlissingen

Anyone can participate remotely! We will be chatting in #social on irc.w3.org

But you can also come in person if you can make it to Vlissingen! There is still plenty of space, and it will be in this cool tower: https://www.watertorenvlissingen.com/

happy almost new years (here), aka "time is gonna be so fucked when interstellar travel exists" thinking time

Just got in my donation to Conservancy. Our donation is much larger than usual in order to reflect the proportionally important role that I think Conservancy is taking in the software freedom space. I hope you might consider donating also! https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/

so much has changed and so much has stayed the same on the fediverse in the last 10y

A real paying job based out of ActivityPub where you could be paid full time to work on an ActivityPub implementation https://twitter.com/fakebaldur/status/1047177467025416193

Freddie Oversteegen dies at 92. Accomplishments during WWII include smuggling Jewish children to safety, blowing up bridges with dynamite, and oh yeah, seducing Nazis at bars to come on a walk with her and then "liquidating" them. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/freddie-oversteegen-dutch-resistance-fighter-who-killed-nazis-through-seduction-dies-at-92/2018/09/16/7876eade-b9b7-11e8-a8aa-860695e7f3fc_story.html

@ted The recent fedidrama appears to stem from the pains of dealing with blocking-centric anti-abuse tooling. On a small level, that's hard enough; on an instance to instance level, it's going to end up with nation states.

Oh nice, @erincandescent is here :)

Erin is the person who transformed the Pump API into the first draft of what became ActivityPub. ActivityPub wouldn't have happened without her hard work!

If you're thinking "gosh, isn't the opposite route of what several 'let's simplify activitypub' threads" have been going towards then yeah, it's in the opposite direction, because I think there's a real risk of losing a better future with making that the "standard".

So if you wonder why ActivityPub doesn't include webfinger, it's because we left ActivityPub open to be the fediverse of the future, not just the fediverse of today.

Okay anyway I said a lot of things here... but here's the general idea: current federation rollout assumes:

- there's one you
- there's one path to get to you
- one naming authority should get to define our names
- when it comes to breadth vs depth, popularity is more important than deep relationships

But these assumptions comes from surveillance capitalism social networks. Reverse all of these and things get interesting.

Okay, lots of posts about "could you elaborate" so let me attempt.

What would we like?
- Strong resilience to abuse, spam, dogpiling
- Networks which focus on *deeper* relationships with your community rather than *popularity*... in depth vs breadth, depth matters more (this ain't a high school popularity contest)
- support for anonymnity and multiple identities without increased support for abuse, spam, dogpiling

it frustrates me that I believe that the way we're handling identity and social relationships on the current iteration of the fediverse is Very Wrong, but it's just a lot of talk from me until I can demo with real code I guess

I hope we don't get locked into dangerous antipatterns before it's too late to shift the direction of the network

I want to bike home but it was raining but so I got tea but now it stopped but I have a bunch of tea to finish #bikingfirstworldproblems

the safest way to use computers is still abstinence