Notices by ar.al🌻 (aral)

Food for thought: The bigger mastodon.social gets, the less successful the #fediverse is.

Sadly, the fundamental design of Mastodon mirrors the design of Big Tech (a server architecture that can support hundreds of thousands of “users”) and thus inherits its success criteria.

I feel it’s time we at least started thinking about what the web would look like if we all had our own place on it and what it would take to get there from here.

#decentralisation #centralisation #fediverse #SmallWeb

We should not be optimising Mastodon so it can handle more people per server. We should be optimising Mastodon so it incentivises more serves with fewer people.

(And if you take that line of thinking to its logical conclusion, you arrive at the idea behind the Small Web: https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/)

#decentralisation #federation #fediverse #SmallWeb

You can now watch my talk on the future of Internet regulation at the European Parliament yesterday on Peertube (@joinpeertube) thanks to @vincib

https://video.lqdn.fr/videos/watch/70f2128c-8c06-4cc4-8a5a-bf77e765c8fd

And here are my slides (which were on the screens but aren’t visible in the video):

https://small-tech.slides.com/aral/dear-regulators-dont-throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater#/

There are people who will tell you that the way things are is the way things have always been and will always be.

Don’t listen to these people.

The way things are is just raw material for the way things can be. And by your every action or inaction you help determine what that is.

Introducing Laura’s Lens – @laura

“Over the last five years or so, I’ve been sharing links to insightful articles with a critical view of technology … When we started Small Technology Foundation, we decided these links needed a new home. These links have always been my view of what I think is related to our work … But there’s another reason why me posting as myself is valuable. Unless we specifically say the work I do is done by me, my work is often attributed to Aral”

https://laurakalbag.com/introducing-lauras-lens/

Introducing Small Technology Foundation, Site.js, and Tincan

https://ar.al/2019/08/26/introducing-small-technology-foundation/

World: Google, you are so smart, impartial, and benevolent, please write all our protocols and standards.

Google: Oh yeah, btw, we don’t think you should be able to protect yourself from being tracked on our browser.

Google to break uBlock Origin on Chromium.

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=896897&desc=2#c23

#SurveillanceCapitalism #Google

The #EFF: “we are the leading nonprofit defending digital privacy”

Also #EFF: “we’ve partnered with the world’s largest #SurveillanceCapitalist who makes billions by violating your privacy to train the people who will make the policies that defend your privacy – come be a Google Policy Fellow!”

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/work-eff-summer-apply-be-2019-google-public-policy-fellow

This is institutional corruption at its worst.

Is anyone else sick of this bullshit?

Via @schestowitz

Linux and “open source” in a nutshell, from the horse’s mouth:

“There is a genuine reason to worry. My desktop is free but my data and applications (which run in the cloud) aww not … what do you care about more – just that the code is open or also about the business practices as well?”

Linus Torvalds: “Personally, I only care about the code. When I say maybe there are people who worry about walled gardens and cloud provides who take ownership of your data, I am not one of those people.”

I‘ve now submitted a pull request for mdbook that, if/when merged, will serve web fonts locally and not hit Google’s servers:

https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/mdBook/pull/848

In the meanwhile, if you want to create Google-free #Rust documentation, feel free to use my fork:

https://github.com/aral/mdBook?organization=aral&organization=aral

@gvenk #Mozilla should not be trusted on #privacy. Their head of EU policy said yesterday at the Nordic Privacy Arena that they are primarily a Silicon Valley tech company, that they do not see adtech/surveillance-based behavioural advertising as a problem (and they do not) and that they are partners with Google (they are and they have gotten >$B from them and have a current deal that gets them 100s of millions of $ every year). Mozilla is a surveillance capitalist.

Meanwhile, the EU has voted to kill the Internet as we know it and possibly aid in creating an even bigger surveillance machine in the process.

Civil disobedience is the way forward on this one. We redouble our efforts to create decentralised alternatives and if they’re deemed illegal by this myopic legislation, so be it. Fuck ’em. We go to jail if we need to.

If you had any illusions that the battle for personhood and human rights would be easier in our age, think again.

#article13

Blown away reading about the philosophy, research, and process behind the Workman Keyboard Layout (http://workmanlayout.org/)

PS. This is design.

Via @hntooter

Multiwriter Dat could power the next Web (Video + blog post)

https://ar.al/2018/08/04/multiwriter-dat-could-power-the-next-web/

#ethicaltechnology #peerweb

Changes

"For the last 12 years, my main development machine has been a Mac. As of last week, it’s a Dell XPS 13 running Pop!_OS 18.04 ... Take note: this is the first operating system I’ve used that is simpler, more elegant, and does certain things better than macOS."

https://ar.al/2018/07/16/changes/

I'm going to write a lot more about this in the coming days but the most important takeaway from my first few days of switching my main development machine to Linux (Pop!_OS 18.04)?

I. Do. Not. Miss. The. Mac. One. Bit.

Everything Just Works (tm), including my USB-C-only LG external monitor (which doesn't even work with Laura's older MacBook Pro), Magic Trackpad, etc. And there are things I actually enjoy more about the experience. Never thought I'd be writing this about Linux. Exciting times!

The punk rock internet – how DIY rebels are working to replace the tech giants

Today, in The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/01/punk-rock-internet-diy-rebels-working-replace-tech-giants-snoopers-charter

“I got into the web because I liked the democracy of it,” says Kalbag, who has just published a book titled Accessibility for Everyone… “I want to be able to be in a society where I have control over my information, and other people do as well … I think we have to have technology that serves everybody – not just rich, straight, white guys.”

https://mastodon.ar.al/media/24IVAeiWDTK-DrYehWw

So Decent is pretty fucking amazing!

Check it out on: http://gwenbell.com

(An in-browser social network based on Scuttlebot and Minbase with seamless on-boarding. Seriously easier to get started with than a centralised social network like Facebook. Very, very impressed!)

PS. I’m @aral on there.

#decent #securescuttlebutt #ssb

I spoke with The Guardian for a podcast recently and it’s now live: Digital dystopia: tech slavery and the death of privacy.

“Is the internet broken? And has the utopian 90s net been replaced by digital feudalism, where a few powerful entities wield control over all of us digital serfs? … To kick off, we explore whether our privacy has been compromised by the tech giants whose business models depend on harvesting and monetising our data.“

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/audio/2018/jan/12/digital-dystopia-end-of-privacy-tech-podcast

I’ll be in Ghent all week. If there are any local ActivityPub, Node.js/JS, federation/decentralisation (not blockchain)-loving developers around, please do make yourselves known. Would be great to meet you.