@freakazoid@retro.social
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

freakazoid

@freakazoid@retro.social

He/him or they/them. Queer GenX parent of two kids living in #Pittsburgh #Pennsylvania USA.

Boost = endorsement. My posts get auto-deleted after 6 months.

#retrocomputing #amateurradio #space #electronics #c64 #rc2014

#noarchive #noindex #noscrape #nobridge, no training your AI model on my posts.

#nobot means no uninvited interactions from bots whatsoever, including boosts or favorites. All accounts marked as bots or which appear to be automated will be treated as bots.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

santiago, to random
@santiago@masto.lema.org avatar

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    freakazoid,
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    @santiago My goal is for influencers to be nowhere at all, because it's impossible to make money giving them a platform.

    freakazoid, to random
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    Was going to open an issue for #PythonForAndroid ignoring my package_data, but with 227 open issues, 47 pull requests, and no commits since March, I'm wondering if it's even worth bothering. I've already fixed one bug myself. I guess I should start by sending a pull request for that and see what happens.

    freakazoid, to random
    @freakazoid@retro.social avatar

    Any system that is capable of hiding the messiness of decentralization isn't actually decentralized in any meaningful sense. To be truly decentralized, it has to matter which instance you pick.

    What we COULD do is to make it easier to move from one instance to another. I'm guessing this is what Bluesky will do, using something like Federated Byzantine Agreement or something like that, which might be where the blockchain association comes from: FBA is used by Stellar Lumens and some other cryptocurrency projects. But it's neither proof of work nor proof of stake, and it doesn't rely on any kind of token.

    But even if this doesn't allow spoofing of usernames, it does rely on instances not hoarding usernames. And of course it doesn't work at all unless there's a single view of the username space, which means the only way to really do it successfully is to have a subset of instances that everyone is sufficiently happy with implementing the username allocation protocol.

    Of course, to be decentralized without being tied to something like a DNS name, you'd have to prove ownership of a username cryptographically. Which then brings up the problem of key management. I think it can be done, but by far the easiest way to handle recovery is with some form of key escrow.

    A system like this has been bouncing around in my head for over a decade now. The idea is to take a username, some (public) salt, and a password and then rely on some heavy duty password strengthening algorithm (scrypt back then, Argon2 today) to compute a Curve25519 or Ed25519 private key without being subject to dictionary attacks.

    To make it strong against fast machines, it has to be pretty slow on a phone. As in something like a minute to compute the key. And this won't work at all if you reuse a password, so I doubt it's actually viable. But people do manage to use OnePassword, which doesn't allow login just with your passphrase and email address, even with MFA. You also need a key, which is normally synced between devices. Really slick, if you ask me, though I use Bitwarden due to its being Free Software.

    So maybe key management is a solvable problem after all. And maybe we can use that plus some kind of consensus protocol to "break" Zooko's triangle and give people human meaningful and secure usernames that are decentralized enough.

    Would love to hear from anyone who's read the AT protocol specs and knows how they solve this problem, assuming they even do.

    freakazoid,
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    I've thought a lot more on this issue, and while I think it's pretty clear that there are solutions to this problem that would provide a "Twitter-like" UX, none of them is actually more tenable than a centralized social network.

    There is precedent for semi-decentralized registration of names in the form of DNS registries that are handled by multiple registrars. But in reality these systems are actually centralized and just delegate the customer service aspect and a certain amount of authority. I also think DNS's unique history would make it very hard to replicate both from a legal perspective and in the public's perception.

    So I think Mastodon just needs to focus on creating a better implementation of instance migration. It needs to move your follows and followers far more quickly, it needs to move your content, and it needs to give feedback about migration progress.

    Mastodon also needs a far better backup story. It should be possible to migrate even if your instance goes up in flames. Which probably means something like cryptographically signed backups of your follows and followers that you can simply import into your new instance.

    freakazoid, to random
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    The reactions of people on make me feel quite comfortable that the decisions other instances made to silence them or defederate were good ones. "You have to interact with us poor rich tech workers no matter what we do or you can't claim to support diversity!!1!"

    freakazoid,
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    This is literally the exact same argument the Nazi instances make.

    No, actually, we don't have to interact with you. We can't shut your instance down and won't try to, but that doesn't mean we have to federate with you.

    The fact that we can defederate is exactly WHY you're able to do what you like. YOU are the ones whining about it. YOU are the ones saying WE have to do what YOU want. We don't.

    Frankly, I think other instances are actually being far more charitable than Hachyderm deserves.

    freakazoid,
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    This is also the kind of shit Wil Wheaton pulled when he got here. "What do you mean I need to use CWs? What do you mean I need to put alt text on images?" So by the time he started getting mass reported for his support of the BlockTogether list (which I had only just learned about), I'd already run out of sympathy for him. And then his "sour grapes" post saying "oh well maybe I was right to support BlockTogether" really sealed it. Just like Nova's actions since ragequitting have shown that in fact she was a problematic actor all along.

    freakazoid,
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    So you can make your own little corner of the Fediverse and do whatever the heck you want, but you can't expect everyone else to choose to interact with you. And the more you try to force them to, the more they're going to push you away, until you find yourself all alone in that little corner of the Fediverse. Well, I'm sure the Nazis will happily talk to you.

    freakazoid,
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    You don't need to believe me. Just scroll through #Hachyderm and read all the bad takes from their users for yourself. We're "Internet bullies", for example.

    I didn't support blocking them before. I didn't see most of the drama myself. But this is an instance full of folks who moved from Twitter and have been steeped in the culture of that instance since they got here. Blocking it wholesale seems like a good way to avoid a bunch of future pain.

    freakazoid,
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    The irony of calling others "bullies" for defederating from them is that as far as I know #Hachyderm is larger than any instance that defederated from it, and possibly all of them put together.

    freakazoid,
    @freakazoid@retro.social avatar

    @anderseknert You are right. I think the right thing to do at this point is probably just to wait and see what happens. It's a big instance, and a few bad takes on the hashtag and in replies to other posts can hardly be taken as representative.

    freakazoid,
    @freakazoid@retro.social avatar

    @austin It's been a long time since I've seen anything on qoto.org.

    shoq, to random
    @shoq@mastodon.social avatar

    In my 15 years on twitter, thousands of people came to me for advice. You know how many people asked "how can I discover more people or news to follow?" Maybe 5. If that. This narrative that it's so much harder here has a glimmer of truth to it, but it's
    wildly exaggerated by many who really want to ask: "I've been on Mastodon for 2 days; how do i get all my old followers back?"

    freakazoid,
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    @shoq I tried out Twitter again a while back and found it to be a ghost town from my perspective, particularly if I wanted to actually interact with people rather than treating it as a read-only medium. I think people forget how hard it was at first. Or perhaps they're more easily taken in by the "illusion of access" than I am.

    For the most part, I don't even follow people here if they don't respond to mentions. I tried for a while when celebrities first started moving here from Twitter, but the novelty wore off pretty quickly.

    austin, to random

    What drivel is this "smart #gun"? How does that prevent the tragedy that allegedly inspired the idea? Sure, it can prevent accidental firing, but the point is maybe one should ask why people keep loaded guns with them in the first place, instead of trying to normalize it further!

    https://www.npr.org/2023/04/29/1172284298/smart-gun-biofire-biometrics

    freakazoid,
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    @austin They're like EVs: an attempt to save the industry, while pretending to be an attempt to save the planet.

    freakazoid, to random
    @freakazoid@retro.social avatar

    Frankly, it makes no sense at all to compare noncommercial, open source social networking software built and run by volunteers with commercial silos with billions of dollars in funding. That people do means Mastodon has already won spectacularly, no matter what you may think the flaws are and no matter what happens from here on out.

    freakazoid, to random
    @freakazoid@retro.social avatar

    If you really valued my privacy you wouldn't be doing anything that required asking for my consent.

    freakazoid, to programming
    @freakazoid@retro.social avatar

    If you want to build an #Android app in #Python using #Kivy, I highly recommend getting the Android build working right away so that you don't end up depending on anything that won't work on Android.

    freakazoid,
    @freakazoid@retro.social avatar

    Hmm, even if all my dependencies actually work on Android, I may have to strip them down to the bare bones anyway just because of the tremendously long build time. I imagine the APK is going to be huge, too.

    freakazoid,
    @freakazoid@retro.social avatar

    As far as I can tell that's not even build time but dependency analysis time. And python-for-android (henceforth to be known as p4a) doesn't seem to cache anything for that, so I guess it's just going to take 15 minutes to even start the build every time?

    freakazoid,
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    And of course p4a doesn't tell you about any missing options until AFTER it's spent 15+ minutes analyzing all your dependencies, so you'd better get it right the first time.

    Talk about user-hostile software. Most build toolchains are, but this thing doesn't give you any help at all.

    freakazoid,
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    P4a docs: "We recommend you use SDK 27."

    P4a command line: takes 15 minutes analyzing your dependencies "We recommend you use SDK 30".

    freakazoid,
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    I suspect the reason dependency analysis is so slow for me and I don't see others complaining about it is because it's doing a bunch of stuff on the network and my side of the bed has especially bad wifi.

    freakazoid,
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    Literally 4 hours of total build time wasted on errors that p4a could have easily told me about up front. This is just plain badly written software.

    freakazoid,
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    This time it's because I left out --version thinking that it could get it from the pyproject.toml file like it does with dependencies. Nope; that's a required option. But it analyzes and builds all your dependencies FIRST, and then checks for the options it needs to build your package.

    The dependency builds are cached, but the dependency analysis is not, so it'll be another 40 minutes or so before I know what else I did wrong. Garbage.

    mmasnick, to random
    @mmasnick@mastodon.social avatar

    It's been six months since Elon took over Twitter. I have some thoughts on the "Twitter diaspora" and the current decentralized alternatives: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/28/six-months-in-thoughts-on-the-current-post-twitter-diaspora-options/

    freakazoid,
    @freakazoid@retro.social avatar

    @mmasnick This is a great summary of technical and UX issues, but I think what's going to matter a lot more to people over the long term is the fact that Bluesky is a business and is eventually going to need to come up with a business model.

    To put it another way, in a social network that's "federated like email" everybody loses, because email is dominated by parasitic entities like Gmail that are too big to block but cause all kinds of negative externalities for everyone else. Which I'm guessing is exactly what Bluesky and Dorsey are going for.

    synoisia, to random

    Moved from the official app to Tusky back to the official app. Notifications on Tusky were getting SLOW

    freakazoid,
    @freakazoid@retro.social avatar

    @synoisia Are you talking about push notifications? I wonder why they'd go at different speeds in either case? Or do you mean the tab was becoming unresponsive?

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