The Beta Network has launched and the first wave of testers are up and running. It’s taken a wee while, but we got there, just as David always knew we would. It could never have happened without the steadfast support of the community over the years.
Thanks to you the network has grown from our original 2,000 MaidSafe nodes to over 17,000 nodes and counting, our biggest by some margin.
Bux is in Texas right now at the Consensus conference waiting to wow the audience. Go @bux!
Currently we're beavering away to get another testnet out of the door, building on the successes of ThisIsNotBetaRewardsNet and knocking off a few rough edges.
We’re particularly keen to get discord bot fully integrated this time round to automate the calculation of nanos for those running nodes.
#DistributedDemocracy#Decentralization#NetworkedFederalism#CyberSyn#Socialism: "Just as liberalism is flawed in its calls for democracy to extend only to parliamentary representation, the core internet protocols are flawed in their assumption that distribution need only apply to network topology. We have seen the consequences of asking private enterprise to construct a distributed system: centralisation, monopolisation. Just as we demand more democracy than offered by parliaments, we should demand more distribution than offered by private telecommunications. Distribution can only be achieved in this sense via socialisation.
Effective network design demands collective, not private governance. If the private market cannot distribute the network itself, as we have seen it cannot, we will need to find new protocols which can achieve this. And there is no reason to limit this aspiration to topology; we could also distribute computing power. If “the cloud” offers the appearance of distribution, a socialist network might achieve the real thing: equitable access to the power of computation, autonomy over algorithms, open and public archives, digital democracy.
We can go beyond the existing conceptions of distribution to build four necessary protocols for a socialist network:
Distribute network topology (a demand already latent in TCP/IP)
Distribute computing power
Socialise communication
Socialise the development of network infrastructure itself
The question of how to go about socialising these things remains an open one, but however weak the left might be in this domain today, we are not without options."
If billionaires can litter the sky with routers, controlling our communication - maybe billions of us could outcompete them with #mesh routers here on earth, regaining control of our communication?
For this #ThankYouTuesday, I want to thank everyone who still wants to own their data. Those who aren't swayed by seemingly valid and effective technical solutions designed solely to entrap. To those who don't believe in the flashy pages created by web giants that promise better results than others and sometimes sabotage competitors to create this illusion. Or embrace and extinguish the competition.
When all our data and activities are chained to the servers and infrastructures of a few entities, what will we truly own?
Pre-warning to my followers: I'm going to leave #reddit for good and I'm blogging about the reasons - mostly because reddit management gone crazy (latest: my #firefox isn't working any more for reddit) & also because of https://karl-voit.at/2020/10/23/avoid-web-forums/
WhatsApp introduces "ask meta ai" in the local chat search bar, and Slack auto-feeds messages to train their LLM robots https://eigenmagic.net/@NewtonMark/112455578857917485 ... Delta Chat is among the shrinking number of messaging applications that does not look at your data except to end-to-end encrypt it and send it over interoperable message transport servers chosen by yourselves and your contacts. #decentralization#security#privacy ftw!
We have two new team members First, we are massively pleased that @Shu has agreed to join us to help out with monitoring, observability and visualisation of operations.
Second, we’re delighted to welcome Nic, who joins as product manager. This is an essential role as we move out of the R&D phase into delivery.
#Ghost#ActivityPub#Decentralization#OpenWeb: "They say the best way to predict the future is to create it, so two weeks ago we shared our intention to connect Ghost with the ActivityPub Network to bring back the open web. We were delighted when our ideas managed to spread even further and wider than we'd imagined, and that so many of you signed up to be a part of the journey."
We have a new stable test network for you as PunchNet winds down. Impressive work as always from the community, and it’s wonderful to see all the dashboards brightening up the thread.
I regularly think about this essay about the evolution of #centralization in computing. It focuses on businesses and research, but I have a feeling that the next stage of #decentralization will happen via the general public.
We don't have to rely on energy-hungry, leak-prone servers to run 24/7 to do our basic tasks. We need more local-first computing.
If you're still using their products by then, you have definitely given up digital sovereignty and you're happy to embrace the possibility of industrial #espionage by US companies.
It would definitely improve the situation a lot when parts of the large amount of money that is transferred to #Microsoft now finds its way to alternative #FOSS#Groupware solutions.
"If you just imagine teleporting yourself back to 1970, and somone who was looking forward to the PC revolution - which was going to happen in just a few years - was like 'alright, we're not going to have entire rooms full of computer stuff anymore, and you're not going to have a mainframe that you connect to to do everything. Everything's going to work on these little boxes people have in their home'."