The most important news this week is the winding down of the Bittrex exchange. Anyone who has MAID on #Bittrex needs to take it off the exchange sooner rather than later.
Other news is that the latest testnet seems to have solved some problems and unearthed others in a one-step-forward-one-step-back kinda style.
We’ve had two testnets on the go in the last week, aiming to clarify issues in replication and at the client, as well as investigating the mem increases we’ve seen across nodes.
So far, while we’re still seeing client issues, we’ve been able to clarify what’s going on there and so fixes to failed CashNote reads, and other upload issues, are in the works.
Call it synchronicity, a confluence of decentralised thinking, or longstanding issues coming to a head, but just as @dirvine was chatting to the team this week about protection against Sybil attacks, a post popped up alerting us to Vitalik Buterin’s thoughts on the topic.
David’s initial response, is ion teh forum. Tldr; outside of blockchain-land Sybil may not be so scary after all.
"We need to seize the means of computation, and that means ejecting all of these interlopers, and relocating it back into the personal domain we control." Danny O'Brien, Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web
yes yes yes. Ive been saying this for at least a year or more and am writing about this again in my current paper. Im 100% behind this. My new theme is promoting the idea of civic learning networks that are based on decentralised federated instance models that also integrate with the open social web.
The DialNet testnet, launched this morning, contains some improvements to the issue of dialling unroutable peers - the one that was causing some nodes to remain chunkless. We have what we believe to be a fix in place now which we want to test out. It will still need some tweaking for performance, but we want to try it in the...
After a successful DialNet we’re looking to test our reworked payment process. Now instead of badly guesstimating costs on the network, we ask each and every node how much they’d like and pay that. (This can be tweaked to avoid bad actors easily enough). As such, every node will receive rewards for PUTs directly!
Yet another testnet that anyone can try out (on Windows, Mac and LInux). Test aims: firstly we want to be sure if removing the attempted kad-caching has helped with data-put reliability (as described in the dev update. This is our main point to dig in on for this testnet, hopefully gaining a bit more clarity via… The new...
We have recently been advocating the activation of a function which is present but usually off in Mastodon and other fedi services called Authorized Fetch. As we plead with the major development projects to take safety more seriously and make it a default, we have learned that Meta itself didn't think twice about it and has activated it in their own ActivityPub implementation against us.
We know this because of news that a fascist has devised a way to evade it and force federation with Threads. They promise to then turn their technique upon us and coerce unblockable federation with fascist and cryptospam instances: https://soapbox.pub/blog/threads-server-blocking/
A note also on the gaslighting we face from Meta's colluders; the latest being the embarrassing spectacle of ActivityPub co-author Evan wagging around a "small fedi". @thenexusofprivacy has a good rebuttal to this cringe exhibitionism here: https://privacy.thenexus.today/the-annotated-case-for-a-big-fedi/
Evan has seen fit to misappropriate the "small fedi" idea, then build a blog post around warping it into a smear, with a long list of patronizing and fictional mischaracterizations. But what is truly small is the thinking that the fedi's future is surveillance, algorithmic ingestion, centralized servers too big to moderate, and huge psychotic corporations like Meta. In fact, that is social media's catastrophic past, the one we're all here to reject.
While Authorized Fetch remains important to activate, it is clear that even it - which remember, provides better defense than that currently implemented on most of our home servers - is inadequate to the threats facing us as the Zuckerberg incursion progresses. If we're serious about protecting our communities and expressions from absorption into surveillance capitalism and the accelerating miseries of fascism, we need to talk about a stronger grade of defensive weaponry.
To this end, @are0h has fired a first volley: https://h-i.social/@are0h/111653850819592308 Every fedi community which serves as a refuge for those targeted and under siege should be thinking like this. True safety only awaits us in a transitive approach to defederation, and further on, in an intentional federation based on the allow-list.
Thanks to everyone who’s participated in the DataPaymentNet testnet. It has performed its role magnificently, telling us that the fundamentals of data payments are sound, even if the UX leaves a little to be desired still. We’ve lost a few nodes after a replication spike the community spotted last night. But we’ve still...
Over the past weeks we have seen some nodes that do not receive records. On further inspection, it seemed like peers of such nodes didn’t add them to their routing table. In essence this means those nodes aren’t seen as part of the network, but function like clients. When a new node connects to its peers, those peers have to...
We’ve often sympathised with Sisyphus in the Greek legend. Sisyphus had to push a boulder up a hill for eternity only for it to go rolling back down again as soon as he neared the summit.
Not wishing to tempt the notoriously vengeful Greek gods, but we’re increasingly certain that this time we’ve finally cracked it, and we’re sitting pretty on the plateau. Why the confidence?
Safe Network Update 31 August, 2023 (safenetforum.org)
The DialNet testnet, launched this morning, contains some improvements to the issue of dialling unroutable peers - the one that was causing some nodes to remain chunkless. We have what we believe to be a fix in place now which we want to test out. It will still need some tweaking for performance, but we want to try it in the...
Safe Network #Testnet DataDebugNet [ 28/09/23] (safenetforum.org)
Yet another testnet that anyone can try out (on Windows, Mac and LInux). Test aims: firstly we want to be sure if removing the attempted kad-caching has helped with data-put reliability (as described in the dev update. This is our main point to dig in on for this testnet, hopefully gaining a bit more clarity via… The new...
Safe Network Dev Update 03 August, 2023 on Kbin (safenetforum.org)
Thanks to everyone who’s participated in the DataPaymentNet testnet. It has performed its role magnificently, telling us that the fundamentals of data payments are sound, even if the UX leaves a little to be desired still. We’ve lost a few nodes after a replication spike the community spotted last night. But we’ve still...
Safe Network test: DialNet [31/08/23 Testnet] (safenetforum.org)
Over the past weeks we have seen some nodes that do not receive records. On further inspection, it seemed like peers of such nodes didn’t add them to their routing table. In essence this means those nodes aren’t seen as part of the network, but function like clients. When a new node connects to its peers, those peers have to...