Re: <nettime> Unlike Us links on social media and their alternatives

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

This is a promising direction. It's impossible to guess/infer at the 
first attempt what the platform should do, but it's almost obvious what 
it shouldn't. What we need is a requirements document, the one not 
produced by techies, as for one reason or another they tend to make bad 
choices. At this point I wouldn't worry what's 'possible' or 
'impossible'. Just imagine the ideal system and then work back to MVP. 
It may take some time, so the stamina is paramount.

> > is not technical (see above).  However, I am not sure that the problem is
> > 'solved' even technically.  Consider how difficult it is to manage a system at
> > the edge in a way that avoids centralisation.  For example, no cryptocurrency
> > network is decentralised; such networks can always be captured by those with
> > the means.  Organisations such as Sovrin, which ostensibly supports a
> > self-sovereign identity scheme, often include in their design some kind of
> > foundation or governing body whose interests are not necessarily well-aligned
> > with those of its users.  And so on.  Some networks are better than others, but
> > let's face it, decentralisation is hard.  The only potential solution I see is
> > diversity, and that is hard to cultivate.  (Witness how project funding works
> > within the United Nations, for example.)

I agree. End points should have diverse implementations but contribution 
gating has to be a principle adopted by participants and locally policed 
at each end point, not (non)enforceable centralized policy. The concept 
of miners can not exist, as it leads to obvious centralization. Each 
node has to be able to evaluate every other node (whose contribution it 
accepts) locally.

How can this be done? I would postpone this discussion at this point, as 
it leads to multiple dead-ends due to diverse (in)competences of 
participants. Instead, we should reach some kind of consensus how the 
ideal system should behave. The rest is a technical problem.

> > this function in the past, although I am concerned about a rising
> > anti-intellectualism intrinsic to the argument for 'user friendliness'.  Rather
> > working to the glory of divine (in either the secular or religious sense)
> > goals, such architectures seek foremost to attract parishoners to the exclusion
> > of others who might seek to do the same.  It isn't right.  We should instead
> > call upon users to work with us, using concepts that are just 'friendly' enough
> > without excluding the 'users' from their design, governance, and management.

I see 'user friendliness' as enabling idiots, but I may be biased. This 
is a fine line that should be carefully threaded. User unfriendly may 
imply certain amount of intellectual/physical effort that can serve as 
moderator. It should not require years of training in particular 
technology. So this is actually a great question: what is 
background-agnostic "user unfriendliness" ? An artificial example would 
be having to turn a mechanical crank to run the dynamo to power the 
contraption.


> > No.  Systems designed for 'Sybil-resistance' (PoW, geolocation) necessarily
> > lead either to blacklisting or to plutocracy.  Think about it.  We need to
> > leverage our institutions, as you started to say earlier but somehow drowned in
> > the melancholic argument that we can never again have institutions powerful
> > enough to resist the current interests of a certain set of global, unregulated
> > corporations and the private, concentrated set of plutocrats behind them.

So we need PoW that doesn't scale. Yes, this leads back to traditional 
institutions, but it could be the least bad alternative. Institutions 
can control voting fraud, maybe not 100% but it seems enforceable. What 
I see sorely (and likely intentionally) missing is blinded proof of 
identity based on government IDs. It's trivially easy to implement, yet 
it's not done. With something like that, each individual cannot 
artificially multiply itself into bots etc.


> I'm not sure about Jitsi, and if the core maintainers 'will soon end the
> support', then what option will remain to keep it from becoming yet another
> rent-seeker?  Personally, I'm much more excited about Nextcloud, which provides
> self-hosted chat, H.265 voice calls, filesharing, calendaring, and more.  I
> only hope that its open mainfestation can remain adequately funded and
> supported by a development community that is committed to developing a free and
> open tool that will be audited and maintained by a broad diversity of
> interests.

Nextcloud is promising, but there is an infrastructural anomaly that has 
to be fixed first - direct addressability of every human (smartphone, 
home computer, etc.) without intermediaries, directories, assistants. 
Without it, only users with real IP numbers can freely participate 
(DynDNS is a centralized service prone to corruption). It's explained in 
the paper I peddled earlier ( https://cryptome.org/2019/02/elbar.pdf )

> that one day we'll have something like Tox that is more private.  I have no
> reason to believe that Briar is that something, based upon its design choices,
> which in my view tend to stand in the way of user control.  And user control,
> in my view, is the best form of user friendliness, and the one that matters the
> most, for all of the reasons articulated by Richard Stallman and then some.  If
> a user is not in control, then who is?

Exactly. Let's do the effort and come up with white paper describing 
what the hell we think would work. No one else will do it.


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