I’ve literally never seen anyone say this except FediPacters as a strawman.

I’ve seen that quite a few times already, mostly in the form of “it’s stupid to preemptively defederate, we can always defederate later”.

If you decide to go down the Synology route, make sure it supports docker. Their cheaper models don’t support it, and it’s the gateway to self-hosting all the services that are not available directly from the package manager.

There is so much wrong with this that I don’t even know where to begin.

I don’t intent to be rude, but this is just not how you build a decentralized/distributed system. The network would grind to a halt if every user app had to search recursively through a portion of the network, and aggregate & rank posts by itself. Aggregate values (communities, votes and so on) would never be right, because you’d never be able to acually gather all events for a particular entity in time. This might work in a local network of 10 nodes, but not on a global scale.

On top, who would pay for those nodes you are querying? There is no relationship between the users and the nodes, so why would anyone just run a node for others or be willing to pay anyone else in this scenario? Servers cost money and stuff. And your spam filtering and moderation solution would be the exact same as with instances, so nothing is gained here.

Maybe have a look at the Session messenger and their Oxen network. They go to great length to make sure the work is equally distributed among nodes and they are compensated fairly. This doesn’t just happen magically by itself, and there are many bad actors who will try to exploit any weakness they can find.

So I just think it’s impossible to create something like lemmy in an anonymous way, because content moderation is a human decision. There is no one correct mathematical solution, and I also can’t send some kind of filter query to a server to do it for me. All I can do is read the general rules that another human being has wrote up, subscribe to their moderation “service”, see how they are doing, and decide to stay or switch to another.

Similarly, if I don’t want to aggregate all the posts in the world by myself (as you are suggesting), then I’ll have to fine someone to do it for me, and somehow pay that someone for their service. This part is actually kind of solvable (again look at Session), but it is not straight forward at all! It would involve crypto currencies, mining/staking, and some kind of client-side monetization. For this part I think trusted instances are just a much better solution, because we are building a social structure here anyway.

Idk if you really can copyright a letter of the alphabet.

That’s the capitalistic definition of freedom. Everything is allowed as long as you have the money.

Signal if possible, WhatsApp if not. I’m also trying out Session, but it’s still very much work-in-progress.

Sure 😁

I think the one thing we could adopt from crypto is having public keys as user IDs, instead of tying it to an instance. But that would require users to handle their own keys, and people are just reeeaaally bad at that!

I switched from Chrome to Firefox about a year ago, because it’s just better for personal privacy and the freedom of the web as a whole. Brave would be my second choice, but FF lets you easily self-host a sync server for all your browsing data.

What I’m saying is that you cannot do those features with what you’re proposing, regardless of what you might want to do.

The Opera of today is not the same as the one from back in the days! The original company sold all their code and rights to a chinese consortium in 2016. Since then it’s basically a variant of chromium, with some propriatary features and tracking added. I don’t know the new owners, so I don’t trust them with my browsing data!

Of course! Moderation is censorship. There is certain content I don’t want to see, and I don’t want to have to filter it myself so I join a community of seemingly likeminded people who censor content based on rules I generally agree with. They ban users who break the rules, keep spambots out, block malicious instances and so on, and if they are doing their job right then it builds trust and attracts more people.

what about it makes you think that to be the case?

Because you want to strip all that out and abstract it away. Who do you think would do the moderating and spam blocking? Who aggregates posts from all over the world and presents a sorted list to a user on their smartphone? It would be the wild west with users having to do everything themselves. I know it’s tempting to think about building a Fediverse without instances, but afaik you need these social structures for the system to work.

Crypto for example only works because you can define the rules mathematically beforehand, and then hand out money for computers to check them. That’s just not possible with a public forum, at least not yet imo.

Cryptocurrencies and social platforms are completely different beasts. In crypto I want no moderation/censorship, I want anonymity, and there is a payout system so nodes can compete for something. This is all different when building a social network, so you can’t just use the same architecture. Building social structures and trust is desirable in a public forum, not something you want to get rid of.

This is not the solution! Being able to pick a server to trust your data and content moderation with is a feature, not a bug.

What we do have to do is make this feature more resilient and easier to use. Like adding the ability to easily transfer accounts and communities between instances, or even change the domain name of an entire instance.

Because DNS is the user-facing part of the whole system. There is plenty of trouble with everything else, but you usually don’t see that as a user. Also it’s a hierarchical system with big providers/governments giving and taking names as they see fit, so there is always the possibility to get screwed.

Here is a good resource for these kinds of questions: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/tools/

This is suspicion on the level of “you can’t be sure reality didn’t just pop into existence 10 seconds ago”. You can never be 100% sure of what others are doing on their hardware, or of anything really, especially if other people are involved. Your chat partners could leak all your chats and metadata for all you know!

What we do know is that Signal is operated by a non-profit foundation, their client and protocol are open source and considered the gold standard for privacy by pretty much every expert on the subject, they had multiple independent audits and a very good track record, they were subpoenaed and couldn’t comply because they didn’t have the requested data. That’s about as good as you can get.

Just leaving this here: Aurora Store

I’ve tried a few and landed on the “VaKo 12 Ports Dockingstation”. Most reliable hub I used so far. I bought it 3 years ago and it’s still working flawlessly.

Depends on the level of technology we are using. If we’re zapping around from one habitable planet or interesting space phenomenon to another star trek style then absolutely yes! But a hard no with our current level of technology. I like to spend my time in an environment that’s actually somewhat friendly to life.

We could also just delete stuff after some time. Nobody really needs the 1000th repost of a meme from 20 years ago.