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robin

@robin@mastodon.social

Governance & Standards at @protocollabs — Former NYT, W3C TAG, science.ai — Privacy, Web, Science, Politics, Philosophy. (he/him/Ishmael)

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JustinH , to Fediverse
@JustinH@twit.social avatar

"We Need To Rewild The Internet"
An absolutely excellent read (and great analogy) by @mariafarrell and @robin Probably the best piece I've read all year.

I often struggle to think of a term for "appearing messy from a distance is often, on a human scale, healthy actually." Comparing the social web to an ecosystem is exactly it.

https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/

@fediverse

robin ,
@robin@mastodon.social avatar

@JustinH @mariafarrell @fediverse Thank you! Yes — "this chaotic-seeming thing is good, actually" is a tough message :)

maegul , to Fediverse
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

Decent Decentralisation

https://berjon.com/decent-imaginaries/

Good counter to the focus on protocols.

> a protocol needs to achieve two things: it needs to prevent the accumulation of power imbalances between parties … and it needs to make it easy for users to cooperate in building the the rules they want for how the protocol's operation affects them … the success of decentralisation and … of a democratic digital world rides not only on liberation but also on organising.

@fediverse

By @robin

robin ,
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@astrojuanlu @maegul @fediverse Thank you!

robin ,
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@maegul @poVoq I'm well aware of democratic work at the instance level, I just don't think that it's the right granularity and I don't see how it doesn't get captured. I'm interested in solutions that work even for people who use Gmail.

I don't understand the Bluesky comment, it doesn't sound related to anything I've said or even to reality?

robin ,
@robin@mastodon.social avatar

@poVoq Except that there is no necessary requirement to reproduce the constraints of IRL infrastructure specifically at that location. A good question is why pick a server instead of, say, people who use the same undersea cable? Typically that's because cables are a commodity whereas servers provide a single point of capture. But there are two options: make the server democratic or make the server a commodity (a real one, with no power and near-zero switching costs).

robin ,
@robin@mastodon.social avatar

@poVoq I used to think that treating the server as a cityish thing made best sense. But cities are dense, they are used for everything including many things we often don't think about (see Jacobs, etc.). The mapping doesn't work very well, except perhaps for people who are very much in one community rather than overlapping ones.

The ATProto approach is credible exit and all the properties that make servers into commodities. It means that you have better flexibility in dealing with infra.

robin ,
@robin@mastodon.social avatar

@poVoq For instance, I think it would make a lot of sense to manage PDS infra with coops the way it's done in plenty of places for energy provision. Things become a lot harder to manage when the people who are good at providing a commodity also have to be good at CoMo. For completely different topics. In completely different languages. Etc. Decoupling really helps here.

robin ,
@robin@mastodon.social avatar

@poVoq Cloud providers aren't commodified, they're not interoperable. You're comparing a protocol with specific design to enable commodification with proprietary platforms. If you don't understand the properties of ATProto that target that, your critiques are going to go well wide.

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