NodeBB-ActivityPub Bridge Test Instance

@oblomov you had to be there

we have a new wound cube incident but this time with the american flag

@helge Content-Length: 0

the hardest thing isn't solving problems, the hardest thing is knowing which problems have already been solved

@swaggboi facebook marketplace is not a place of honor, no esteemed deeds etc

@StarkRG @dangillmor exactly. as bad as this move is by google, they're still ahead of apple, which is even worse.

@cwebber whoever wins, we all lose

@by_caballero @laurenshof @dansup you can also just *not* verify people's age. you can fight these laws just like the SOPA/PIPA blackouts in 2012. i don't see why anyone should just roll over and accept the dystopia without a struggle

@laurenshof @dansup they can at most go after specific domains. you can just ignore mississippi entirely and people in mississippi will probably still be able to access the web if they really want to -- this only affects large well-known services to the extent that they can be fined (which they don't have to pay) or censored (which can be bypassed by proxy or vpn -- and every fedi server that maintains its own cache is essentially a proxy)

@dansup it isn't about any one website being able to block visitors from mississippi. it's about mississippi being unable to block every single noncompliant website for their citizens. there's no reason to comply in advance, because they can't retaliate meaningfully unless there are centralized chokepoints.

@aetios ancient legend

a lot of people don't realize it, but this is in fact a political question. if you establish what is basically a one-world government for how people communicate, that is not necessarily a good thing. which expressions are allowed, and which ones are disallowed? the consequences are more technical than social, sure, but they are still consequences all the same -- it's just that instead of governing the natural language, they govern the structure. can we agree on a single structure for everything?

so ultimately, if i have to weigh the value of a connection, it's not just a question of what i gain by connecting. it's also a question of what i have to give up by connecting. if your view of the world is so fundamentally compromised that i cannot express myself satisfactorily -- if i have to bend over backwards to make you understand just a fraction of what i was trying to communicate in the first place -- then maybe i am in fact ending up worse off overall.

when people are allowed to publish arbitrary information on current services, it's not seen as a feature; it's seen as a security exploit. that's a real shame. we've moved away from the idea of people publishing web resources; instead, services publish web resources that are generated based on extremely limited input from people. some software doesn't even recognize the difference between a service and its users; it just assumes that everything on a given domain must represent the service.

a somewhat related concern i have is that this "lowest common denominator" approach has over the years reduced the range of human communication and expression to just a series of mostly plain text notes within a character limit and maybe a media attachment. this is a far cry from even a single web page. one of the cool things about the web is that you can and should be able to publish whatever you want. you don't get to do that if the structure is disallowed or not in your control.

i've probably said this before but every time someone cites metcalfe's law and says that networks get more valuable with more connections, i want them to consider that the value of a connection might in fact be negative

another thing to consider: connections need a shared context. if you want to connect to everyone, then you are limited to the lowest common denominator of what the most naive node understands

@codl that might be it actually, the word filter is very naive and it's probably a scunthorpe issue using a multilingual word list

i saw the "con" in "continuous" censored. why...?

@cwebber some people i've seen have used the term "funposting"

@helge a tag is taxonomical like a category, and an attachment is intended to be part of the message dispositionally

this matter is complicated by mastodon stuffing toot:Emoji in there and expecting transformations of the natural language properties, which is not what a "tag" is typically supposed to be. but i would also go so far as to say that Mention tags should be replaced by directly tagging the Person.