Notices by Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz), page 12

What I would love, is to be able to lease a mobile device from a #PlatformCooperative, with accompanying remote storage, and both the device and remote storage servers running 100% #FreeCode software. It would also need to provide a stupidly simple sync system (also free code) that allows me to keep a copy of all my user data, on my own laptop/ desktop/ server/ external drive. That's something I would pay for, on a regular subscription.

F%$&*ing #Android! I just uninstalled and/or disabled a bunch of seemingly unnecessary system apps, after looking them up online to see what they are, and now my phone dialer has disappeared :-(

@ZettaiRyouiki sure, and that's a debate we got onto in the follow-up posts, about who is and isn't a "common carrier", and thus obliged to treat all users and content equally. My point wasn't that FB (for example) shouldn't be allowed to engage in censorship (that's a separate question), but that it's wrong to claim it's not censorship, just because FB isn't a state.

@Wolf480pl @djsumdog I do get the common carrier argument, and I think it does apply to providing internet connections, and domain names. It's worth noting that if a private company's infrastructure is regulated by "common carrier" rules, they are obliged to host fascists, legally if not morally. That's why the net neutrality debate is so complex, it's about where the line between common carrier line and private infrastructure ought to fall, when it comes to the net.

@kaiyou it's a step in the right direction, for sure. But I think we also need to consider political campaigns, eg for telecoms regulations that prevent companies owning both cable and server businesses, or anti-trust efforts to stop cable companies from throttling upload speeds to force customers to buy hosting from them. If we move from corporations hosting gratis services for us, to paying them to do the hosting ourselves on their "clouds", what have we really gained?

@kaiyou the same thing happened to previous generations, with TV broadcasting, and before that radio broadcasting. They started as DIY media that anyone could use cheaply for public speech, and ended up as commodities dominated by an ever smaller number of giant corporations. So at root, the for-profit corporation is the medium we need to come up with radical alternatives to, like #SocialEnterprise and #PlatformCooperativism

@kaiyou there's an old saying in radical media circles, "freedom of the press belongs to those who own one". The revolutionary thing about the PC+internet was (in theory) that anyone who has them has a printing press. Problem is, at some point, the same #BigCable companies who were supplying net connections also got into the web hosting business. It then suited them to throttle upload bandwidth for anyone not paying for commercial hosting packages, which are now the printing presses of the net.

@djsumdog but that was one tiny server run by some activists. What if the entire web hosting industry decided not to host, say, anti-abortion speech? I'm pro-choice, but I believe that people who are anti-abortion have the same right to express their views on the subject as I do. In fact, I think it's *healthier* when they do so, because people tend towards militance (eg killing abortion doctors) precisely when they feel their ability to speak and be heard is being actively repressed.

@djsumdog I used to be involved a collective running an Indymedia site. At one point we had to introduce the ability to delete content from our site, because fascists had uploaded recruitment videos to our server via our #OpenPublishing server, and were using our resources to promote a cause we utterly opposed. I didn't believe we had any right to stop them publishing their views at all, but I also believe we had no obligation to help them do so.

@djsumdog for me, the issue of hosting is more complicated, and CDNs even more complicated. I think people have a right to not let their own communication resources be used to promote things they consider not only factually incorrect, but ethically wrong. I think it goes both ways. Hosting companies owned by liberals shouldn't have to host fascist sites, and hosting companies owned by conservatives shouldn't have to host, say, abortion rights sites.

@djsumdog oh we're totally on the same page about domain names. I would argue that refusing a group the ability to register any domain name violates the UN Declaration on Human Rights, specifically the sections about free expression, and political and cultural rights. I would same the same about denying some an internet connection. But ...

@djsumdog yes, that's currently how WebTorrent works, a mash-up for #BitTorrent and #WebRTC protocols. There has been some discussion of implementing a fallback using #WebSockets, particularly in the context of making it easier for desktop torrent clients to support WebTorrent swarms.

The is a great piece by Rich Bartlett of #Enspiral, #Loomio, and #TheHub, talking about the advantages of federations of small groups, over networks of loosely connected individuals:
http://organizationunbound.org/expressive-change/build-a-network-of-small-groups-not-a-mass-movement-of-individuals/

It's reasons like these I encourage community-hosting more than self-hosting. Note: I'm not against self-hosting, for those who have the skills and motivation to set up and maintain it, it's just not my ideal that everyone self-hosts.

"It's not censorship. Only the government can do that."

I see this claim a lot, and I don't think it's true anymore, at least not without broadening the definition of the word "government". When quite a few of the 50 largest economies in the world are corporations, and many of them govern #BigTech platforms like FB and YT that have more users than many countries have citizens. it's nonsense to say they are not capable of effective censorship.

A #HackerNews thread on #PeerTube raises the issue of videos URLs changing if the original instance goes down but the video is still available on another one. It would be great if videos in the PT network could be assigned some kind of persistent address (the video equivalent of a #DOI URL), so that as long as a video is on at least one instance, that address will point to it:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17386609

@adfeno But whatever we blame, we all realize that both corporations and governments can be threats to our somewhat shared vision of a free, tolerant, creative, open, global democracy, organized at least in part using the net. So via groups like the EFF, FSF, and Fight for the Future, we join together to fight for net neutrality, and sensible copyright laws, and against fast lanes, and DRM, and link taxes. Because we can all put our our political biases aside, and see that this need to be done.

@adfeno the way we explain this conflict to ourselves depends on what political assumptions we bring into our online work. If we're left-liberals or progressives we tend to blame corporations. If we're pro-capitalist propertarians (often miss-labelled as "libertarians"), we blame government and regulation. If we're anarchists (actual libertarians), we blame both. Some blame the NWO, or the banks, or something else, as the root cause of the symptoms we can see.

@adfeno The founders and staff of the EFF, like a lot of the people involved in the development of the net, internalised that image of a free, tolerant, creative, open society, as projected by both US and USSR/PRC propaganda during the Child War. We set out to make the net resemble that image, and then found ourselves at odds with a rapidly globalising state-corporate system that was threatened by people being too free, tolerant, creative, or open.

It looks like the acquisition of #FlickR by #SmugMug might actually be a case where users are liberated from a #DataFarm by an acquisition, rather than sold to one. They're getting rid of the compulsory Yahoo login, and:
> "Giving away vast amounts of storage creates data that can be sold to advertisers, with the inevitable result being that advertisers’ interests are prioritized over yours. Reducing the free storage offering ensures that we run Flickr on subscriptions":
https://blog.flickr.net/en/2018/11/01/changing-flickr-free-accounts-1000-photos/

@Shamar @demonshreder
"The proliferation of different free software licenses is a significant problem in the free software community today, both for users and developers."
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#Introduction