quickleft

I have had issues with a couple lemmy instances today. I think there is both a software upgrade and a massive influx of users going on.

a depressed guitar-playing sysadmin who identifies with marvin the martian… I was like “wait is this my dad?” Well he he retired now.

FWIW he has managed to get old (2x your age) and even though I had a somewhat strange childhood I wouldn’t choose a different parent even if I could. A lot of people I know who had “normal” parents suffered a lot at their hands in ways that were not even conceivable to me. He didn’t get any kind of therapy til more recently and it has vastly improved things for him and those around him.

I’m one of few in the world who know him and he is one of my favorite people.

A post reddit signup. Just a casual weekend sort of nerd. Not an engineer, developer, sysadmin, sysop or anything of the sort. But I do appreciate yousall.

I am sad about reddit.

This analogy keeps being made but I am not convinced it is correct.

Any participant in a dynamic network can choose with whom to have relationships. That’s the point of a firewall or cloudflare or a million other security efforts… to prevent interactions which due to malice or accident would cause some harm to come to the local system. There is no obligation to participate and in fact with the fediverse it is specifically designed with defederation in mind.

The comparison has been made to email explaining the fediverse concept to new users. Most people know about email. But Usenet is much more apt, if you are familiar with that. Usenet had (has) similar concepts such as the way servers share, mirror and distribute content from others servers. There is a burden imposed on any given server according to the others it has communication with. If you never had the pleasure of being on Usenet, it was basically like email discussion lists where the inbox was public. But you still needed to have access to a server to read and post. Messages were sent in similar way to email but every server would retain a copy of messages prior to forwarding them on to a list of other servers. They would in this was percolate through the network. Every server had its own version of the history of usenet according to the choices of the admins and there was not central authority or main copy.

Usenet server admins exercised broad discretion deciding who they would have a relationship with and what they would accept. Nobody was every perfectly connected to everybody else for various reasons including: legality, morals, politics, technical, geography, taste and happenstance. Individual people, hosts that allowed too many bad users, problem communities, filetypes, topics of conversation… all kinds of things were blocked by admins. Some news servers were permissive and some were restrictive. Servers that were excessively permissive became hubs of spam, and thereby risked losing their relationships with other servers because other admins got too annoyed having to deal with it. And servers that were excessively restrictive had a hard time keeping users because you couldn’t really participate properly if unable to see a lot of groups and not seeing a lot of the traffic, plus your messages would not propagate for others to see. So it was a balancing act.

For the most part this is an analogy that isn’t helpful for a lot of people… But maybe on SDF there are some who can recall those days. I do not think the concept of blocking servers breaks the concept of the fediverse at all.

(I am still undecided on my opinion on the question but I think it is a legitimate possibility.)

Comparing to “homesteading” is an interesting choice. Perhaps to you the term bears connotations of freedom, community, adventure, creativity or nostalgia. But a more comprehensive view would be that the state used extreme violence to appropriate land and natural resources from an existing population. Homesteading was the subsequent privatization of the nominally public lands. It was privatized specifically into the hands of people who it was thought would be loyal and suitable, if sometimes remote, subjects of the state. Their loyalty was reinforced by arranging things so that the settlers were perpetually engaged in relationships of domination either directly or implicitly, with the prior residents of the land and other conquered people.

I guess I am wondering… to follow your analogy… you think you/we are the settlers in this situation? Seems like Meta is the state/military. Their users are the homesteaders and the libre community is the historic but already weakened pre existing communities.

Just like so called “pioneers”, meta users as people can have all kinds of good intentions at the outset however the situation is one of inherent tensions. The territory is vast and we are in a relatively weakened position. Therefor, we unable to defend it sufficiently to prevent incursions, even if we were all in agreement about wanting to. The conquering institutions will enter and they will bring people along under various pretenses, with messaging and structures that favor the extension of their power. Some settlers will defect but most will just try to make it work in the context they find themselves— like people always do. Structurally, we are in conflict even though as individuals I don’t think anyone bears particular ill will towards the other. And in both the historical and contemporary situations, the groups are not completely distinct and clear cut. Humans instantly become intertwined with one another when the opportunity arises so there is plenty of intermingling and relationships.

However if the sight of platoons and caravans approaching in the distance leads to apprehension, the ominous feeling is justified. We must represent our own interests, and what are arguably the broader interests of humanity, using tactics from diplomacy to guerilla. We should be vigilant in self defense and not wait til its too late to engage whatever potentially effective means are available to us. I am not sure what those are.

(In case it is not clear, I hope I am not read as flippantly comparing anything happening to lemmy as equivalent to the horrors of genocide. This situations has the violence dial turned waaaaay down. However there are certain narrative elements that bear a similarity so I wanted to expand upon the analogy to colonization as a positive thing at all, and one that we are on the winning side of.)