on nostr here)
Project 2025 wants to:
www.defeatproject2025.org breaks it down by topic, also highly suggest John Oliver’s segment on it
It’s always the same bullshit when they want to take away your rights:
Look, I get it, I wouldn’t give a shit if TikTok imploded tomorrow and went out of business. I don’t use it. Actually, I would cheer on TikTok’s implosion. It’s a cesspool. However:
“First they came for the xxx and I didn’t care because I didn’t use or like xxx”…“and then they came for me or the thing I liked or used there was nobody left to defend me”
True. Impossible to fully censor. Easy to “censor enough”, force out of app stores, and deem illegal while being cheered on by the left and right because they both somehow think it’s in their interests, having abandoned the idea of free speech somewhere along in their ideological trajectory. Just like with TikTok ban or the Digital Services Act.
The government controls it and they use it to gradually decrease the portion of supply your hard-earned money represents. They aim for 2-3% inflation in a “good year”. That’s the nice countries, ask any Argentinean how they feel about who controls that money printer. Monetary inflation mostly impacts the poor and middle class who have more of their net wealth in cash whereas rich people have their money safely stored in assets like stocks or land. So the government controls the money printer.
Unless you use Bitcoin. Then the protocol (nobody) controls it. And it’s controlled to never make more than 21 million BTC. No person, even if they had a trillion dollars, even if they bought every Bitcoin in existence, even if they had 1000 guys with AKs, no person could make Bitcoin print an extra BTC it wasn’t intended to print. Or spend money that they didn’t have the private key for. That’s a money printer I can trust. It’s faithfully done this for 15 years without a single hour of downtime, bank holiday, or being hacked and has a market cap that places it in the top 20 countries by GDP all while experiencing continual growth and adoption. But it’s a fad right? That has no purpose? A scam? And on year 16 you’ll finally be proven right?
Except they already made Oracle handle all that and they can easily legislate privacy protections without banning TikTok entirely. And, again, it is my right as a citizen to install whatever app I want even if it is spying on me, just like the rest of my apps do. I could film every second of my life and put it up on Facebook or a personal website and the Chinese government could watch it and there’s not a damned thing the US government can do about it.
They are all examples of speech platforms the government targeted because they disagreed with what they were publishing. Because of the precedent set in those situations, the government has even more latitude to prosecute even more speech they don’t agree with. The basis of the TikTok ban is literally it’s “foreign propaganda”. Propaganda is just “stuff the government doesn’t want you to hear”. The right to hear things the government doesn’t want you to hear is one of the most basic rights of human expression. Not just in the US, but in the UN Charter on human rights as well.
Fear of “foreign influence”? You would find that exact argument being made by the Soviet Union to block US films and books in their country. You would find that exact argument being used in China to block internet access. You would find that exact argument being made in Iran to stop the discussion of homosexuality.
Since when is reading newspapers your government doesn’t agree with a right? Since when is communicating with people your government doesn’t like a right? Since when is publishing whatever you want a right? Since approximately 1776. It’s such an important right that it’s literally the first one in the constitution. Because our ability to speak freely and criticize the government is one of the rights that underpins all others. The medium shouldn’t matter, speech is speech whether it’s an app, website, chat server, newspaper, bulletin board, code, painting, drawing, whatever. If the government can just shut down any medium or venue they don’t like because “it’s propaganda”, that basically closes the door to any open criticism of the government.
We’ve tried not having those rights for the sake of convenience, expediency, or social pleasantness. Tends to not end well. Ask people in Russia or Iran how that “government gets to dictate where and how you speak” thing is going for them. Insane bootlicking going on in this thread.
Hot take: there is no food safety reason to replace a sponge if it’s still good at removing food from dishes. If you remove the food source, and the soap removes whatever is living on the dish, whatever is left over will die due to lack of nutrients and water. It’s why in food safety courses you are taught that dishes have to dry completely. Even a sponge which has been used once will be depositing “new” pathogens onto the dish. Stuff is gonna live in the sponge. The sponge doesn’t kill pathogens. Removal, soap, and desiccation do. The sponge’s job is almost purely mechanical.
“Not everybody will use it and it’s not 100% perfect so let’s not try”
There is no “delete a user from the internet” button. It doesn’t exist. Even if a single admin could ban a user from entire network, which is giving immense amount of power to any admin, all that user has to do is make a new account to get around it. That’s true for Nostr, AP, Twitter, Facebook, E-mail, etc. This is why spam exists and will always exist. AP or nostr or whoever isn’t going to solve spam or abuse of online services, the best we can do it mitigate the bulk of it. Relays and instances can share ban lists in nostr or AP, that can be automated, that is the way to mitigate the problem. There is, however, a “delete a person from society” button we can press, and that is LEOs job. That, conveniently, also deletes them from the internet. It’s just not a button we trust anybody but government to press. We do have a “delete a user from most of AP/Nostr” button in the form of shared blocklists.
As we get stronger and stronger anti-spam/anti-abuse measures, we make it harder and harder to join and participate in networks like the internet. This isn’t actually a problem for spammers, they have a financial incentive, so they can pay people to fill out captchas and do SMS verifications and whatever else they need to do. All we do by increasing the cost to spam is change that kinds of spam are profitable to send. Other abuse of services that isn’t spam have their own intrinsic motivations that may outweigh the cost associated with making new accounts. At a certain level of anti-spam mitigation, you end up hurting end users more than spammers. A captcha and e-mail verification blocks like 90% of spam attempts and is a very small barrier for users. But even that has accessibility implications. Requiring them to receive an SMS? An additional 10% but now you’ve excluded people who don’t have their own cell phone or use a VoIP provider. You’ve made it more dangerous for people to use your service to seek help for things like addiction, domestic abuse, etc as their partner or family member may share the same phone. You’ve made it harder to engage in dissent against the government in authoritarian regimes. You’ve also made it much more difficult to run a relay, since running a relay now requires access to an SMS service, payment for that SMS service, etc. Require them to receive a letter in the mail? An additional 10% but now you’ve excluded people who don’t have a stable address or mail access, etc. Plus now it takes a week to sign up for your website and that’s even getting into apartment numbers and the complications you’d face there. For a listing to be placed on Google Maps, maybe a letter in the mail is a reasonable hurdle to have, after all, Google only wants to list businesses which have a physical address. For posting to twitter? It’s pretty ludicrous.
I generally trust relay admins to make moderation decisions, otherwise I wouldn’t be on their instance or relay on the first place. And my trust becomes extended to other admins they work with and share ban lists with. And that’s fine. But remember that any person with any set of motivations can be a relay or instance admin. That person could be the very troll we are trying to prevent with this anti-spam or anti-abuse measures. What I don’t trust is any random person on the internet being able to make moderation decisions for the entire internet. Which means that any approach to bans would need to be federated and built on mutual trust between operators.
Yes very true!
Before we get into the weeds here, let’s start with an important basic premise: Moderation ability, at a protocol level, from an instance/relay admin perspective in nostr and AP is identical.
Are there moderation tools to propagate bans across relays quickly?
Relay operators can share ban lists like they do in AP. Relay operators can only directly control their own relay, not other relays. I don’t know the ins-and-outs of how the interface on the admin side looks, but at a protocol level, AP and Nostr offer the same abilities.
Some users need to be booted off the network entirely and swiftly sometimes, we’ve seen several cases of this in Lemmy already with users posting horrendous shit. I’d be concerned that one of my relays would lag on banning (timezone differences for moderators or whatever innocuous reason) and these users achieve their goal of more people seeing the shit they post. For some people this might trigger PTSD, which is why I say it would be a huge barrier to mass adoption until that issue is resolved.
Relays sharing ban lists help can solve this problem. I would argue that we don’t want to give that power (to ban a user from the entire network) to a single relay admin or even a couple relay admins (since anybody can be a relay admin), so broad consensus of some form needs to exist OR sets of relays can form their own little networks of trust where they will automatically trust a ban from other admins in that network. A relay admin doesn’t need to be able to ban somebody from the entire network if they simply disagree with that user’s post, they can just ban the user on their own relay. There is value in having public squares with varying degrees of moderation, among other reasons, because laws about what kind of speech are acceptable vary country by country. There is value in having mainstream platforms which refuse to host some kinds of content and having that be a different moderation policy than the one used by the government, for example. Remember that legality and morality are not the same and that there are differences in what is illegal vs illegal in different jurisdictions. We don’t want the legal standards of Russia or China to the legal standards the entire network has to follow.
If the user is doing something which is very illegal, which I believe you are referring to, that is a job for law enforcement. Neutral networks like the internet are traditionally policed “at the edges”. We don’t have gmail proactively filtering for objectionable or illegal content because of the consequences that come from that privacy invasion, false positives, additional computational load, reducing reliability of sending/receive between email carriers, etc. Comcast is not inspecting packets as they fly through their network at a the speed of light, delaying them, and determining if they should be passed or not. It’s the internet, they just pass them through. Instead, we say “this is an open, neutral network and if you break the law, LEO will deal with it”.
Background:
Sounds like somebody gave you some incorrect information re: banning.
Nostr is the way. I think it’s going to end up with way more adoption than mastodon or bluesky. I wrote a post comparing nostr vs mastodon if anyone is curious. https://lemmy.ml/post/11570081
Good for who? Where does value move when your currency is reduced in value by an expansion in the supply? To regular people? No. Lower and middle class people are the ones who have the most cash, they have a higher ratio of cash to net worth than rich people who can put their money into assets. They have an emergency fund. They are saving up to become property owners.
Humanity survived and grew total economic output for millennia before inflationary paper currency came around. Inflationary paper currency is a relatively recent phenomenon. I’m not saying we should go back to the gold standard, but that ended in 1971. That’s pretty recent.
If you live in a hyperinflation environment, you will spend your money on anything because it’s better than holding onto that money and see it become worthless. It might seem silly to own 12 blenders, but buying yet another blender is a better investment than simply sitting on your money for a month in Turkey. At least a blender can blend and maybe be re-sold at a later date. That effect still happens in mildly inflationary economies: we are incentivized to buy goods and services we don’t need because the alternative is just slowly watching our money lose value. This is not a great incentive to have baked into our financial system when we live on a planet with finite resources.
On the other hand, if your money is expected to retain or gain value, somebody has to really convince you to part with it. Does that mean products are built to last? Built more repairable or sustainable? Perhaps. You will still buy things of course, everybody needs stuff, but at least the incentive is trending in the right direction instead of towards needless consumption.
What if:
How might the world look different?
Solana is incredibly centralized compared to BTC. The higher the TPS on your base layer the harder it is to meet the hardware requirements to run a full node. Scaling in layers is the solution.
Eth’s L2s are a confusing mess. They offer a variety of degrees of security and decentralization, some of them, like Polygon, are a network run with only 15 validators, yikes! And many of them are secured by a single bridge. There have been plenty of notable bridge hacks, it is not fun when your currency gets depegged.
Project 2025 wants to:
www.defeatproject2025.org breaks it down by topic, also highly suggest John Oliver’s segment on it