makeasnek

makeasnek, 14 days ago

Almost ready for it’s prime time I think. We just need a bit more on the UI/mobile app friendliness to make it shine for all.

Yep, been using it for a few months now and it’s getting really good. Not quite as polished as mastodon (as least in the app I’m using), but still very fully featured.

makeasnek, 14 days ago (edited 13 days ago)

Lemmy is “uncensorable” and offers identical moderation abilities in the “public square” aspect. E-mail is “uncensorable”. Uncensorable does not equal unmoderated. It means if you want to publish something, nobody, not the even the government, can stop you (though they can throw you in prison but that’s outside the discussion of protocol). It doesn’t mean anybody has to choose to listen to what you publish. It does not mean relays have to include you in their list of public tweets. Relays can pick what tweets/etc they show. They can choose what goes through their relay. What they can’t do is stop you and another user from using the protocol to DM each other. As long as one relay allows your traffic through, the traffic will flow. They also can’t stop you from tweeting, they can just choose not to show your tweets. If I want to follow somebody, frankly, it should be no business of a relay operator or the government or anybody to prevent me from following them, just like it should not be the business of the government to decide what books I am legally allowed to read. By building networks which are “uncensorable” we can guarantee that it remains not their business for future generations. So that they can live as free, or freer, than we do.

The internet, as a structure, is “uncensorable”. This is good. Power should be decentralized. The whim of a government shouldn’t dictate how the entirety of the internet operates, and it can’t. People in power love censorship, it is to their advantage that we are not able to organize among each other using common communication platforms.

makeasnek, 13 days ago

DMs aren’t as relevant in Lemmy so I get why securing them isn’t a priority, but in Mastodon or any twitter clone it seems like a relevant feature I’d like to have some security/privacy with. Instance admins, and anybody who breaks into their server, being able to see all DMs seems like a security flaw that should be engineered away. Even Facebook, the place with the worst privacy, has E2E encryption (or so they claim, who really knows)

makeasnek, 13 days ago

Finding good people to follow has been a challenge for me both on mastodon and nostr. But I find just posting and seeing who likes my posts and then following them has got me a decent feed curated at this point. And searching hashtags for topics I’m interested in.

There are some bridges so you can follow mastodon users on nostr and vice versa, but it’s not quite the same. We’re still pretty early adopters on both platforms at this point.

makeasnek, 13 days ago

It definitely started as mostly crypto bros, kinda like how lemmy was 100% tankies, but it’s gotten better. Lots more human rights activists and scientists and even just regular people on there now. A lot of human rights/privacy activists/orgs are joining up to it after nostr got some promotion at their conferences. Ultimately your feed will be who you follow so luckily you’re in control of that. The default settings for most nostr apps even include a filter to remove anything crypto, NSFW, and other controversial topics related.

Still very early days for all these platforms.

makeasnek, 13 days ago

Interesting project, cool to see that you are passionate about this. Nostr does much of this and can do it entirely in-browser without having to trust any particular relay like AP/Lemmy/Mastodon does. It has encrypted DMs. Might want to check out the protocol.

makeasnek, 13 days ago

No, but if a linux distro implemented a local-only version of this, I would be interested in using it.

makeasnek, 15 days ago

Here’s a list if you want to find your rep www.cnn.com/2024/03/13/politics/…/index.html

makeasnek, 15 days ago

Disagree with this one, voters should have the final say in who is electable. If there’s an 85 year old out there who can convince 51% of the electorate to vote for them in the primaries, go for it. This rule will become a problem if life expectancy continues to increase at the rate it has the past 50 years, with AI and some major changes in genetics, we are poised to solve a lot of causes of death in our lifetime, which means longer life expectancy.

makeasnek, 15 days ago

Or because they’re just genuinely well received by the public. One of my reps has been in public service for decades and I actually like most of his positions. The longer you are in office, in theory, the better you will understand the legislative system and be able to push issues your constituents want. If you do, you keep getting re-elected, if you don’t, you don’t.

Regardless, this is a problem of FPTP and the primary system not age. Primaries select for who is considered the “most electable” not the candidate “most want”. Fix that system, and age is not an issue. Or if more people who don’t like 80 year olds participated in the primaries this would also be less of an issue. But they don’t, they just complain about the “lesser of two evils” choice even though they had a “lesser of 10 evils choice” and chose not to participate in it.

makeasnek, 14 days ago

Lindows

makeasnek, 14 days ago

The distro used by the one laptop per child project. Fascinating GUI

makeasnek, 14 days ago

Idk about nostalgic but north korea makes their own linux distro, that’s gotta rank high on the interesting list

makeasnek, 16 days ago

Link without paywall: archive.is/TvS0F

makeasnek, 17 days ago

There is an apt variant that can do this, but nobody uses it. BitTorrent isn’t great for lots of small files overhead wise.

IPFS is better for this than torrents. The question is always “how much should the client seed before they stop seeding and how longs should they attempt to seed before they give up”. I agree something like this should exist, I have no problem quickly re-donating any bandwidth I use.

makeasnek, 17 days ago

Depending on your jurisdiction, you may have anti-SLAPP laws which render a baseless defamation lawsuit against you into a blessing which you can turn around, counter sue for, and end up with a nice payday.

makeasnek, 18 days ago

Syncthing

OnionShare

makeasnek, 18 days ago (edited 18 days ago)

We need more censorship-resistant, private, decentralized communication protocols. We need them to be widespread enough that lawmakers see censoring/controlling them as technically impossible and politically unwise. That means they need to be easy to use for the average person so we can get sufficient adoption. Donate to your software of choice, that’s how it happens.

This is kinda how Bitcoin is. Even if a nation-sate wants to “ban” it or attack the network, the network is gonna keep working and doing its thing (technically impossible) and they will piss off a bunch of voters and/or other keys to political power and potentially lose out on businesses and jobs building in this sector (politically unwise). The CCP tried to ban Bitcoin some years ago, did not work at all, and the network wasn’t nearly as strong or large as it is today.

makeasnek, 17 days ago

Thank you for posting this. I did not know that S3 can equal anything aside from “amazon hosts this”. TIL

makeasnek, 18 days ago (edited 18 days ago)

Bannability is similar to lemmy. Each “instance” (or “relay” in nostr words) can decide what content/users can live on their relay. The difference is that you are usually connected to multiple relays. So if you want to follow somebody who is banned by other relays, nobody can take that choice away from you. Likewise, nobody can stop you from publishing, though your reach may be limited by relays sharing blocklists etc.

There are some right users there just as there are on any social media network. You can just click block and move on and/or pick relays with stronger moderation policies. If Lemmy has a “left” tilt, Nostr has a “libertarian right” tilt. But over time it’s expanding and becoming more generalized, just like how Lemmy isn’t 100% tankies now.

makeasnek, 18 days ago (edited 18 days ago)

You don’t have to pay relays to use nostr. Been using Nostr for a while and love it, it’s an underlying protocol like AP is for Lemmy, Kbin, mastodon, etc. The main “interface” for it right now is as a twitter clone.

You don’t lose your identity if your instance shuts down which is a major pro (Bluesky also has this advantage over AP). The UX is a little less polished than Mastodon but I find the underlying tech concepts more solid, privacy respecting, and censorship-resistant. For example, DMs are automatically encrypted so relay operators can’t read them.

makeasnek, 18 days ago (edited 18 days ago)

Replying to this comment so people don’t get put off by it. Nostr has an optional feature where you can tip other users using Bitcoin lightning. So if you like their post, you can send them .001c or $100 or whatever you want. You don’t have to use it though. It’s valuable IMO as a way for content creators to get paid and will be a key driver of content creators choosing to use it over other platforms, but to each their own. You can also dedicate a % of your tips to your nostr relay or app to supporting hosting and development.

Crypto is full of garbage and scams, Nostr uses Bitcoin. Bitcoin has been around for 15 years without a single hour of downtime, a single hack, or a single broken promise. Whatever you don’t like about “crypto” is probably actually other stuff that isn’t Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a way to transfer coins around the world quickly, and it works, and nobody can print away the currency’s value by inflating the supply. It has a trillion dollar market cap for a reason, which places it in the top 25 countries by GDP.

makeasnek, 18 days ago

Freenet and YacY are worth adding to this list.

makeasnek, 18 days ago (edited 18 days ago)

Lightning is a terrible protocol. The Lightning devs themselves state that it’s basically unusable and you shouldn’t even try sending transactions valued more than a few hundred dollars

FUD. I use lightning on a daily basis, it’s getting continual development, and millions are still being poured into development efforts. Some devs stopped working on it and now more new devs are involved, which is common with long-lived OSS projects. You can use it to send money to anybody on planet earth with a cellphone and a halfway reliable internet connection. In under a second. For a penny in fees. Try that with a bank wire. It’s a non-centrally controlled network, like OPs post is about. It does what it does very well, and it has been live and growing for years. Over a few hundred USD, you’re probably better off with a main-chain tx anyways as fees are flat instead of % based.

If you tried selling all that bitcoin, the price would tank

Yes that’s how market caps work. It doesn’t change that it’s a massive market cap.

makeasnek, 18 days ago (edited 18 days ago)

You can either increase blocksize (and therefore decrease decentralization) or build L2s. Look at ETH with their big, frequent blocks. You can run a Bitcoin node on a 10 year old laptop, good luck running an Eth node with those specs. You need at least 1TB of space, and it’s gotta be SSD, and you need a pretty fast processor. Which is why many Eth nodes are hosted in corporate datacenters, over half the network. You can split hairs over what counts as a “node” etc but the end result is the same: increased centralization due to large chain size/requirements.

Monero doesn’t need L2s yet because it doesn’t have the transaction load to fill up available chain space enough to impact decentralization. Long-term, we cannot store all transactions on every node and do that forever. Small txs do not belong on chain. I love XMRs approach to privacy, it will need L2s at some point. Or pruning, which comes with some significant tradeoffs.

makeasnek, 18 days ago (edited 18 days ago)

Millions for development? Do you have any sources? I’d like to read about it. Thanks

Watching videos from the most recent Bitcoin conference is a good way to get updated on recent development changes to the protocol, lightning included. Bitcoin Magazine if you prefer reading to watching. Github if you prefer reading code to words.

I don’t have a specific source to cite here, just am generally aware of what’s going on in the bitcoin space. Lightning labs is the main company building the protocol, they’ve raised 86 million in funding, though not this year. There’s dozens of lightning wallets, some of which are supported/published by companies like ACINQ whose investment capital measures in the tens of millions. Tons of stuff is being built on it. And more payment providers are integrating lightning: Strike and Cash App are the two major ones. Coinbase recently announced they will be adding support for it, Kraken and most other exchanges already support it. There’s a lot of FUD about lightning, there are some valid critiques to be made for it as a “universal scaling strategy”, but generally speaking, it works well and does what it’s supposed to and has plenty of room to scale. There are proposals (channel factories etc) which will massively help with scaling as well.

Likely there will be more than one L2 in the future to optimize for different use cases. But for large orgs who frequently need to move liquidity around, solutions like lightning are excellent. They can settle their accounts with other orgs and their customers instantly. Think banks, online retailers, online marketplaces, etc. This leaves less money “in flight” and at risk. And it can also be used for micro-transactions for everyday people. A bunch of funding just got allocated to Ark as well, which is another L2 solution similar to but different from lightning. Fedimint is another project/proposal to look at if you are researching all this.

makeasnek, 15 days ago (edited 15 days ago)

Wait till you find out about some of the nazis etc who have contributed to the linux kernel. One guy even murdered his wife! And Linus himself is… well let’s just say some of his behavior is “problematic”. Oh and Richard Stallman my lord. Lemmy/AP has some interesting people as well. Nostr is an open protocol worked on by dozens of people. I would also question the motives of a “journalist” who makes it their business to dox anonymous developers, especially people developing software that could get them imprisoned in certain countries.

makeasnek, 21 days ago (edited 21 days ago)

Downvote this guy all you want, but this is an incredibly true point. For 15 years, Bitcoin has maintained a distributed, uncensorable ledger, the question is, can we use similar ledger tech to store archive.org? Wikipedia is a single point of failure, so is Archive.org. So is the library of congress. We could easily store all the text content of wikipedia on chain that’s under 100GB, along with IPFS pointers to media content. Long-term, humanity needs a resilient censorship-resistant system to store our collective knowledge and history. These systems, when sufficiently large, are uncensorable and incredibly difficult to exercise undue influence against or shut down. Ask anybody whose tried to get a judge to enforce a judgement against the bitcoin blockchain lol. And they can survive quite well major disruptive events like wars, natural disasters, and even widespread network disruptions. Blockchain can also solve the spam problem that plagued early P2P systems like Gnutella/Ed2k/etc. Everybody moved to BitTorrent because we could trust custodians (trackers and indexers) to curate lists of valid torrents. But that can be decentralized now.

There’s over a dozen different blockchain projects working on the “file storage problem”, some of them have very interesting proposals, at least one of those is going to emerge from the smoke with something that will replicate archive.org’s current role, but it might be a few years before that happens. Already, we have blockchains which offer “decentralized file storage marketplace” that competes pretty well with current file storage providers (AWS etc), and some of them have been running for years.

makeasnek, 21 days ago

You’re right about NFTs. There’s no reason to store the data on chain. Chain stores the metadata and pointers to the files (IPFS, torrent/magnet link whatever). Chain administers how many copies etc should exist and enforces those rules. Filecoin etc have already successfully done this.

makeasnek, 21 days ago

I’m glad to finally see this cockroach serve time for something but it unnerves me a bit that his something is ignoring a congressional subponea. We are given the fifth for a reason, I remember when this exact same subpoena power was directed against suspected communists during the red scare. And when republicans have used it in their numerous BS “house investigations” into everything from Fauci to Hunter’s laptop. Some of those lib subponea recipients rightfully told them to kick rocks because the investigations were stupid.

And when grand juries (a different kind of subponea power) have been used as fishing expeditions to disrupt activist groups, or target Wikileaks. Pushing a world where you can be forced to testify to the government is questionable imo. Giving people immunity and forcing them to testify isn’t a great solution either, as that information can still be used to further tyranny even if you cannot personally be charged with what you say. Our ability to refuse to cooperate is an important check on tyrrany, that’s why we have the 5th in the first place.

makeasnek, 20 days ago

Inflation is caused by inflationary currency. Any other inflation caused by supply chain issues, corporate greed, lack of market competition, etc is just added on top of that. Fiat inflationary currency is a rather new invention in terms of the human timeline. They aim for 2-3% inflation in “good years”. Central banks are not to be trusted.

Think of it: in the last 50 years, everything has gotten cheaper to produce thanks to increasing mechanization, outsourcing to cheap labor/low regulation countries, and extremely efficient supply chains. Yet so many things “costs more” than it did 50 years ago. Even basics like bread. How is that the case? Shouldn’t it cost less? Where is that “extra efficiency” going if not to lower prices? The answer: bread is the same value it’s always been, the money has gotten less valuable. This is how they keep working class people running on a treadmill, never able to achieve economic mobility.

Inflationary currency devalues the currency you worked hard to earn by increasing the supply. It hits the middle class the worst because they have more of their net wealth in cash, often in the form of emergency funds, savings, and putting together enough money for a down payment on a home. Rich people have their money in assets which aren’t harmed by currency inflation. Poor people live hand to mouth. If you want to identify the causes of increasing wealth disparity, the inability of people to save money is a major one.

makeasnek, 22 days ago

Let your MEP know their voters care about privacy. These efforts have been defeated before, it just requires vigilance. Your letter can be as simple as “I care about privacy”. That’s all you have to write.

www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home

makeasnek, 22 days ago

Let your MEP know their voters care about privacy. These efforts have been defeated before, it just requires vigilance. Your letter can be as simple as “I care about privacy”. That’s all you have to write.

www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home

makeasnek, 23 days ago

Works great till somebody does a sim swap on you.

makeasnek, 25 days ago

I use lightning on the regular. Transactions confirm in under a second, fees often less than a penny. Works incredibly well. For custodial wallets (less privacy but you can connect to your bank account to buy/sell BTC and they are as easy to use as venmo) check out Strike. For non-custodial wallets, Phoenix is great and super easy, for maximum privacy use Zeus but it’s slightly more complex than Phoenix.

Lightning, like Bitcoin which it is built on, provide pseudonymity not anonymity. Understand the difference and look into it if you’re curious. Still vastly better than credit cards, banks, etc when it comes to privacy.

makeasnek, 25 days ago

You have solved what you have direct control over, the next step is things you have indirect control over like the policies of your school or government. Get engaged civically. Vote and advocate privacy in your community and to your elected representatives. Ask businesses if they will accept forms of payment which provide greater privacy than credit card like Bitcoin lightning or Monero.

makeasnek, 24 days ago

You still need a reputation system otherwise your DHT will get filled with spam. BitTorrent doesn’t have this problem because the file you download either matches the hash or it doesn’t. But you can’t use DHT for things like search or tagging unless you have some way to weed out bad submissions (sybil attack). Either a curated centralized database or a blockchain are the two known ways to solve this problem.

makeasnek, 25 days ago

https://lemmy.ml/c/bug'bounty

makeasnek, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Commercial transactions -

Aaah, the kind of transaction that most transactions are?

Operated by providers

Aah, so any business which accept crypto must KYC every one of their customers. This makes accepting crypto especially burdensome, which is half the point of this legislation in the first place.

So non-commercial transations are fine, as are crypto transactions to non-custodial wallets.

Unless you’re using the wallet to buy or sell something. You know, the thing people use money for.

Why does the government need to have every transaction reported to them? Crime is bad because it causes harm. If harm is being caused, that means a person or entity is causing that harm. That means there is evidence. Follow that.

Police have more surveillance and crime-detecting tools than at any point in human history. Nearly every category of crime, particularly violent crime, is on a decades-long downtrend. We all travel with GPS monitors in our pockets. We all use credit cards instead of cash. We all are recorded by CCTV 90% of the places we go. We don’t need to give them more financial surveillance because ‘crime’.

makeasnek, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

I use it on a regular basis. I also run a non-profit that funds open source tools for scientists, it makes accepting donations a lot easier for us among other benefits for our donors (they don’t have to pay capital gains on the coins they donate, just like stocks).

Bitcoin is pretty incredible and offers decent anonymity which continues to improve, Monero offers more. Lots of scams in the “crypto world”, but Bitcoin has faithfully kept its fiscal policy promises for 15 years:

• Fixed supply of 21 million coins. Your money’s value is not diluted by supply inflation.
• You can send funds to anybody in the world with a smartphone and a halfway reliable internet connection in under a second for pennies in fees (with Bitcoin lightning). And you can do it from your couch, no banks required.
• It has operated 24/7, 365 days a year for 15 years without a single hour of downtime, bank holiday, or hack, and has survived attacks from many angles including nation-state actors.
• At every possible turn it has chosen decentralization and security. I can’t say the same for most other coins.
• And it has done this with < 1% of global electricity usage, mostly from renewables and other “stranded” supply. Pretty powerful stuff.

Monero’s privacy features can be absorbed into the Bitcoin protocol whenever Bitcoin decides it wants to, that is the biggest long-term risk to Monero IMO. That and centralization of block production due to increased block size. Bitcoin worked around this block size problem with L2s like lightning, Monero chose bigger blocks though of course it could always add an L2 if it wants to.

makeasnek, 3 months ago

Wait till you hear about stocks and derivatives. No way are they ever gonna make it big time. Only used by sleazeballs trying to get rich.

makeasnek, 3 months ago

It’s more complicated than this, and it gets more complicated every year, especially with lightning. It’s certainly not monero in terms of privacy, but it’s not the same Bitcoin it was 10 years ago where this was more or less true.

makeasnek, 3 months ago

Not with L2s like Bitcoin lightning. Your fees come in under a penny in most cases and are not tied to chain space because they are not on chain. This is 100-1000x less than credit cards, for example.

makeasnek, 3 months ago

Look up a network map of lightning, it’s not centralized at all. Payments typically route through multiple hubs, just as many Bitcoin nodes may be involved in processing a main chain transaction. Anyone can run a lightning node, and you can choose which nodes you want to use, if you want. There are thousands of them to pick from.

The lightning channels are secured by the main chain. There is no centralized party who can rug you.

makeasnek, 3 months ago

There’s lots of people who use the dollar and other currencies I don’t like. But I still use the currency. Bitcoin has faithfully kept its fiscal policies and promises for 15 years. It’s money whose supply can’t be diluted through inflation. You can be your own bank. That has never changed. Whatever it originally promised, it’s still doing.

makeasnek, 3 months ago

Fees with lightning (Bitcoin) are often under a penny per transaction and transactions settle instantly. Usability has come a long way here.