rottingleaf @ rottingleaf @lemmy.world

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As someone from Russia, we have Ozon and Wildberries and Yandex and Mail.ru, neither of which exists in all business niches of Amazon, but in the overlapping ones seem close.

It's not that they are really bad, but I don't like monopolies.

I think for all of these - marketplaces with delivery, social networks, cloud hosting, - there has to emerge some standard, some global system. Similar to the Internet or maybe to the postal service. Something has to be done, because these unfortunately work in a way encouraging monopoly.

Even when I was almost unconditionally ancap, infrastructure was a special case (and it still is for most ancaps, theoretically unconditional private property applies to hypothetical things fully created by a person, and for territory, infrastructure, discovered ideas it's closer to the other extreme). These things are infrastructure.

In the Internet one person can host their stuff on one hosting, another on another, and their email on different providers, but they'll be able to interact. A buyer on Ozon and a seller on Amazon are not.

That's because email and web hosting require only the Internet the functioning system to exist. A social network requires more (if we want it to be interoperable and global),

I think the missing part to make such a standard is automated payments in the Internet. The platforms' inner management of resources is hidden from us, but for a global system computing and storage resources are necessary, and they are neither provided by governments nor pooled by enthusiasts, it's impractical to rely on pure altruism for such. And to have a global system with monetary encouragement of providing infrastructure means that we need payment for resources as simple and general as how we pay for landline or Internet service. ISP's no longer provide shell accounts and web hosting, but even when they did, this wasn't quite the thing.

The platforms emerged because it's bothersome to pay for infrastructure and maintain it, there's not even a straightforward way. You need a humongous service with plenty of computing, someone should pay for it.

So - there was Usenet at some point solving a lot of the similar problems, except, of course, a news server would store lots and lots of stuff for each hierarchy. But that wasn't reimagined for the new things we do in the Internet.

For twiddling and various kinds of power abuse to be impossible they should be technically impossible in the system. So:

1. Various functions of platforms should be decomposed into different pooled untrusted services (to pool anything you have to design for untrusted) in the Internet. Pooling can be done the way similar to bittorrent trackers - a service comes online, announces itself and repeats that regularly. A client needing a service requests a few trackers and picks a few services from the results. Services might be, say, storage (anything, like FTP servers even), computation (submit bytecode, receive result, or something like that), indexing (a search engine, returning results in standard machine-processable format), notification (like NOSTR relays). Maybe trade for resources can be a separate type of service. And user identity caching.
2. It should be possible to provide a paid service and pay for that service, easily enough, like MMORPG scripted marketplaces - a setting like "buy no more than 2G of storage, by price no more than N per K, stop if remaining money less than K". Or same for selling on a service you host.
3. The history of platforms in the last 20 years shows us that the Internet is for the machines. The user representation should be in a local application, and the logic combining those non-application-specific services should work on the client machine. Say, aggregating results of a few indexing services, or aggregating trade offerings from a few trade services, or online users from among friends from a few notification services.

Shit, I wrote this again.

I would dream of coming up with a solution to existence of such monopolies, which is not exactly the same.

In any case, no. I suppose you are simply incapable of understanding it, but no, not everyone wants to be the biggest turd in the room. There are people who want there to not be turds in human habitats outside of intended compartments and environments.

The only reason you need - it's a monopoly. Fuck its all.

And I also hate with passion that 5 years ago you'd need AWS in your CV.

Well, I live in Russia, but I've read there were changes about taxes calculation logic for people of low enough income too. Maybe they are smiling about that?

It's still funny how the supposed problem of US state debt going is apparently not a problem when it's your side inflating it beyond the year 1946 record against GDP. Or so they say.

BTW, when people say that US state debt is being misinterpreted and it's not a problem, - basically any country's state debt is, until it isn't. That would work like, well, loss of trust into US ability to support the debt, which means loss of the value of USD, which together may form a positive feedback loop. Not hard to see that if such thing were to happen, you'd have rapid inflation and probably default.

(Also maybe that talk about bringing production back to USA, Musk's political ideas and funding for military structures, all that stuff, are being done in preparation for the inevitable, - it's technically possible to avoid it, but politically may not be, cause both main sides just promise more spending to own the other side. Because their plans that don't make sense now look kinda better in a hypothetical scenario of post-default USA. It'll still have enormous human capital, and its economic situation would allow to use that for building industries anew.)

Yes.

Because all the ideas of "national character" and "nation" are worth about as much as the paper to write them on, or electricity to transmit and display them, you get the idea.

Only the life itself matters.

And the life itself becomes the better the wider is the participation in the government and the society's life by all people in it, with which citizenship helps a lot. And people having a baby on some territory are obviously sufficiently firmly present there to be its inhabitants in fact, and all inhabitants of a territory should be citizens. They already, directly or not, pay taxes and work. Citizenship is (should be) just the other side of the coin.

It's not acceptable for two people to work in one country and one of them to not have citizenship. From labor interests, from ethics, and just from plain dignity, why the hell should someone living in a land not have citizenship? It's not a privilege. It's a set of rights and responsibilities, someone having a different set is segregation.

Also cultural diversity (not the artificial bunching together into protected groups, like that bullshit Americans do) is precious, having an influx of immigrants that become citizens without any fear of being stripped of that citizenship or being deported is a blessing. There are countries like Argentina, Brazil, USA, that once were close to becoming better and richer than Europe, US still is by inertia. They all had such a trait.

At the same time the education system should guarantee that such a citizen will really be a member of the society when they turn 18. Speaking the language, knowing the constitutional law at least. Not a ghetto dweller.

What I'm speaking about is that it should be impossible to do some things. If it's possible, they will be done, and there's nothing you can do about it.

To solve the problem of twiddled social media (and moderation used to assert dominance) we need a decentralized system of 90s Web reimagined, and Fediverse doesn't deliver it - if Facebook and Reddit are feudal states, then Fediverse is a confederation of smaller feudal entities.

A post, a person, a community, a reaction and a change (by moderator or by the user) should be global entities (with global identifiers, so that the object by id of #0000001a2b3c4d6e7f890 would be the same object today or 10 years later on every server storing it) replicated over a network of servers similarly to Usenet (and to an IRC network, but in an IRC network servers are trusted, so it's not a good example for a global system).

Really bad posts (or those by persons with history of posting such) should be banned on server level by everyone. The rest should be moderated by moderator reactions\changes of certain type.

Ideally, for pooling of resources and resilience, servers would be separated by types into storage nodes (I think the name says it, FTP servers can do the job, but no need to be limited by it), index nodes (scraping many storage nodes, giving out results in structured format fit for any user representation, say, as a sequence of posts in one community, or like a list of communities found by tag, or ... , and possibly being connected into one DHT for Kademlia-like search, since no single index node will have everything), and (like in torrents?) tracker nodes for these and for identities, I think torrent-like announce-retrieve service is enough - to return a list of storage nodes storing, say, a specified partition (subspace of identifiers of objects, to make looking for something at least possibly efficient), or return a list of index nodes, or return a bunch of certificates and keys for an identity (should be somehow cryptographically connected to the global identifier of a person). So when a storage node comes online, it announces itself to a bunch of such trackers, similarly with index nodes, similarly with a user. One can also have a NOSTR-like service for real-time notifications by users.

This way you'd have a global untrusted pooled infrastructure, allowing to replace many platforms. With common data, identities, services. Objects in storage and index services can be, say, in a format including a set of tags and then the body. So a specific application needing to show only data related to it would just search on index services and display only objects with tags of, say, "holo_ns:talk.bullshit.starwars" and "holo_t:post", like a sequence of posts with ability to comment, or maybe it would search objects with tags "holo_name:My 1999-like Star Wars holopage" and "holo_t:page" and display the links like search results in Google, and then clicking on that you'd see something presented like a webpage, except links would lead to global identifiers (or tag expressions interpreted by the particular application, who knows).

(An index service may return, say, an array of objects, each with identifier, tags, list of locations on storage nodes where it's found or even bittorrent magnet links, and a free description possibly ; then the user application can unify responses of a few such services to avoid repetitions, maybe sort them, represent them as needed, so on.)

The user applications for that common infrastructure can be different at the same time. Some like Facebook, some like ICQ, some like a web browser, some like a newsreader.

(Star Wars is not a random reference, my whole habit of imagining tech stuff is from trying to imagine a science fiction world of the future, so yeah, this may seem like passive dreaming and it is.)

If he made the Silk Road mostly to kickstart BTC, after buying a pile of BTC, and then waited till now to sell it - then he's kinda smart.

they think they can replace with AI vibe coding etc

The way Microsoft products feel they really can.

I mean, it's interesting for sure, in 2011 I think I hadn't even heard of BTC yet.

The mod ego problem will exist as long as there's moderation, unfortunately.

It was present in the web even before it was expelled from heaven.

But it's not necessary to remove all moderation, just global identifiers of posts and many different "moderating projections" of the same collection of data can be enough to change the climate for most of the users. Not moderation itself really matters - the ability to dominate, to shut someone's mouth matters. If the only way you see a post is without such at all - then maybe it's too rude. If it's removed on the instance level on most of instances - then maybe it's something really nasty that shouldn't be seen. But if in some projection it's visible and in some not - then we've solved this particular problem.

In such a hypothetical system.

tuning its algorithm to promote the most divisive material possible. Because that is what will increase engagement

But at the same time in every case I described on Lemmy an experience not maximizing engagement by maximizing conflict, I was downvoted to hell's basement. Despite two of three modern social media experience models being too aimed for that, that'd be Facebook-like and Reddit-like, excluding Twitter-like (which is unfortunately vulnerable to bots). I mean, there's less conflict on fucking imageboards, those were at some point considered among most toxic places in the interwebs.

(Something-something Usenet-like namespaces instead of existing communities tied to instances, something-something identities too not tied to instances and being cryptographic, something-something subjective moderation (subscribing to moderation authorities you choose, would feel similar to joining a group, one can even have in the UI a few combinations of the same namespace and a few different moderation authorities for it), something-something a bigger role of client-side moderation (ignoring in the UI those people you don't like). Ideally what really gets removed and not propagated to anyone would be stuff like calls for mass murders, stolen credentials, gore, real rape and CP. The "posting to a namespace versus posting to an owned community" dichotomy is important. The latter causes a "capture the field" reaction from humans.)

It doesn't come up in search on Lemmy, at least everything by "Adam Kadyrov" is about some special forces training event or him beating someone.

If a link in Russian will do (Google Translate?), then https://www.gazeta.ru/social/news/2025/06/30/26158466.shtml , maybe?

The wedding also involved shooting into the air from a G-Wagon and polarized sunglasses (OK, that part is really not that strange, it's basic convenience and fashion everywhere around Caucasus ; just wanted to communicate the atmosphere).

I don't know, it's Russian news mostly, just impressed plenty of people enough to say "yeah, this is bad, time to flee" (because this basically means that people in power don't expect anything even resembling rule of law in the next few decades ; some sort of thief feudalism, like the "political system" Gypsies have when left to themselves, and I don't hate Gypsies, but I also don't like a few things associated with their cultures).

That's 1/85 of the watch that Ramzan Kadyrov's son sported on his wedding.

Or one can just compare it to the share of Google's profits in California.

You mean leave Microsoft live? A strange thought.

Its hilarious to me that people think that the founding fathers, who ostensibly designed this entire country specifically for the benefit of the land-owning gentry, would hate maga politics.

I think they would. Land-owning gentry culture had one visible advantage over most of modern political culture - if you make a rule, then you follow it, and if you say a word, you mean it. It was important, people would fight on duels for these things about them being put in doubt. Not that they all would really act this way, of course.

Differences between MAGA and Democrats for this purpose are not important.

I would bet every dollar I have that if the founding fathers snapped back to life right now that they would be no different than the maga morons or libertarians that want to run this country into the ground

I think they would find some similarities with libertarians for the reason stated above. Some.

But in general I think they'd disown whatever in the modern world is ascribed to them.

I'd really prefer India on my side, not being Sunni and all that

Compared to before, no, there aren’t.

Well, that can be said about Greeks and Armenians in Crimea as well as Crimean Tatars. That's because after Stalin's forced movement to Kazakhstan (which is barbaric act, of course) or wherever, when descendants of those people were allowed to return, they were more likely to move elsewhere in the union. And after 1991 Greeks would often repatriate, well, to Greece, changing the ethnic character of the whole Russian and Ukrainian Black Sea coast, and Crimean Tatars to Turkey.

I think you also underestimate the role of Sevastopol. Purely due to strategic importance there'd be people coming from all parts of the empire and the union, and the "melting pot culture" there was Russian.

There has been an ongoing genocide since the tsarist times,

That's a weird way to say this, before Crimea becoming part of the Russian Empire the actual Crimean Khanate didn't exist for too long. It seems you have a misconception of Crimean Tatars being some sort of the native population of Crimea. They were not. They were a nomad vassal state to the Ottoman Empire, conquerors themselves. They weren't the majority there ethnically under that khanate either.

That’s why people are “wary” of Russia - because it is a genocidal state since time immemorial.

That's gross from someone who's likely a US-American or a European. Also "time immemorial" doesn't quite mean what you seem to think.

One would think on the decline of democracy and accompanying problems you should gain faith in democracy.

But somehow it's always the opposite.

The less scientific progress there is, the more people "lose faith in it", the less peace there is, the more people are skeptical of it, the less equality there is, the less people value it.

I think it's not natural, rather an illustration of covert media propaganda being very powerful.

I'd prefer wooden floor.