@luke As an old-time #Debian user, at least, I was happily handing out #Ubuntu CDs, given that #Shuttleworth was insisting "Ubuntu _is_ Debian", and #jdub was on board.
@luke Non-free drivers seemed an acceptable compromise to support old hardware; #Nvidia seemed the last proprietary hold-out in a war we'd won… Then #Ubuntu launched their non-free app store, I went back to install #Debian on recent hardware and… #WTF! I thought we fixed this!
I don't know how #RMS gets out of bed in the morning. Or out from his nest under his office desk, or whatever peculiar arrangement he has. Fighting the same battles over and over…
* You assume that [any !OStatus instance] has the responsibility to verify its users.
The fact is that each user has their own responsibility to verify their accounts. Say, for example, that you are you. Then you have a personal website or work account. At this profile, you place a link to your social account (just as with your Twitter account). Noone else can fake that (assuming you're not hacked, but that's a different story).
Furthermore, there's something called !indieweb which makes this verficiation seamless and integrates into browsers etc, where if someone claims to be someone else - so called rel="me" links can be used in a sort of "callback verification" scheme. Fully automated with green checkmarks and whatnot.
All other issues you raise are also issues on the web in general.
@lnxw48a1 This article is better than most, but I find the argument that we need some sort of overarching authority for "enforcement" in the fediverse just as suspect as it is in the real world. It's pretty trivial to verify which accounts are valid and which aren't: you ask the person what their user address is in a medium outside of the fediverse. This is exactly the same as looking up an email address, yet that's not touted as a weakness of email?
@csaurus @lnxw48a1 I find the immediate reliance on a games cupboard analogy very telling, in the way such pieces usually say more about the author than the system they are critiquing. it is very childlike to my eyes.
Some of us - probably quite a large number, I would guess - prefer the responsibilty and autonomy federation offers.
@csaurus @lnxw48a1 so this article makes the similar mistakes to others, although the author does understand decentralization. He assumes that internet standards always fail, and yet we have TCP, DNS, HTTP, XML, TLS. The list could go on for a while.
On usernames, that people havn't been making the same complaints about email for the previous N decades is perhaps illustrative of some tech journos fishing for any reason to dislike something not centralized. That the author believes that there is "no adult in the room" presumably means he assumes himself to be incapable of taking adult decisions or of deciding what is legit from what is hype/fakery.
@sulman @lnxw48a1 @bob I'm not sure I'm familiar with the term "games cupboard analogy". Overall, I think that this article still cuts to some of the key issues that federation addresses. The author just doesn't seem to have freed themself from expecting it to work like Twitter. Like, none of the purposes that he brings up for an authority really seem to be something I'd want. I think you're right that a large number of people appreciate the autonomy.
Me: I'm just waiting for the growth curve in the fediverse to flatten out.
@csaurus @bob @lnxw48a1 I was referring to this: "Mastodon is an equipment closet where we can make our own fun, but no one is watching and there are an awful lot of bats and javelins and fencing foils in here, not to mention a roster of players with an established appetite for chaos."
It's an appeal to an authority, actually something that *really* started to grate with me about Twitter.
Not everyone needs to be governed in their social spaces.
@sulman @bob @lnxw48a1 Ahh I see, that analogy is pretty weak. I don't use Twitter so I haven't gotten to notice that about the culture, just the various crap I hear about such-and-such getting "unverified" and what a travesty it is.
Like, personally I'm all for heavily moderated spaces, but a monolithic authority just can't do it properly for everyone. Which is why federation is a great thing, because no one is forced under someone else's authority if they don't want to be.
There are, but the writer's POV is that the network needs a central authority to referee disputes and to "verify" user identities, as though those things have worked at Twitter or other #corpocentric networks. IOW, almost everything that is wrong with the #lockiverse should be instituted here on the #OStatus network.