Diary

I cut the grass and the weeds around the house this morning with the brush cutter. It took about 90 minutes. There’s more to do.

Afterwards we went out to a plant nursery to buy mainly flowering plants for pots + fertilizer for the lawn and the citrus trees. We noticed this year that the skin seems to be growing thicker and thicker on the oranges and gratefruits, and this apparently indicates a need for potassium, in particular. We got some organic fertilizer and resisted the advice to get a chemical to treat the crinkling of the leaves. Similarly for the bit of lawn, I didn’t get the fertilizer that has insecticide built in. I don’t want to be responsible for killing the critters or harming birds.

VPNs

According people who understand these matters better than me, VPNs are becoming almost a necessary feature for privacy on today’s web.

I have been experimenting with some of them lately. I started with Njalla. It worked well with MXLinux, I activated through a script in the terminal. The cost was, if I remember rightly €6 per month for one device, and it was not possible for me to choose a local server.

ProtonVPN has both a free and a premium plan. The premium version costs about the same as Njalla, but is for 8 devices. There are servers all around the world, so I was able to find a local one. Linux support is through a dedicated gui app. However I found the app to be buggy under MX Linux / KDE. After I got rid of it, I had a hard time getting back into the Internet. The app works fine in my aging Samsung phone however – it’s still working there, till I cancel the subscription.

Now I’m trying Mullvad VPN – I came upon it by chance since I have started to use Mullvad browser. This also has a Linux GUI app for Linux, which works well for me, so far (2 days). It costs about the same as the others, and is good for 5 devices, which would be enough for all our computers and phones. Like ProtonVPN, there are servers around the world, including local servers that we can use. The speed seems fine.

Mullvad browser

Mullvad browser is a new browser produced by Mullvad VPN company in cooperation with the organization behind Tor browser. After reading a review on it in The Verge, I am giving it a try. So far it seems quite usable; like a slightly downgraded version of Firefox. One noticeable “feature” is that the actual size of the browser window is smaller (evidently they are trying by this means to standardize the canvas size, which is one of the things that trackers use in order to establish a unique browser fingerprint). There are also no sync options, and the addition of addons is discouraged. I will probably use it in conjunction with my other browsers.

The country

I haven’t been listening too much to the depressing news. My assumption is that it is in the interest of our wise leaders to create a fracas or maybe start a little war in order to distract people from the other harmful stuff they have been up to. Nothing unites the (normally divisive and polarized) Israelis better than a healthy reminder that it is surrounded by enemies. Starting a minor war offers a win-win situation. You can easily start one by sending border police into the Al-Aqsa mosque to beat everybody up, raiding Syria night after night and then bombing Gaza again. Everyone will feel sorry for the Jews cowering in their shelters over the holiday. The people will unite against external threats that are, with a stretch of the imagination, just real enough to be believable. After weeks of warnings about the dangers of Ramadan, it seems that the holy month got off to too quiet a start.

Interoperability

I am not so worried about a few big tech companies embracing fediverse, because if a couple of them do, it may draw the even bigger fish in too, meaning that for the first time we will have interoperability between major social media companies.

If we like the unique feel of Tumblr, the rapidity of Twitter, the artistic community of deviantart or the targeted boosts offered by Facebook, etc. we could choose one of those services knowing that we can still them to stay in touch with our friends on other networks.

That will still not be enough to persuade many of us to join those commercial networks, but we will finally be able to read posts sent by our friends, and they will be able to read ours. If that happens, it will be great, because it will no longer matter what service people decide to join.

Even the big companies may eventually see that interoperability is to their advantage – they will simply need to shift their attention away from all kinds of devious behaviour that aims to lock in users by force, and towards offering the best experience possible. When people are no longer held captive, they will be able to demand more.

If I already enjoy being on Facebook, but can also see there all the posts of my friends on Twitter, I will end up spending more of my time on Facebook, which is eventually better for Facebook.

The only real danger, as far as I understand it, is that as with email, it could become a playing field mainly of a few big operators. Because in order for it to work properly, there is quite a high bar to reach. It has to be done with a slew of protocols and security standards. But new email companies and services, even non-profits run by a few volunteers, do manage to break in, and even manage to be innovative in what they offer.

I think this will be the same with the fediverse. What will eventually persuade the big companies to open up and be interoperable will be government regulations or other necessities, rather than “competition” from Mastodon. But the availability of common free opensource protocols like ActivityPub is showing the way forward.

Pleroma and Streams

Maybe my last post was a little harsh. I modified it slightly afterwards. Anyway, I felt an urge not to be directly on the social network that everyone’s currently talking about. Disroot’s instance runs on Pleroma. (Update: or rather “Soapbox”. Is Soapbox still a front-end for Pleroma or a fork of it? – it isn’t so clear). Anyway, for now, I’m squatting there. Yesterday I also read about Mike McGirvin’s new effort, Streams, about which he says

From day one the question was how to build a federated/decentralised communication stack that provides more control over your privacy, and respects all people and cultures – including those which have a different political bias; while allowing them to all co-exist in the same space (and without killing each other).

and:

The current name of this repository [Streams] implies fluidity. As a brand or product it technically does not exist. This is also intentional.

This implies openness; the openness of the open web, and I like that. Human beings are clannish. That’s always going to be the case. I dislike this quality when we gather around meeting points such as nationhood, religion, party politics, gender… and also social network brands.

The way it plays out is exemplified in the current gathering around Mastodon. Mastodon did not invent the idea of federated social networks. There existed StatusNet and GnuSocial (based on the StatusNet protocol), Friendica and Red Matrix. Then came the ActivityPub protocol and Mastodon (which initially also supported GnuSocial). Since Mastodon had the flavour and the brand identity that people were looking for, it proved to be a greater success. The above narrative leaves out developments such as Diaspora, SSB and other networks that do not easily federate with each other.

Social networking should be something as generic and white-label as email and XMPP. It should be possible to read and participate through various means, such as commercial networks, community websites and phone and desktop applications.

Links

The 1.5C climate target is dead – to prevent total catastrophe, Cop27 must admit it | Bill McGuire | The Guardian

Israel will not cooperate with FBI inquiry into killing of Palestinian American journalist | Israel | The Guardian

Israel is therefore kindly saving the FBI the trouble of conducting an inquiry and confirming what has been obvious from the start. The only question is whether this was an act of an individual soldier or whether he was obeying orders.

Instance blocking; the open web

After so many years in the Fediverse, I thought that I understood it well by now. But looking lately at the landscape, through the portal of Mastodon, I’m not so sure. What I see there is a culture where blocking becomes the solution for whatever you don’t like, particularly instance blocking.

On the conventional social networks, you can block a person. On Mastodon, if you don’t like somebody, you can block the whole instance. While I initially felt some sympathy for blocking instances like Gab, now I’m beginning to see how far this can go. Last week, someone set up an instance to “onboard journalists”, without vetting so well who could join up there. A couple of days later, other instances began blocking that one due to the presence of a few unsavoury members. Today I read that another Mastodon instance decided, in the name of free speech, to allow persons with controversial opinions, so people on other instances are urging to block that instance.

I can imagine that eventually someone will decide that it’s advisable to block all instances that aren’t on some kind of a master-list whose member instances endorse a particular constitution – perhaps one that is similar to that of mastodon.social* (I have only heard about these, but haven’t read them). And why not block instances on the basis of their geographical location while we are at it? Russia? Ukraine? Israel? Palestine? Africa?

Update: What there currently is, is the list maintained at joinmastodon.org that is governed by the criteria of the Mastodon server covenant:

Thus, we are proud to announce the creation of the Mastodon Server Covenant. By highlighting those communities that are high quality and best align with our values, we hope to foster a friendly and better moderated online space. Any server that we link to from joinmastodon.org commits to actively moderating against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia.

In practice, it’s very demanding for volunteer moderators to perform such moderation, but super easy to block an entire instance.

In an environment of hair trigger instance-blocking, we’re arguably better off in one of the mainstream social networks, where we’re chucked out mainly for egregiously bad behaviour – but our own behaviour, not that of our neighbours or due to our affiliation with some group – say, the US Republican Party.

Although it’s very tempting to filter out all the voices that we don’t want to hear, the consequence is that we live in an ever more intolerant society.

I’m not going to change the world, but I’m in favour of a return to the open web, in combination with RSS news feeds and email newsletters. The need to set up a personal site, or to be published to an existing journal sets a high bar, but maybe that’s a good thing. There are many problems yet to solve, such as discovery, comment spam, payment issues, government censorship, etc. but there are also advantages: returning control and responsibility to the individual; independence from any kind of control or banishment by corporations, billionaires, groups, cliques, etc.

What the Indieweb people propose is, as always, a pragmatic and favourable compromise: publish first to our own site, and then to everywhere else: we don’t have to be in love with the networks we use in order to benefit from their reach. So we publish where we can and if we get blocked we get blocked.

Because I happen to be not-so-interested in spreading my germs far and wide, I try to keep my site out of the search engines and don’t publish to Facebook and Twitter, hardly even to the Fediverse. So I probably won’t take that advice.

Earl Grey tea

I was making Earl Grey with the quantity needed for milk tea, so it came out too bitter. Just a flat teaspoon, then three or four minutes brewing time, is enough. I still add half a teaspoon of sugar. But I’m happy to get rid of the milk (anyway it’s always milk substitute in our case).

Mastodon

Is the fediverse about to get Fryed? (Or, “Why every toot is also a potential denial of service attack”) – Aral Balkan

” decentralisation begins at decentring yourself”

A good article, though it doesn’t touch on the fact that concentrating so much of Mastodon in the servers of Masto.host, which hosts Balkan’s (and this) instance, is also a danger to the decentralization of the Fediverse.

It also doesn’t mention the energy that all this distribution must require. This could be an issue with decentralization, as it is with blockchain technology (though to a much lesser extent).

While it is evident that part of the problem is a result of the way the protocols work and interact with servers, it doesn’t suggest a solution.

From the perspective of resource and energy usage, I have no doubt that the old methods of blogging + RSS news feed make more sense, though I tend to be more attentive to my Fediverse timeline than to my newsfeed subscriptions.

Exodus continues at Twitter as Elon Musk hints at possible bankruptcy | Twitter | The Guardian

“Messages seeking comment were left with Twitter, but it is unlikely someone will respond as the communications department has been laid off.”

Energy use of a home server vs paying for a VPS

A person in my time-line had tried to estimate the cost of running a Raspberry server from his home. It came out to something like €1.10 per month. Running a server from an old laptop, as I was doing till recently, must cost quite a bit more; maybe as much as the VPS I now pay for.

Since some hosting companies use renewable energy, maybe it makes greater sense to use one of those. But there too there is a calculation involved. For example, if the VPS server with the green energy is at a location that is geographically distant from oneself or one’s potential audience, is it more energy efficient to use such a server? Does it depend upon whether CDNs are employed by the hosting company?

At a certain level, without lots of research, the way the internet works and its environmental costs are still very opaque for most of us.

Kerala

Indian police investigating film that portrays Kerala as Islamic terrorism hub | India | The Guardian

There’s apparently zero evidence. But it’s not surprising that the film industry would seek to ride the wave of right-wing populism sweeping the country.

Freedom of speech

Was reading about what happened when Stephen Fry offended Poland, and it made me think that there’s an advantage to being a nobody – with few followers you can be yourself and say whatever you want, at least more so than when you are a celebrity figure.

“Telegram has launched the ability to buy and sell short recognizable @ usernames for personal accounts, public groups and channels.” I need to get rid of this centralized service, but a messaging platform, even more than a social networking service, depends upon obtaining a critical mass of people that use it. Some of my contacts don’t even have Telegram or, if they do, use it only in order to send messages. They can’t be depended upon to see mine.

Carbon Cola

At the office, I saw Avigail was back at her desk.

“You were on vacation – did you have a good time?”

“Sure, how else could it be – Thailand!”

“No idea. I’ve never been; For me it’s either Europe or India.”

“There were lots of Indians there in Thailand – they had some kind of a holiday I think.”

“That would be Diwali; but I didn’t know Thailand was popular with Indians.”

“Well it’s nearby for them after all.”

“That’s true.”

The “Muskopalypse”

Yesterday was the first time I thought that the Fediverse might actually become mainstream. I watched as Greta Thunberg came on board, and saw her follower count go up to around 15,000 within the space of a few hours. On the other hand, she has 5,000,000 followers on Twitter, so I realized that I should calm down. Numbers are hard. Will the sea rise 30 meters by the end of the century or 2 meters over the space of the next 5,000 years? Will the Twitter permafrost really melt and mastodon clones roam the earth? I’ll leave it to the experts. Anyway, in my excitement, I wrote the following.

I think we will all want to thank Elon Musk, whatever we think about him, for what he has accomplished.

Masses of people are finally beginning to turn their back on one of the big commercial social networks while simultaneously joining a non-commercial federated one. I really hope that Mastodon and ActivityPub can hold together through this crush of new users and not piss them off too much, because the world really does need a safe, viable protocol for social media connection, and it also needs social media to be interoperable – regardless of whether we prefer commercial or non-commercial variants.

If a critical mass join Mastodon, and they and are happy with it, three things may eventually happen.

First, it could bring a chain reaction, causing people to discover the other ActivityPub flavours that offer alternatives to Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, etc – and possibly new ones that compete with other commercial social media providers.

Second, when, as we see already beginning to happen, the European Union becomes invested in the Fediverse, it may begin to legislate for interoperability, forcing the commercial social networks to open their walled gardens and allowing, for example, people on Mastodon to follow people on Twitter or Facebook and for people on Twitter to follow people on Facebook or the fediverse, all without leaving their chosen social media provider.

Third, the same rules regarding the limits of “free speech” will be enforced across the Fediverse, requiring Fediverse instance operators to moderate content. This is a huge problem because operators of large instances do not have the means to employ workers to moderate content. As far as I know, the Fediverse lacks even the ability to conduct AI assisted moderation.

Small instances have less of a problem because they are easier to moderate. Governments may not even enforce their laws over small instances with few users. (If so, there’s the question of the break-off point between “small” and “large” – a few hundred users?, a few thousand?, a million? Twitter has over 200 million active users, by comparison with which the whole of Mastodon is tiny.)

In any case, the necessity to moderate and block content could have implications for both large and small instances.

First, moderation is reported to be difficult by the maintainers of Mastodon’s larger instances. As instances grow, and especially if they need to comply with state-imposed moderation rules, they would need to employ workers to moderate content. This cost would need to be covered – probably by user subscriptions, though possibly (cringe) by the introduction of ads.

Second, we could imagine a scenario similar to what has happened with email: large instances could block small instances by default. With email, the big email servers like Gmail routinely discriminate against small and independent email servers in order to prevent the proliferation of spam.

With the Fediverse, it could happen that large instances would eventually block small instances by default, due to the headache and expense of moderation.

The Fediverse is still taking its first baby steps. We have no idea how it will be as a teenager or as an adult.

What is Mastodon, the social network users are leaving Twitter for? Everything you need to know | Twitter | The Guardian

The big social networking platforms and their troubles

Twitter and Meta

Facebook’s Monopoly Is Imploding Before Our Eyes

How to leave dying social media platforms

Interoperable Facebook (video)

Instagram sucks now, sorry

Après WhatsApp, Instagram victime d’un gros bug

Elon Musk dissolves Twitter’s board and makes himself ‘sole director’ | The Independent

What apps to use if you leave Twitter – The Washington Post

Those are a few recent articles. In short, both Twitter and Facebook, and Meta’s other services like WhatsApp and Instagram are in serious trouble right now. People are seeking alternatives such as Mastodon, which some of the mainstream press, like the Washington Post (see above), struggle to understand.

We love to hate these big tech corporations here on the Fediverse. I would describe myself as an avid despiser of Zuckerberg and Musk. On the other hand, if I look back a few years ago, I remember my awe when MySpace, Facebook and Twitter were finally turning people on to the web, in a big way. At the time when those services were beginning, the internet was still a place that many less technical users visited only reluctantly. They certainly didn’t participate or publish anything there themselves. Yet suddenly, when the early social networks gained prominence, people finally “got” it. They began to share personal stories and family pictures in earnest, and even discover old friends. When Facebook came along, it suddenly became possible to find former classmates, reconnect with distant family members and recover old relationships. Its contribution to the social fabric of society was huge. Twitter, at the same time, became a place that you could find journalists and writers, engage with them personally, and get the back story behind the news. Emotions that journalists would carefully hide behind a screen of objectivity in their polished stories, you could learn about from their tweets. And, of course, Twitter was the first place to visit on any developing news story.

These examples are just a fraction of the contribution made by the big social media companies. The amazing thing is that, all the while, their true agenda was figuring out how to make money from their services. In a way, we should be thankful that they did.

And yet, as we know, their solutions were inimical and destructive, first to the web, and then to people and societies. We are now at a place where we are beginning to ask how we could arrange things differently, reap the benefits while minimizing the drawbacks.

Everyone on the Fediverse thinks they have the obvious answer to that; though, if you look more closely, there are problems there too, of how and how much to engage in moderation, on whether to block networks like Gab, about how to relate to new laws and increasing governmental snooping and interference.

Regarding the biggies like Facebook and Twitter, the EFF and Cory Doctorow have the core answer: there needs to be interoperability. Those big tech companies don’t deserve to be abolished, but their monopolies need to be trimmed down through legislation and regulation. They can live on, for those who want them, as honorable but interoperable platforms. If they are creative and clever, with an amazing interface that people appreciate, they will always be popular enough to make money. But they should not be permitted to stifle competition. Ergo interoperability. No more walled gardens: if the user wants to friend people on other networks, or wants people from other networks to be able to friend him, that should be made possible. May the best platforms win, but it should not be a zero-sum winner-take-all situation. Those who prefer to live on a maybe less slick, less plush, but ad-free, non-algorythmic networks should not be penalized for their choice.

And I still look forward to seeing an offline client, like Thunderbird is for email, that can bring together all of our social media posts, from around the Fediverse, from Diaspora, from Twitter and Facebook, and everywhere else.

Social media keeps putting people in jail

Links

Saudi woman given 34-year prison sentence for using Twitter | Saudi Arabia | The Guardian

A Saudi student at Leeds University who had returned home to the kingdom for a holiday has been sentenced to 34 years in prison for having a Twitter account and for following and retweeting dissidents and activists.

This is another reminder that social media is not a safe space for free expression. Posts and retweets that express sympathy for violence, sedition, support for unpopular causes or anything in the opaque category of “extremist” thinking can lead to incarceration in your own country or the denial of entry into others, even the western so-called democracies. A cursory web search will reveal arrests in the UK, Germany and France. Israel arrested 390 Palestinians last year for incitement on social media.

If it isn’t a nation state that comes down on you, it can be individual vigilantes who would like to see you dead. Having your own website like this one is probably just as likely to invoke the interest of the authorities. It no doubt depends on how dangerous it looks and the circulation it gets – but you can never know about that.

It is far safer to remain anonymous. True anonymity is tricky, because it depends on never making mistakes. In any case, you have probably already expressed yourself more freely than was wise in posts that will remain for posterity on the internet, a place that never forgives or forgets. Still, the web is humongous, and older data are buried under more recent data, so it is never too late to start taking an interest in privacy.

In my case, I figure that I’m at a stage when I’m never going to be looking for a job again or running for public office. The opinions I express may diverge from the mainstream but, in my domicile, would be unlikely to serve as grounds for arrest. My profile and risk factor are low. I may be barred from travel to some countries, but that’s something I can live with too.

Laws and conditions change. What is acceptable now may later become a crime. What seems to be private today may be in the hands of investigators tomorrow. That’s a risk we all take as soon as we open our mouths to say anything, or click on any button to post or publish to the web.

Links of the day

I think I’m spending too much time again reading the news. Mostly I’m reading stories that have, strictly speaking, no actual bearing on my life, so I grow agitated about matters that needn’t concern me. This is a phenomenon of the news media, though the psychological effect is similar to that of fiction: we read or watch something that is contrived in the mind of a writer or filmmaker, and our emotional reaction is almost as deep as if it were real and affected us personally. So we return to the theme of the interconnectedness of reality and fiction. On the TV news, particularly in featured stories, and in documentaries, there is the conscious effort to emulate what we are used to in watching our favourite TV series. The addition of background music, close-ups portraying the expression of emotions and other tricks of the film-trade all duplicate the experience of watching a TV drama. It’s one reason that I prefer to read the news rather than watch it.

Welcome to the freeport, where turbocapitalism tramples over British democracy | George Monbiot | The Guardian Wow, another evil scheme I didn’t know about. How do they get away with things like this?

Uproar after Mahmoud Abbas in Berlin accuses Israel of ’50 Holocausts’ | Mahmoud Abbas | The Guardian Words are wind. It’s doubtful whether any Israeli decision-maker actually cares what he says as long as he continues to do Israel’s bidding – they are not going to find a more moderate or pliable Palestinian leader. For ordinary Israeli citizens Abu Mazen just reinforces their negative stereotype of Palestinians. What Germans may be thinking is hard to guess. However in modern diplomacy outrage is usually staged. Even genuinely sickening and egregious episodes like the Khashoggi murder can be swept under the rug, if not today, then tomorrow. Israel can continue its brutal occupation without fearing reprisals. Russia can look forward to being welcomed back into the community of nations and Ukraine forgotten, as soon as it becomes economically or politically expedient.