Notices by jonny (good kind) (jonny@neuromatch.social)

@alcinnz
Well you see according to Mozilla, that lack of advertising is just you being highly privileged and not a reflection of the basic reality that the advertising economy is not in fact vital to the web and that there will always be alternatives to it simply by virtue of people wanting to make things for each other. The Real Web Is Advertising Only and if you talked to Joe the Plumber you would know that The Poors Like It That Way
/s

The docs and communications around mozilla pivot to advertising is both a stunning display of an insular echo chamber culture that has completely lost the plot and seems to have no critical internal voices, and also a fascinating attempt at corporate gaslighting, claiming that advertising makes things accessible and so they are enabling the advertising and surveillance economy "for the poor."

@steve @evan in rdf identity == location

in general i try not to dunk but i can't believe that this is something that a mozilla tech lead actually wrote down about the nearly silent introduction of an aggregated advertising system into a browser that is plastered wall to wall in its promotional materials as being dedicated solely to privacy

This police state is your police state. This police state stands between you and any brighter future you might imagine. This fight is your fight

You wont believe the number of stormtroopers theyre deploying against unarmed students unless you see it. This is just one side: at least 7 police departments with at least two layers at every point of egress, with several layers in back for rear control and rotation. They've got the army out against your kids for having the audacity to do whatever they can to stop a genocide

#UCIrvine

@GavinChait the learning curve for p2p systems is not intrinsically any steeper than cloud systems, in fact there is a potential for it to be much simpler since much less needs to be concentrated in a single system. With generalized p2p the distinction between generalist and specialist data is actually much much easier - there doesn't need to be a specialist database or platform for each type of data.

neither wikipedia nor openstreetmap are p2p systems, and that is one of the reasons why they as platforms need to maintain paid staff to maintain data integrity.

there aren't any such systems, and there are good reasons for that having to do with the history of the platformatization of the web. the things that come closest are private bittorrent trackers which maintain excellent quality archives with next to zero budget in highly adversarial conditions.

here: https://jon-e.net/infrastructure/

A #p2p future for the web is the radical idea that its bad to put all data in a single place owned by 3 companies and rented by a few hundred. The internet wasnt a mistake, the cloud was a mistake. Platforms were a mistake. A mistake where its not only possible but routine for "everyone's health data" to get stolen. https://infosec.exchange/@patrickcmiller/112341111375581551

I need to share my health data with like 3 people that arent me. Why on earth is that data in the same pile as literally everyone else's.

Ive said it a million times before: in research, if open data mandates mean that all data needs to exist on some cloud server, we are in for a catastrophe of the highest order where cloud providers will be in a position to siphon off however much public funding they want - the "free open data" programs are bait. The corollary is the continual rise and sudden collapse of archives who miss one grant cycle or cant keep up with the infinitely expanding cloud bills.

Its not just a disaster for private data, but public data and the whole of the web. If researchers want their disciplines to continue to exist, to contribute to a healthy information ecosystem, and to realize the promise of the web for science, they should be investing in and demanding p2p infrastructure.

@GavinChait
What if hosting costs were a one-time investment in on-site server infrastructure that is a seed node that other seed nodes can replicate and rehost so there is no single system to keep the lights on in the first place, and curation labor was not the responsibility of a single central research group but a participatory process by everyone who uses the data? What if there was no platform at all?

usually i try not to make a big deal out of the entertainment industrial complex and its shit, but i have seen in a bunch of personal cases how much influence talk shows like these have over peoples perception of the world and i gotta say i think that in this dystopia you could sort of do a lot worse than having a dude like jon stewart doing an interview with lina khan like this on a mass broadcast medium
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaDTiWaYfcM

More of this
https://www.palestineaction.org/tamworth-shutdown/

They did WHAT
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/02/05/no-data-no-problem-undisclosed-tinkering-in-excel-behind-economics-paper/

Compare figure 3 here in the #atproto / #bluesky paper
https://bsky.social/about/bluesky-and-the-at-protocol-usable-decentralized-social-media-martin-kleppmann.pdf
To the diagram here:
https://bsky.social/about/blog/5-5-2023-federation-architecture

The paper figure is a lot cuter, but by linearizing it and presenting it as two parallel tracks they have obscured the most salient feature of the network: the big relay in the middle. Beyond "centralization bad," that pins down most of the undesirable and dangerous features of the protocol, and makes it seem like theres a lot more choice than there is.

Since the design purposefully hides the architecture: you dont know where your feed generators are drawing from, or those used by your friends. So you cant know what the effect of choosing a different relay would be, aka the main relay is always indispensable. Importantly the relays subscribe to you, you dont push to the relay, and since you arent really supposed to operate your own data store, you can be dropped from the network without knowing - the relay serves as an unaccountable point of moderation.

They describe another real weakness in the protocol on page 4 that also makes the single relay indispensable: fedi has backfilling problems, but its possible to solve them because you can at least know who does have the complete picture - the OP server knows of all interactions (that it wants to). Since there are no backlinks, and PDSes are not dereferenceable by username, the only way the whole thing works is if someone has a relatively complete picture of the whole network - otherwise eg. you would have no idea who to deliver a post to.

Its this part for me that tells the whole story: #atproto was designed for a new kind of advertising market, and when their VC money and puttering domain registration revenue streams dry up, control over the main firehose relay is a big gaping profit vector waiting to be capitalized on.

I guess this is turning into a real project so putting this out there if anyones interested:

We're making a very lightweight tool to create RSS feeds for journals from crossref metadata (with room for other sources). If ya dont know, many publishers are shutting down their RSS feeds to drive people onto their surveillance platforms, and every enshittification leaves behind an opening for adversarial interop.

This opens some interesting possibilities like creating feeds for keywords indexed across journals to start breaking down journals as the major organizational scheme of scholarly lit - papers have metadata keywords, but they mostly arent used, so lets use them!

Eventually wed like to write a FastAPI plugin similar to activitypub-express so we can make all feeds available on the fedi as well, and that would be a really nice set of tools to build for smaller AP projects that dont necessarily want to be full instances.

This is designed to be extremely deployable so you can run your own feed generator, but we'll also host a reference instance here at feeds.neuromatch.social once we get it running.

Just getting started, help wanted and welcome from anyone who loves #RSS and reading papers ♥

Repo: https://github.com/sneakers-the-rat/journal-rss

Cc @lili and @roaldarboel

Stems from this thread: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/111668885237921256

Hey any journalists on here plz turn your public post indexing on, because most of you haven't and thats why people looking for public information cant find you.

Go to settings > public profile > privacy and reach, select "include public posts in search results"

Not all the fedi wants to be a public space, and thats fine, but some parts should be right now.

Academics: stop being coy about #SciHub and start treating it like basic research infrastructure. If you dont include it in your syllabus already as a normal way to access research, you should start. No more winks and nods, just link directly to it and accept no criticism for doing so from the researchers that necessitate its continued existence by their publishing practices

https://mastodon.social/@eff/111075817148342123

@aral
@ubiquity75
I would be interested in setting something up. I've talked about your work a few times and I think it might be interesting to pitch similarly for academic infra together. I am bb in academia but I know some web infra ppl around here :)