My attitude on the Kolektiva breach is close to what my attitude was when I pointed out Riseup's canary had gone dead and then shit blew up.
It's bad. It's not quite as bad as some people imply. Admins fucked up by failing to have better security from get-go, but they're not maliciously or dishonest and some of their moves make some sense. Still. The catastrophe was locked in when radicals accepted community centralization. Probably their greater sin is de facto encouraging that centralization.
Generally in these cases part of the reason the community centralizes is that the admins are elders with wide connections and respect from eons doing shit. This means that they really do care and have generally good practices, and are sincerely trying their best re the trolley problems that involve how much to reveal on certain things.
But goddamn, I'm sick of older anarchist techies like Moxie w Signal embracing centralization.
@rechelon The safest way would be a periodic backup. But backups are resource intensive, and the ones hit with more backups are the ones that people don't think will hold. So it's a self fulfilling prophecy going on.
If there's a way to have a client based backup... Like, an app that doubles as backup, so responsibility (and ownership) of backup is local, then we have something.
Very much agreed, I've thought about precisely this, but don't have the time or free executive function.
@rechelon It's complicated.
The use of backups, that is the insurance users have from instance collapse, brings smaller instances close to collapse.
I've been working on product/usability solutions for peer to peer, distributed systems, and the limitations are always very interesting.
@rechelon If you want, I started a group with others called https://commons.garden
We could do one (and only one) design strategy session, frame the problem correctly or even propose solutions, announce it, and leave it for others to pave the way.
Life is short.
William Gillis 🏴
nonlinear