Broadcasting your government name, face, & location online. The fall of pen names & anonymity. This is all web2.0+ behavior. It's been extremely strange to see the rise & continued engagement in this behavior.
Being safe on the early web, you learned about 'threat actors', number one was protecting personal identity, not connecting to untrusted servers, watching out for bad / nosy systems administrators, & now? Google openly admits to reading your email & people just, don't care… what happened?
Search is kind of a wild concept to me. And agreed. Free or otherwise, I advocate people to self host simple services from home for their local community if possible. In the end it raises local interest in hosting & computer sciences. But corporate? As the age old adage in the tech industry goes: if it's free, you're the product. This has all been literally insane to watch unfold.
Also, if I ever provide free service, I'll need 20$ if you want me up at 4am because the server is down.
@rusty__shackleford Commodity groups, financial groups, marketing and research teams have taken over.
Building a product, impressing the market and improving the environments... isn't financially worth it anymore.
The dot-com bubble burst gave us an opportunity to learn. We learned... how to better siphon money out of the system.
There is this thing called Wheel of Life which is basically a system that talks about making sure you deal with all parts of your life.
A lot of business people seem to like applying things when it helps them...but they somehow refuse to turn it internally. The wheels are fully fucked and they just somehow refuse to acknowledge it because they are in the most benefit.
Misinformation, disinformation, relaxing personal rights are all part of that.
@rusty__shackleford I've been doing it for so long that it's just become second nature. That said, I tend to keep to self-hosted technologies, but federation limits the amount of mitigation that that provides.
It doesn't help that my domain is derived from my government name.
We all have the self agency to be public online. Self hosted also changes things a bit as there is sovereignty there, as I am moreso referring to threat actors like bad service providers reading your personal messages, building advertising profiles surrounding the clicks and actions you take on their site, and in general, predatory behavior (also see LinkedIn, facebook, Google, etc etc.)
We also have the right to be anonymous, which opens up the other half of this discussion.
Is it ok that Google builds device/ browser/ app/ network fingerprints to build profiles around anonymous users to serve them targeted content? Is it ok that anonymous users don't have control of this?
If this was not ok just a decade ago, why are we ok with it now?
@rusty__shackleford Broadly speaking? For most people, the wall between online and offline life thinned and disappeared. There became more advantages to self-representing as who you were IRL than in keeping your dog-anonymity.
The threats didn't change, but the boons turned out to be huge. People collaborated online and that success transitioned to their real lives. Folks met other human beings in chat rooms and fell in love and got married. Bloggers parlayed their words into TED talks. People found business required them to represent themselves accurately for legal (or simple common human behavior in the offline business world) reasons. Facebook gave a generation of college students an opportunity to self-represent as themselves and their world didn't spontaneously combust as a result, on average (I think of all of these things, that's the one that had the largest impact on shifting online culture).
There's still an underground that stays anonymous, and God bless 'em. But as with most human societies throughout history, we tilted toward "reputation matters" and began to assume those who stay anonymous have something to hide that they don't want attached to their reputation, which is default-suspicious.
Disregards networks of trust. If this were the case, open source would have fallen apart decades ago.
Through networks and chains of trust we create an ecosystem without deanonymization.
If devs were forced to register government IDs and faces, the ecosystem and landscape would be vastly different.
Besides this, these are subjective perceived norms. Take note of how many Japanese interact with SNS & notoriety. Oftentimes covering their face, using pen names. Similarly to radio hosts.
While few may absolutely need this, as they market themselves as individual spearheads, see; Hideo Kojima, Cory Doctorow, etc.
The rest who appear in the credits may hide their presence, either by using a pseudonym; publicly or online.
Either way. The lack of separation between real life and the internet has not resulted in a boon for the majority of people, only for a very small percentage.
Meanwhile many doing real work remain anonymous, or at least attempt to.
For example, mathematicians have famously worked in anonymity, either by choice to avoid fame, through the use of pseudonyms, or by withdrawing from public life. Ex. the secret Bourbaki group, William Sealy Gosset, and Grigori Perelman, who solved the Poincare conjecture.
So broadly speaking, these parasocial walls have thinned for most people, at great cost, with little to no objective benefit to the masses.
I understand the sentiment. But our logic seems fucked.
Google openly admits to reading all of your email, meanwhile Android System SafetyCore is staring straight at your COCK.
Again. We have come an exceptionally long way in terms of how we approach the internet as individuals. The modern day shows a gross erosion between users trust, rise of complacency, and the unchecked abuse of power by service providers like Google.
@rusty__shackleford The most interesting thing, I think, is how little these facts have impacted the average person's day-to-day, and that's probably what matters most towards understanding how we shifted from online paranoia to online complacency.
Android System SafetyCore is AI-analyzing my dick pics, but unless that means they actually cancel my account, I don't have any reason to care and can barely subjectively perceive the fact. I have to go way out of my way to understand how a large and complicated machine works to even be aware of the fact unless someone brings it directly to my attention, and the immediate response that engenders in me is "And they seem to have been pretty good stewards of this intimate knowledge, since their scanning of it has caused me no issues."
@rusty__shackleford >The lack of separation between real life and the internet has not resulted in a boon for the majority of people, only for a very small percentage.
I mean, we could get hung up on the details of definitions here, but I think agree-to-disagree. Most white-collar jobs are connecting via LinkedIn now if they aren't using word-of-mouth and in-person handshakes. You're not using a pseudonym to communicate on LinkedIn.
Perhaps one could argue white-collar work is dwarfed by the kind of local blue-collar work that doesn't need a LinkedIn, but that's getting off into definitions.
Meanwhile many doing real work remain anonymous, or at least attempt to.
No disagreement there, and I didn't mean to imply that the non-anonymous Internet world is incompatible with the coexistence of the anonymous Internet world. Your point about open source is extremely solid (although I think we do know most of the names and identities of the most prolific contributors to the open source space, although that might be perception distortion; it's easier to know someone if they have a face, voice, and name tied to a reputation). But i don't know if I'd say the open source ecosystem is as large as, say, the Facebook userbase in terms of people.
Right right, I don't want to argue unnecessarily about semantics either, I do agree with many things you said. Everything is just a mess and I'm exacerbated at my lack of real options. Like many have said "I guess we are stuck with Google and LinkedIn despite the conditions"
*Big sigh
*Rubs temples
I just stopped smoking like two months ago lol
@rusty__shackleford Yeah, it's a hard ecosystem to escape. I don't trust Google nearly as much as I did when I worked for them, but wow am I disinterested in setting up my own email server. Especially since so many other servers out there will just refuse to transit my messages because the system (a) became a lot more complicated and (b) had to develop an ad-hoc web-of-trust architecture to compete with the threat of basically-unfettered spam.
(Quick plug: for Google Drive alternatives, I can give a soft recommendation to Sandstorm. It's not a drop-in replacement and you'll notice the performance difference, but as a personal cloud ecosystem, it's not bad at all!)
Yes, & that's what's crazy to me! Talking with a few people as I prepare to host myself & I have learned that even with a perfect set up, Google will still bin your messages to their spam folder!
I understand the reasons, but, coupled with the size of user bases, we have another potential 'Google & xmpp' scenario:
What if Google, Microsoft, & Apple "defederated" from the larger email ecosystem & encouraged others to join them? Forcing you to use their protocol, software, or services?
Seems like a ridiculous 'what if', but Google defederating from xmpp seemed just as ludicrous back then to users of xmpp.
@rusty__shackleford I concur that this is not an impossible scenario, although I think even they don't quite have the clout to make it happen; Amazon doesn't run its email on any of those servers, for starters.
But could the FAANGs hypothetically pull off some kind of sharding and create a sub-ecosystem on top of the open source implementations? I put it in the definite maybe category.
kajer :notverified:
Rusty Shackleford
vox
J4ck
Jonathan Lamothe
Mark T. Tomczak