Yeah, I’ll look whether this event was followed up with consequences like that. I also appreciate the clarifications in db0’s post.

I’m not sure whether I agree with your position. I don’t think so. I use LLMs myself. And I think summaries is kind of a weak spot for them. I’ve read too many LLM summaries of journalistic writings, scientific papers, mundane emails etc. And frankly speaking, they’re basically all riddled with inaccuracies. In some instances the AI entirely misses the point. But as a minimum, it removes nuance. Which is kind of a decisive factor here. So I think it’s a bad use case for chatbots. They’ll underperform at summarizing a user’s comment history and then giving some moral judgement. Especially in more complicated cases. Which would be when a mod wants to use a tool like this. I didn’t do the maths on it, but I think it’s set up for failure. And it’s a bit unfair since only prosecution gets that tool. That’s not how our real-world justice systems work, which are way more nuanced, for good reasons.

And the other way round, with the AI making out the targets and a human doing the final decision doesn’t really work for me either. It’s a bit complicated to come up with the ethics. At some point, you’re in the territory of what Palantir wants to sell to your police department for predictive policing. I think it’s deeply problematic, and closer to some fascist dystopia than to anarchism?! I mean detail really matters here and how it’s set up. In itself, force intensifiers and predictive policing, don’t get along well with anarchy. My opinion.

And we have strategies like “grounding” LLM output. But that wasn’t what was done here at all. The LLM was fed a lot of text and then given room to speculate. Which is pretty much the opposite of preventing faults.

But that’s not my main point. Which is: I use this place as a retreat from all the algorithm-fueled platforms, full of bots and ulterior motives. They all want to sell me something. Manipulate me into buying their products, ideology… And I just don’t like it. They’re full of intransparent procedures, fabricated activity to steer something for somebody else’s sake… And I don’t want this platform to become like that. I think the Fediverse is the remaining retreat for genuine human conversation. I’d love if we were the ones who treat each other as humans, with respect. And not throw each other into some kind of machinery. That’s why I don’t fancy LLMs becoming part of it. We already struggle to not drown in noise, mass re-posters and agitated people.

I agree, “assign blame” isn’t a useful goal. And I don’t really care about your opinion on me. All I care for this moment is my opinion on you. Like if you’re indifferent towards abuse, or how you deal with it once it happens. If you have the same concept of what constitutes unacceptable behaviour. So I can judge if I want to be on the same party as you. My first attempt a few days ago were met by several people from the FAF side, who all(?) refuted all my arguments and they said I consented to everything, including what I think is abuse, just on the basis I participate on a public internet platform. Which was kind of a very negative experience for me, because I don’t think I need any “friends” (or internet platforms) like that. The rest of the people here don’t seem to be interested in engaging with me either, other than make allegations, downvote and leave. But now I talked to db0 and you and it seems some people have a bit of a perspective. So thanks for sharing yours. I just don’t know if I’m compatible with the majority / more vocal part of the userbase here.

Can I ask some more questions?

What’s the stance on popular votes? B/c some other people I know, they don’t really fancy democracy as in: majority rule. It’s a complicated matter (in reality) though.

And coming back to the question I wrote a few comments earlier: What’s a moderators role? I guess I’d view it as some form of effective mild(?) hierarchical(?) or better: organizational position, as a mod gets extra tools and gets to …well… moderate people’s conversations. Are they bound to represent their community? I mean if they’re part of some form of radical recall as well, they kinda represent/or speak for the group with what they’re doing. Reason I ask is your post. And one individual connecting LLMs to mod decisions in their role as a moderator. Is that on them as an individual? Or do I get to apply the anarchist philosophy in reverse and blame the group of people standing behind their spokesperson for doing it in their name?

Sorry if my phrasing is a bit weird. Genuinely trying to make sense of it and what I’d like to think about the FAF’s methodology.

Talking about shifting goalposts… I’m far more interested in an opinion on the longer paragraph I wrote. Arguing about words regularly doesn’t get you anywhere.

I’d say Anarchy is a hierarchy. A flat one. But we can also stick with hierarchies being vertical, and Anarchy is not part of that.

And I’ve been in real-world groups of people with flat hierarchies. It’s fairly easy in those: It’s EVERYBODY’s responsibility in that case. If you’re doing an illegal anarchist rave in the woods and you see someone spike the drinks… Or the person who sells nasty adulterated drugs shows up… You know that guy but they found some new innocent people… Well… You better do something about it, whoever you are. Or everyone who knew, watched and let it happen is to be blamed. Because there is no other host you could shift blame to. It’s now become your moral obligation.

Hmmh. I mean I don’t exactly know the hierarchies on dbzer0 regarding those kinds of smaller/quicker decisions. Guess what I wanted to say is more or less: If you have instance rules, or a collective stance/policy on things, you better enforce them. Or they’re meaningless. I just replied to this post because you summed it up. Other than that, whatever floats your boat.

Thanks for the clarification.

To add a few of my personal remarks: I think as an instance / admin (team) you bear some kind of responsibility for your users and mods. I mean you provide a stage to them. And federate that out to other instances. It’s a bit unfortunate if mods use instances for experiments that are against instance rules, or they use it to call people names… I mean if your staff knows this is going on, you kinda need to step in. You can’t say our staff is against it. But we gladly let our mods do it. …So I appreciate the clarification.

And with the public data… Well, technically almost everything is public data on the Fediverse. So people could make a point for arbitrary positions. It’s more a unwritten social agreement how we don’t sell user data to Google or use it for nefarious purposes. I think we’re more or less trying to do what’s right to do. Not just look at the designation of an activity. The majority of users here probably didn’t mean to consent to abuse. That’s why we’re here, and not on Reddit.

The Anti-CSAM filter is great work. That’s a very welcome use of machine learning. At least in my opinion.

I feel the majority of it isn’t really Android, but some Google Apps… Google Camera, Instagram, Find hub… RCS messages aren’t in AOSP either… The threat detection will be inside of the Google services… So I won’t get most of this on my phone. And I wonder if OS verification and hardware isolation are features to protect my security, or whether that’s to safeguard some DRM stuff and whatever some dubious app developers don’t want me to touch on my own phone.

… don’t forget about the backups.

And if your major issue is putting things in wrong locations… Maybe learn about some abstraction layers, so next time you’re able to just move it, instead of tearing it down?

Maybe don’t learn all of it at the same time, or you’re bound to get confused and mix up whether some concept was from Dart, Python or one of the several frameworks.

Sure. I should have phrased it a bit differently. My point was more or less, why is the curl developer’s review of the performance in a hypothetical scenario a decisive factor here… That feels like super random information. Same with the other two people. I’m fairly sure this is true and all… There’s just no context given, nor is there a connection being made between the statements and the rest of the content of the article.

Lmao. Just add a big RELEVANCE? I mean why do they cite 3 random people’s opinion on random aspects of the entire concept? It’s supposed to be an encyclopedia, not a blog post…

Totally agree. First of all with the Linux vs Meme… Yeah, we’re all living in more than one dimension. Guess I more or less wanted to say, most helpful advice I got on what non-spec combinations of RAM and computers work etc… I got from Reddit. I think it’s a bit an amount of users thing.

I’m also for human connection. I’m also here to talk to people. Especially in the comments. Also why I sometimes disagree with people on what the Threadiverse needs more of.

With the pamphlet bombings… Well, the internet changed a lot in my lifetime. We had times we thought it was a bit unethical to do statistics on what software you install, hence what packages in Debian are installed how many times. As a more privacy-oriented person you were told to just put it out there and not worry about collecting that kind of data… Or just write your Blog mainly for yourself and maybe some people will like it as well. I think as of today, that’s very niche way of thinking. Thanks to the advertising industry, we need exact page impressions. And everyone expects social media to come with all these engagement metrics, how many people saw the post… Not only professional “influencers”. I’ve heard random people will also have a look at the numbers. And your local youth organization also wants to know about the propagation of their invitation to the summer party. What the algorithm does to their posts, etc… Just counting how many people showed up isn’t how communication works any more. At least in my experience.

I’ve upheld the opinion, the change in the MAU is probably a rough indicator on our attractiveness. If a place is nice, people will come and want to join the party. But it’s a bit of a diffuse metric and doesn’t tell anything in specific. Plus it’s not the only factor.

If my quickly written down SQL query is right, those are the numbers for the last month from my instance’s perspective (my subscribed communities):

 num_comments | upvotes_on_posts | downvotes_on_posts | num_posts 
--------------+------------------+--------------------+-----------  
       188597 |          1646685 |              46461 |     13928  

So without the boosts, it’d be a total score of 135.

I guess with statistics, you’d always better ask a very specific question. I mean, these are just numbers, I guess? And if you’re fixing an old Linux computer, there is no point in lots of people commenting on meme posts. You want the one person who’s done this before to be part of the network, read your post and then reply… Or if you want to discuss politics, all the people re-posting the news articles on geopolitics don’t really count, you’ve already read the newspaper, now you’d like nuanced opinions in the comments. I’m a bit unsure whether a single abstract number means anything.

For the health of the overall network, I think MAU isn’t even all that bad. There’s probably a strong connection between “health” of a place, and how many people think it’s worth subscribing and then coming back on a regular basis.

Just read the robots.txt and obey the rules. Also set your user agent string properly. We’ve had crawlers forever on the internet and that’s the long accepted way to give consent or revoke consent, for website owners. Either you match a disallow directive and need to stop. Or you’re completely fine to scrape it.

Thanks. Sadly I can’t even get the latest version to work. It does find the other peer and loads the chat interface, but doesn’t open a data channel, so it’ll say “not connected” and do an error popup everytime I try to send a message. And I’ve spend enough time debugging it for now.

Just some general words of my wisdom: I think software projects are first and foremost about focus. I don’t really know what you’re trying to do here. If that’s writing a cryptography library, I think focus is about right. You first need to lay down the design properly. Make sure you factor in advanced tech like formal proofs from the start. After that you need to write the actual code. And then also make sure it aligns with your testing. I mean it’s fairly common to make mistakes while writing computer code, or have bugs… And any of those could render your more formal methods useless. For example like that one time when some Debian package always sent the same random number as a seed… That meant the algorithms were 100% correct. Just used in a wrong way so most of the encryption was futile. Things like that require an equal amount of focus. If not more, since we already know how Double ratchet works, the important part is to implement it correctly and use it correctly. That deserves a massive amount of focus (and effort). It’s also the major part of a security audit of a software project as a whole.

We also have things like sidechannel-attacks, which aren’t covered. But I think that’s a minor thing with what we’re looking at.

And if you’re trying to develop a chat app, Your focus probably needs to be somewhere aimed to make it work, first. Make it connect reliably and across a multitude of devices. Cryptography is pretty much dispensable at that step. Then focus on the UX. Make sure it’s not vulnerable to just bypass any subsequent encryption because for example you don’t have script nonces and everyone in the chat can inject JavaScript and just bypass your entire encryption.
Think about metadata and if your software product wants to address that. You could be doing encrypted messages but all kinds of third parties know who is talking to whom… Make sure you do what your users expect!

And I think that’s also the reason for some of the downvotes here. You have a narrow focus on the formal proof of your encryption algorithm. While your audience probably expects a working Chat app. For all they care it could be entirely unencrypted in the alpha version, and encryption comes in a later version. We as users need something that works in the first place. We want to know what happens to our metadata. If there’s security vulnerabilities in the software. And once all of that is in place, then we start to worry about the specifics of the end-to-end-encryption.

Probably also related to the AI-slop argument. I don’t really know what shaped your focus. But it must look to your audience like you’re deep in some singular rabbit hole, because you write about formal proofs a lot. But then there’s this huge disparity with what your audience assumes you’re doing, or what you have to show off. Just my opinion. But it’s kinda like that for me. You write about how great AI assisted coding is, and where it led you. But then I try to use your software. And it doesn’t even connect. And that really shapes my first impression of it all, in a very negative way. I mean… If we hadn’t talked, I would have just assumed your cryptography is on the same level as your code to do the peer connections. And that wasn’t a good first impression.

Sorry, I just saw the recommendations. I’m using a Matrix server myself. And it’s connected to the internet, since I use it 24/7 and on my phone, etc.

I guess technically, most protocols can be used in an internal network. But maybe you’ll need to put in some extra effort, for example if a platform requires SSL certificates or something like that.

I mean you could try… If it asks for a hostname, just put a local hostname in. Or the IP address. Or set up a DNS entry on the router. And see if it works.

Or try something like RocketChat, or depending how your team’s workflow is, maybe you don’t want a messenger. But some (online) collaboration platform more focused on documents, like Nextcloud.

I think the added benefit of an OpenWRT router is, you get 3 more ports (for your TV, Playstation and PC), plus a Wifi network. And it’s really hard to break it. But a MiniPC with OPNsense, of course will be more powerful. And some more advanced things have been notoriously difficult to set up in OpenWRT, maybe OPNsense does it a bit better.

I think some people here recommended Snikket. It’s supposed to be easy to install and modern. I don’t know what components it’s made up of. It’s a dockerized XMPP server + Apps.

To give some perspective: BitTorrent was released in 2001. So in the 90s, you’d be looking at some precursor to that. And the first CD recorder to cost less than $1000 was sold in 1995. Before that, they’d cost something like a car.

We definitely shared and copied a lot of floppy disks back then. And music on tapes.