But accounts are already pseudonymous?

Here’s where I am at:

I can check if my votes are federated correctly by checking if any of my votes are suppressed or votes in my name are made up. If my instance sends a different random token with each vote, I can still do that, as long as I know which tokens are assigned to my votes.

But vote tallies can also be manipulated by making up new votes through fake/bot accounts. If a vote can be connected to posts, this can be checked to some degree. Say, if an instance has a lot of voters that never post, that indicates a problem.

I don’t see how the second thing with E2EE.

Wait. What is the relation to vote federation?

It’s doable with E2E encryption,

How?

Federation requires openness and that goes badly with secrecy. You can argue that one has to trust instance owners anyway, but knowing the users and not just the tallies makes uncovering manipulation easier.

Alternate history: Bluesky never happens. Instead, some company opens up a Mastodon instance as a Twitter replacement. So instead of Bluesky with 12M+ users, there’s a Mastodon instance with 12M+ users. Now what?

[Edit: I see the problem, even with a self-hosted instance of 1, when you comment on posts in other instances that data is no longer held on your server, so you don’t own it and can’t control it directly, is that right?]

Not quite. It’s more like Bluesky works, but also not quite.

First, a note on the idea of “your” data. The law gives people rights over certain data. For example, copyright gives people rights over certain content, which translates to rights over data encoding that content. You may think of a movie as being yours because you have the file on your device. The copyright holder still considers it their data and will therefore demand control over your device through DRM.

Rights over data always means rights over what other people do with their computers and devices. Unfortunately, Fediverse users are not very tech-savvy. They demand more rights and regulations and then condemn Big Tech for the predictable consequences. They pull on one end of the string and blame dark powers when the other end moves.

The European GDPR also creates rights over certain data. You have GDPR rights over all data that is directly or indirectly related to you. For example, if I write about the current French President, then Emmanuel Macron has GDPR rights over that data, even if I don’t mention him by name. Of course, his rights will be limited by freedom of information. Also, these rights are rarely recognized outside of Europe.

What legal rights you have over data depends on your location. Copyright is internationally recognized, but its precise reach depends on location; eg the US has Fair Use. Even at a specific location, those rights depend on context, with a lot of gray area. This cannot be implemented technically.

With Lemmy it’s like this: When a user on an instance subscribes to a community, all (recent-ish) posts and comments in that community are downloaded to that instance. Users on that instance are served from their own instance.

Generally, a Fediverse instance keeps a copy of whatever data its local users might need. If your instance was the only source for some data, then every user in the whole world needing it would have to access your server every time they want it. Every user whether registered or unregistered would hit your server every time they reload. If a server buckles under the strain, you just get missing data. It just wouldn’t scale.

Bluesky has Personal Data Servers (PDSs) for that role. Those are the definitive store of some user’s data. This can be self-hosted easily. The data from all users is aggregated by a “relay”, If a PDS is like a personal web server, then a relay is like a search engine. That’s the one that you can’t self-host; takes big time capital expenditure.

I don’t think the Fediverse has a solution for this. Imagine Mastodon or Lemmy with 100M+ users. How do you find stuff? Well, making a crawler and search engine for the Fediverse would be simple. But that would also take major capital expenditure.

The Bluesky relay combines all activity into the “firehose”. Anyone can write apps that get data from the firehose and present them to users. When Bluesky blocked Mississippi, that meant that the official Bluesky App did that. Other Apps still work in that state.

Final bit: When you self-host, you need to be your own legal department. When you use a service, you are shielded to some degree. Eg when you infringe copyright, a social media service will usually just take it down. If you infringe copyright on your web server, or even via torrent, you may get a pretty hefty bill.

Fedi-users cheer when Meta gets sued or settled with a huge fine. Well, good luck running your own Facebook server. Fedi-users mostly aren’t very tech-savvy but when it gets to law, they are positively delusional.

Be strong now. Mastodon is a gGmbH. That’s the German version and translates to public benefit limited liability corporation.

Maybe a little, but it’s like spitting in the ocean. The SEO people are now targeting genAI; calling it GEO. They might be able to help you. Take other suggestions with a grain of salt. People who hate technology are generally not very good with it.

Lotsa questions. I’ll give brief answers that will be a little incomplete.

Why is mining a nessecary part? Is it only to keep the quantity of units in circulation in check? And why is that nessecary?

Transactions need to be recorded so that it is known who controls how many crypto coins. This service needs to be paid. That is done by creating new coins or alternatively by subtracting a fee from transactions. Creating new coins has the advantage that it spreads coins to people with a stake in the success of the cryptocurrency. If there was only a fee, then you would have to find some other way to get coins to the people wanting to use them.

Crypto is for transferring money outside the banking system and thus beyond the reach of the law. People buy and sell crypto coins for that purpose.

The value of coins depends on how much money people want to transfer and how many coins are on the market. If people want to transfer $10M and there are 10M coins available, then the price of a coin is $1. If there are only 5M coins, then the price is $1. People wanting to transfer money do not need to consider the price. If you want to transfer $20, you buy that amount of coins. It does not matter how many coins that is.

When miners sell new coins, that causes a little bit of inflation. That way, real money is transferred from the users to the miners. If someone holds a large amount of coins, they can extract a lot of money without having to do anything. So people will not be very keen on promoting that currency because that person can skim off the gains. That means it’s simply preferable to slowly introduce new coins to a wide audience.

People who “invest” in crypto cause a bit of deflation. They spread real money to the users but there is no actual value created.

Removing coins from circulation increases the price in a purely mechanical way. If the price rises further, they are able to make a profit by selling the coins and skimming off money from the users. That does create an incentive to promote that crypto coin. That’s why we are seeing so much crypto spam.

It’s not necessary for adoption to increase to see a profit. If other people can be convinced to buy and hold coins, then the price increases mechanically. This makes it possible to skim off more money from actual users than was spread to them by buying the coins. Obviously, that’s economically nonsense. It’s another fatal design flaw.

instead of proof of busywork? Why does it need to be so wasteful of electricity?

The record of transactions, the ledger, is public and unprotected. You could have different, competing versions of that record. The version that is adopted by the majority is adopted as the correct one. This creates a problem. It would be possible to spam the system with lots of copies of a fraudulent record. Proof of work mitigates that risk. Originally, it was an idea to combat email spam by increasing the cost of sending each mail.

A more efficient alternative would be to only allow a limited number of known entities to keep the ledger. If they attempt manipulation, they can be prosecuted for fraud. That’s basically the banking system.

But the whole point of crypto is not to do that. If governments could prosecute the people involved, then they could also be made to crack down on ransomware, drug dealing, tax evasion, and so on.

A more crypto-compatible scheme is proof of stake. Miners have to put up a certain amount of cryptocurrency as a stake. If other miners find that one is not following the rules, then they can be fined. Also, because they own a substantial amount of currency, they can be assumed not to act in ways that harms the network. That would lower the price of their crypto.

Why is it so slow? Will it ever be as fast and cheap as an osko payment?

The overhead necessary to avoid law enforcement means that it will always be slower and more expensive than mainstream systems.

Bitcoin, in particular, is just not suited for such wide adoption. It’s actually amazing how well it does actually work, considering its humble origins. Because of the amount of money that rests on its reputation and its decentralized nature, it is extremely difficult to get people to agree on updates.

Is there an equivalent fixed amount of USD that is in circulation?

No. Money is created every time someone takes out a loan and destroyed when it gets paid back. Physical currency (called central bank money) is manufactured as needed.

It’s really clever. I also think it was unintentional. They did not want to create a money laundering tool but a currency in its own right. That failed.

Also, this scheme only works with money involved. The miners run the system, and they get paid by creating new coins. If they cannot sell the coins to cover their costs, then there is no blockchain.

Besides money laundering, you mean? Not as such.

Merkle Trees were thought up in the 70ies or so. A blockchain is a Merkle Tree without branches. They are used in a number of application; for example git which predates bitcoin.

The actual innovation behind bitcoin is mining. A payment system needs someone who runs it. Bitcoin introduced a way for these people to get paid by creating new currency for themselves. That way, there is no single entity in charge. There is no contractual relation that would require government enforcement.

If a Merkle Tree is the only thing a blockchain is to you, then it has legit uses. But that was already widely used before a simplified version became called blockchain.

If you’re thinking about a bitcoin-type blockchain, then evading government oversight is its sole use. The technical overhead and the economic inefficiencies exist only to obscure identities and legal responsibilities.

An EU resident could sue for emotional damages under the GDPR. Or maybe just complain to data protection authorities.

One day it will happen.

It was something like mashed pumpkin. I forget the exact variety.

I was for dinner at some friend’s place. He gives me a bit of that pumpkin stuff, saying I have to taste it because it turned out so great. It was left-overs from the previous day. I take a spoon and it tastes absolutely rotten. Well, ok. He is trying his best to be an amateur chef, but I do have doubts about some of his culinary judgments. So, I put on the polite face and just eat it.

After a few spoons, I can’t take it anymore. I say: “Sorry, this tastes absolutely rotten.” He tastes of it, nods and hurries out the room to throw it away. So yeah. I ate spoiled food. I didn’t get sick but I haven’t eaten pumpkin since. The taste really stayed with me.

Like Nethack?

Or Angband?

It’s complicated…

Some compare it to the surface of a balloon. Mark 2 points on the surface. When you blow it up, they will become further apart. A 2-dimensional creature on that surface would see their universe expanding.

That 2D creature would not be able to visualize the surrounding 3D world anymore than we are able to imagine more than 3 dimensions. It might dream of taking a short-cut to the other side of the balloon by building a bridge through the center. That’s the Sci-Fi fantasy of hyperspace travel.

Mind that scientists don’t believe that the universe is like a 3D balloon. A balloon has a closed surface. You can go round and get back to where you started. The universe is thought to be more like a flat rubber sheet being stretched where no one can see the edges.

You might now wonder what kind of high-dimensional space the universe exists in. But even that may be a completely wrong way to think about it. This universe is all we know and have ever experienced. Worse. We evolved in it. We are absolutely constrained.

Let’s take a little detour through Einstein’s relativity. Imagine a spaceship travelling at close to the speed of light. It flashes its headlights. The light moves on ahead of the ship at, of course, the speed of light.

So here’s the thing to break your mind:

You look at this from the outside. You see the ship moving at close to the speed of light and the flash slowly gaining distance. The ship is almost as fast as the light, right?

You look at this from the inside. You see the flash of light moving ahead at… the speed of light. You don’t see it moving just a little faster than your own spaceship.

Everyone, everywhere, always sees light moving at the speed of light. The person in the spaceship sees the flash moving away at the speed of light. The person outside, at relative rest, sees the distance between the flash and the ship increasing only slowly.

How can this work? Well, time needs to pass slower on the spaceship relative to somewhere at relative rest. That’s what time is relative means. There are more things that need to give way, like space/distances.

Intuitively, we think of time and space as absolutes but it is not so. Light is an electromagnetic wave. So we might think that it behaves like a soundwave or an ocean wave. Not so. The speed of light is fundamental and time and space are built on it.

Actually, the speed of light is the speed at which electromagnetic phenomena spread. We believe it is the general top speed of things happening in the universe. When you move a magnet, then the magnetic field around it moves. But this movement spreads only at the speed of light. The gravitational field around it also moves, but also only with a delay given by the speed of light.

Let’s go back closer to home. Everything consists of atoms. Atoms have a positively charged nucleus and a negatively charged shell of electrons. What keeps the nucleus and shell together is electromagnetism. The reason you can’t walk through walls is that equal charges repel. Electromagnetism is how our reality is solid.

We intuitively think of everything as space with stuff in it. But that is a playing field created by electromagnetism and a bunch of other things.

This view obviously starts breaking down when we go away from what we are used to. At large scales and high speeds, you have to think in terms of relativity. At very small scales, it gets quantum. Stuff only has a location, speed, or other properties in interaction with other stuff.

Quantum theory and relativity contradict each other, but also are completely accurate as far as anyone can measure. The conditions where they’d contradict each other exist around a black hole or maybe at the beginning of the universe.

Let’s get back to the question…

You ever use a spray can for a while and notice that it gets cold? That’s how a fridge works. And also our universe.

When everything was closer together, the universe was hotter. About 13.8 billion years ago, it was white-hot glowing plasma. Plasma means that the atoms bump into each other so hard that they knock off the electron shells of each other. When there was enough room/the universe had cooled enough, this stopped.

The light of that is what we now see as the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR). When that light started out, all those billions of years ago, it was quite close to us. But the universe expanded and so it had to travel a long way, eventually. The expansion of the universe also caused the wavelength to become larger. The wavelength expanded like any other length. So instead of light (nanometer wavelength) we now have microwave radiation (micrometer wavelength).

When we look out from earth, we don’t just see into the distance. We see into the past. That glowing plasma is opaque to light, so that’s as far back as we can see. It’s the edge of the observable universe, but it’s not a barrier to which you could travel. It’s in the past.

We assume, and it appears to be true, that the laws of nature and thus the speed of light, are the same everywhere. That means that the edge of the observable universe is a sphere around us.

As far as we can tell, every point in space expands equally. The CMBR comes uniformly from everywhere. We don’t know what this expansion means or why it happens. We only know that we can explain the observable universe with the Big Bang Theory. Maybe it’s just some fudge we are stuck with, because we can only think in terms of time and space.

Yes. It’s easier said than done. I often find myself thinking, I could do more to make my country better.

But I am just too irritated by the selfishness and privilege on display. Just relocating to a nicer country is an option that 99% do not have. You need to be young and well-educated, or be relatively wealthy. Otherwise, a rich country will simply not have you.

At the same time, those who can just pick up and leave are the same people who are most able to change things for the better. Americans are not risking their lives by speaking up. The rule of law is mostly being followed. Democratically elected representatives hold power.

Freedom and life can be taken from us, but never honor. -Otto Wels, 1933, in the final session of the elected german parliament.

You’re ignorant of history and that’s a problem.

There were fewer than 500,000 jewish Germans in 1933. That’s less than 1% of the population.

The millions who were murdered were mainly citizens of Poland and the Soviet Union. If the nations of Western Europe had prepared themselves better for war and fought with more tenacity, millions would have lived.

The absolute disaster that the Wehrmacht inflicted on the Soviet Union is largely the result of Stalin’s defects. Dictators are bad; an obvious lesson. A less obvious lesson comes from the Generalplan Ost. The Nazis wanted to murder much of the population east of Germany; Poles, Czecks, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians, and others. Many tens of millions of individual human beings were to be killed, mainly through hunger. Then the territory was to be settled by Germans, That’s the whole Lebensraum thing.

Where should all these people have gone?

That’s why the Ukrainians today don’t have a choice. Putin wants to eradicate the ukrainian ethnicity. We know that. We don’t know how many people he is willing to murder; to physically eradicate. Would you take the chance?

In 1939, immediately before WW2 and the holocaust, the MS St. Louis sailed with 900 jewish refugees from Nazi Germany to Cuba. But Cuba refused to take them in, as it had just hardened its laws. The ship sailed to Canada and the USA, but they, too, refused. Something, something, race.

Eventually, the UK, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands took pity on these people and gave them shelter. Obviously, many of those on the continent were murdered in the Holocaust.

Where do you think 65 million US Latinos will go? They live in the US and they will die in the US. One way or the other.

Cut the histrionics. Americans aren’t being massacred. They are only asked to go to some minor inconvenience to uphold their country’s democracy.

The distance between Chicago and Las Vegas is greater than between Berlin and the Russian front line in Ukraine. Are Germans supposed to feel pity for you poor darlings?

Non-Muricans, what’s the thought on accepting US refugees?

Stand and fight, you cowards.

That’s no moon.