What about a way to donate (held in reserve for that purpose?) money after the fact for specific commits, and then have a way to indicate which things you’d be most likely to donate to going forward if they are completed? This would mean less reliable payments since there wouldn’t be a guarantee any given contribution would result in a payout, but there wouldn’t be any disincentive to work on things and there would be a general idea of what donators want. Plus doing it that way would eliminate the need for a manual escrow process.

Even if they are trying to hack me it’s only polite. Plus on the very remote chance they somehow find this and care they would have slightly more info about me.

Tried setting this up, caught a few already

I’m not assuming that, I just don’t see why would it even matter if it’s from another instance.

Is it a mistake? Wouldn’t federated content still count the same way legally, since an instance is also a website?

What does that enable? Could people in states blocked by the main network use it through these?

How can you know the success is zero? Encryption is more widely used and much more resistant to political attack. Open source software is more powerful and accessible. A large portion of people loathe corporate tech platforms at a level they didn’t years ago. Granted a lot of that is just down to how functional or trustworthy the software is, and what guarantees about it can be plausibly provided, and it isn’t all wins. Maybe you can’t exactly get everyone caring about this stuff in the same way or for the same reasons you do. But that doesn’t mean there are no possible avenues to success, or that the tech habits of other groups can be written off as useless here, because it’s probably the most important thing.

Also if wifi mesh is our last hope, oof

Yeah. What I propose is getting more people involved and caring about freedom preserving technologies before it gets to that point. A tiny minority of somewhat more tech literate people are not going to be magically immune to authoritarian checkmate scenarios through technical solutions alone.

Are there now legal means to do longer range communications? I thought the main limitation was you need to be licensed to do anything more than short range home wifi

Thanks. Somehow the network actually seems to be working pretty well for me now, not sure why it wasn’t before.

Unless these companies are hosted in MS, have offices, or sell ads there, there’s nothing legally they can do.

Is that really how it works? Haven’t legal challenges to these sorts of laws already been appealed up to the supreme court and they were upheld?

I’ve tried a few times to check out i2p, it seems to take hours of leaving it running to even get to the point where you can very slowly and inconsistently load even the official pages though.

So far their efforts in various forms of voter suppression have prevented that, and at the same time more people equals more congressional seats.

Except if the topic is wifi meshnets, no amount of tech savvyness will get you around an absence of other nodes nearby. General apathy is actually a huge problem here.

In those cases it seems like the law does prevent state level regulation of those things, because the state is only allowed to regulate commerce happening within its borders, not what its residents do elsewhere (although they can still also regulate the use of fireworks and airguns, but enforcement is more difficult, for instance where I am they sometimes send out notices in the mail warning that it’s against the law for individuals to be setting off fireworks but there’s always a massive decentralized fireworks show every 4th of July anyway).

Somehow with the internet, the location of the server isn’t the thing that matters, it’s whose computer is accessing it and where that person and computer is located, and the liability is on the server not the user. IMO it should not work that way, because then every state with regressive politics has a stranglehold on the whole internet.

But the question is, what would be a reasonable legal principle for preventing such laws generally? Mississippi is going to pass bullshit laws, but it shouldn’t be possible for the jurisdiction of any state to be anything on the entire internet.

Doesn’t that game already have a “behavior score”?

Just like old web forums, how nostalgic

Complex requirements for social media websites to verify the identity of users, respond to spurious automated takedown requests, provide authorities with backdoors, etc. I think instead of explicit bans, it’s more likely they pass a regulations that are made for large websites with lawyers and algorithmic moderation, which are in practice not something fediverse instance operators can safely deal with and go against the basic values of the open internet.

Open source code doesn’t mean open API though. Bluesky seems to have made a whole thing out of their technical architecture, and I get the arguments that it’s centralized in practice, but wouldn’t it mean basically scrapping the whole thing to lock down third party clients? Even if that didn’t mean anything I think multiclients could be a good idea anyway, if people were using those and there was a Reddit situation, some portion of users would want to stay with the same clients rather than using whatever proprietary app they try to push.