Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youā€™ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last weekā€™s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    7Ā·
    5 months ago

    Interesting post and corresponding mastodon thread on the non-decentralised-ness of bluesky by cwebber.

    https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

    https://social.coop/@cwebber/113527462572885698

    The author is keen about this particular ā€œvision statementā€:

    Preparing for the organization as a future adversary.

    The assumption being, stuff gets enshittified and how might you guard your product against the future stupid and awful whims of management and investors?

    Of course, they donā€™t consider that it cuts both ways, and Jack Dorseyā€™s personal grumbles about Twitter. The risk from his point of view was the company he founded doing evil unthinkable things like, uh, banning nazis. Heā€™s keen for that sort of thing to never happen again on his platforms.

    • skry@mastodon.social
      2Ā·
      5 months ago

      @rook @techtakes Dorsey is off the board now, as of this month I think.

      I read that posts on BlueSky are permanently stored in a blockchain, which, if true, would put me off.

      • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
        4Ā·
        5 months ago

        Iā€™m aware he isnā€™t there now, but it bears remembering that he was there at the beginning when these goals were being shaped, and as we have seen with twitter thereā€™s nothing to stop him coming back, even if nostr is his new best friend for now.

        I read that posts on BlueSky are permanently stored in a blockchain,

        So, this is complex and hard to find concrete information on, but:

        1. Bluesky use a merkle tree based things. Donā€™t call em blockchainā€¦ thatā€™s the sort of thing cryptocurrency boosters want so as to present their technologies are useful.
        2. Posts are stored in a merkle search tree, but attachments are stored separately. Attached blobs (like images) can be (and are) deleted independently of the tree nodes which reference them.
        3. The merkle trees are independent and can be modified without having to rewrite the whole history of every post on bluesky, because there isnā€™t one central official ledger of all posts.

        From blueskyā€™s own (non technical) blurb on the subject,

        it takes a bit longer for the text content of a post to be fully deleted in storage. The text content is stored in a non-readable form, but it is possible to query the data via the API. We will periodically perform back-end deletes to entirely wipe this data.

        The merkle trees are per-user, which makes history-modifying operations like rebasing practicalā€¦ this facility apparently landed last summer, eg. Intention to remove repository history. Flagging tree nodes as deleted, and then actually destroying them in a series of later operations (rebase, then garbage collection) would explain the front end respecting deletions but lower-level protocols showing older state for a little while.