@ebel @mayel @alanz @cykros

not even convinced it's centralisation that's the core problem; i mean savannah is a silo, the debian repos are a centralised resource …

the problem's capitalism, as usu, corporatisation rather than centralisation

@gracie I broadly agree. But it wouldn't it be cool if there were software/technical solutions which made corporations unable to mess things up.

e.g. Copyright has problems, and copyleft is a "solution" to some of those problems.

@ebel yep the gpl has been an extraordinarily successful weapon for us; i think we need more than technical solutions tho—people like gmail the same way people like levis and cocacola

@gracie like, I know that most of this is a social problem, not a technical problem.

*But* when you phrase it another way, there *might* be a technical solution! And the geek in me likes this. 🙂

@ebel you got me thinking tho

remember google wave? why did they kill it, because it wasn't the facebook they were looking for? maybe; it turned out to be a great way of organising activist communities (in which capacity it abides)

power, capital and monopoly

@gracie who knows why Google cancel things

@ebel call it tinfoil but i reckon they realised they couldn't control it

shoutout to comune collective's kune

@bob @cykros @alanz @mayel @ebel
it's centralized in the sense we're talking; imagine what a federated repo would look like

@gracie @bob IMO debian repos *are* federated. You can set up your own mirror and sync from the main one. If it goes down you can use another mirror. Local groups can (and do) use their own mirror.

Now imagine what a p2p system would look like, where everyone running apt was also part of the swarm. That's the counter-anti-disintermediatisation

@ebel @bob mirroring isn't federation, there's still central control; who signs packages?

facebook isn't federated just because it has cdn failover

distributed storage isn't distributed power

@bob @ebel the mirrored data has to be identical else checksums fail; it's resistant to being taken down, that's all—it's not federation but a more robust form of centralisation

which is not something i'm against; it's a question of ownership of the means of production

@gracie @ebel @mayel @alanz @cykros The way I see it is that no matter how distributed the technology is, we'll still get centralization of effort like with Debian or Savannah. Those are groups of people working for a common cause and sharing the same infrastructure to do so (a.k.a. crowdsourcing).

It's when you centralize for other reasons that the bad incentives kick in.

@alcinnz @ebel @mayel @alanz @cykros totally agree, solidarity is good, we need it to fight a centralised foe

@alcinnz @gracie @ebel @mayel @alanz

The big difference there is, they're open standards. As such, any Debian contributor could choose to take what's been made, fork it, and make something out of it (such as Devuan, Ubuntu, or any of the derivative distributions), regardless of what the community wants to do. That is decidedly not true of centralized projects such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. One takes contributions and puts them in a pool, the other takes contributions and locks them up.

@cykros @alcinnz @gracie @ebel @alanz

That's right, I think our minds have been hijacked a bit, and we focus on this centralised/decentralised dichotomy, when we have more important problems such as profiteering, exploitation, surveillance, etc (which, yes, decentralisation *can* help us combat)

@mayel @cykros @gracie @ebel @alanz

Very true. Going decentralized (federated or better distributed) is great, but we must remember the cause we're doing it for.

Cryptocurrencies meanwhile tend to be the extreme of forgetting the cause: they (with few exceptions) just make the privacy problem worse at the cost of slow performance.

@alcinnz @mayel @cykros @gracie @ebel @alanz There only needs to be one exception, and there are several. Zcash, Zclassic, and Monero come immediately to mind. I imagine there are others.

@seanl @mayel @cykros @gracie @ebel @alanz GNU Talor is the one I like to follow, as I like it's simplicity. But at the same time it's not really a cryptocurrency is it merely exchanges value, not holds it.

Then there's coins like FileCoin that actually attempt to solve actual problems other than the financial. In that case it's getting initial distribution of IPFS documents.

@seanl @alcinnz @mayel @gracie @ebel @alanz

Likewise on the matter of slow performance and scaling, some perform better than others (with Ethereum's projected move to Proof of Stake and Bitcoin's move to the Lightning network being huge examples). This is why there are so many cryptocoins; those that don't keep up will surely not be around in 10 years; those that define success may end up reshaping society in ways not yet contemplated. The sure thing for now is that it will be turbulent.

@cykros @seanl @mayel @gracie @ebel @alanz And GNU Talor attains performance by realizing federation is enough, if when you're getting censored you can go elsewhere.

I was trying to be careful not to disparage all cryptocurrencies, just most of them.

@alcinnz @cykros @seanl @gracie @ebel @alanz

It's Taler with an e for anyone trying to look it up: https://taler.net/en/

Last time I checked it had been in development for years but not ready. Know if there's any news?

@mayel @cykros @seanl @gracie @ebel @alanz Sorry, I don't.

@mayel @cykros @seanl @gracie @ebel @alanz Looking at https://git.taler.net/ it's still being very actively developed, and they've got a demo. I don't know how that compares to the last time you've checked.

@alcinnz @cykros @seanl @gracie @ebel @alanz

Thanks! I'm happy to see that :) I will have to explore Taler more in depth then. It may just be a good building block for a couple project I'm working on (http://ora.network/ and http://www.creditcommons.net/)

@mayel Neat ideas!

I'm just left wondering on Ora, what if I'm doing (eventually) paid work contributing to the commons? Because that's what I've been doing today.

@alcinnz

Well that's the ideal scenario (but too rare!)

It doesn't have to be exclusive of course, you can be rewarded simultaneously through #Ora, karma, good vibes, reputation, and yes, money. The point is to reduce the power of money in dictating our choices ("would love to work on that #FOSS project, but gotta pay the bills...")

@mayel This is certainly an issue for me right now (though I don't expect Ora to help in this case). I've just graduated university and am looking for work. So not having an income yet is really guiding my choices.

On the other hand I am getting contracts, of which the one I referred to is in helping a Gazateer project communicate more info using it's visualizations. I'm just now really getting somewhere. https://github.com/alcinnz/skos-cloud

@alcinnz

Good luck! I've been in the same situation and ended up mostly freelancing rather than taking jobs. Been at it for years, it's not easy but I wouldn't trade the freedom for anything!

That sounds like an interesting project. I used d3 myself for visualising a knowledge graph on https://haha.academy/ a couple weeks ago, that was fun!

@mayel Thanks, it's nice to hear from someone who's been on that road.

Now I just need to start filing some paperwork so my government stops threatening to drop the subsidy I've been living on unless I do an apple packing job rather than these contracts.

@alanz @ebel @gracie @mayel @seanl @cykros

ASIDE: It looks to me like GNU Taler has a clear path to success. They can start by helping people cope with the craziness of cryptocurrencies whilst maintaining privacy, before maybe branching out.

@alanz @ebel @gracie @alcinnz @cykros

Incomplete of problems hiding behind this "centralisation" we are fighting: profiteering, exploitation, surveillance, inequality, hierarchy, intellectual property, elitism, manipulation, inaccessibility, idiocracy, etc...

Or put more simply, power and capital.