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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Federated systems are one option for this. On one of my sites, the only way people can leave comments is with ActivityPub. They must have a (probably pseudonymous) account on a server to use that, and I hope that most servers have moderation I find acceptable. I can block those that do not.

    More sophisticated options for sharing reputation between servers would help here. If, for example five servers I trust block another server as a source of harassment, I’d like to block it as well, automatically.





  • I like Condorcet methods.

    This is a ranked method that’s different from instant runoff, with its defining characteristic being that the winner would beat every other candidate in a two-way race. The biggest downside is that determining the result is more mathematically complex than other methods, which makes it harder to explain and might lead people to mistrust the result.

    Condorcet methods benefit candidates few voters hate, which is the inverse of the current and past two US presidential elections. Given a situation where two dominant parties run widely unpopular candidates, a Condorcet method would create a very strong probability that any palatable third-party candidate wins, though over the long term a system using such a method probably wouldn’t have two dominant parties.




  • I’m not immunocompromised or any other kind of high-risk and I wear an N95 mask in most indoor public settings.

    I plan on doing it until something changes. That could mean any of:

    • SARS-CoV-2 mutates into a dominant strain with a low risk of long-term disability
    • A new vaccine is developed that reduces the risk of long-term disability following COVID, or probability of infection to virtually nil
    • Monitoring programs, such as CDC wastewater testing show a low risk of infection

    It seems to me people collectively decided to stop caring about COVID even though most of the risks that were present two years ago still exist. I would therefore ask the inverse: why stop protecting yourself before the danger is over?









  • Privacy can mean different things in different contexts.

    Some peoples’ thoughts go first to sharing content with a restricted audience. ActivityPub isn’t good at that since the admins of every server involved can access the content. That’s also true of centralized social media, though sometimes the admins of those services seem farther removed from users’ social lives. E2EE chat like Matrix and Signal are good options for that use case, and there has been work on adding E2EE options to some ActivityPub software.

    I usually treat social media as public, so I’m not concerned with restricting access to things I share that way. I am, however concerned about service providers monitoring behavior like how long I spend looking at a particular post, or trying to track my browsing habits on third-party websites. Fediverse projects do not normally include those kinds of behaviors, and it would be scandalous if a service provider added them.