What do you mean by "not on the web"? It is accessible on the web. Everybody with a web browser can see public posts and replies. For writing new posts, you need an account though. Here is the public account of Mastodon's founder: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron
I can’t post or reply by creating a web page, and identity is not email or dns, but specific to whatever mastadon instance I register with.
I already have a domain, blog, and email. Posts, replies, likes, etc. But mastadon doesn’t work with the web, or my existing web identity - instead it’s entirely based on federated ActivityPub servers plus various extensions.
So get a blog that complies with ActivityPub or host a Pleroma instance with an account that mirrors your blogposts / posts them on the fediverse. Shouldn't be hard.
He posts on Twitter instead of his own blog. Saving the web is pretty simple: post to your own blog and stop using closed silos like Facebook and Twitter. Support IndieWeb tech instead of calling for government regulation.
Also, why is Facebook considered the web? Unless you’re a member the content isn’t accessible. Facebook exposes practically no HTML on the web at all.
It’s terrifying that people want to use the government to regulate a free website that nobody even has to use and which has not actually caused anyone harm.
GDPR tyrants: get a life and stop using Facebook. Seriously.
That means that any site that allows two people to communicate can be complicit -- be it forums, discussion boards or chat/messages. Criminals can easily adopt code words, or encrypt their plaintext communications in ways that a website would be unable to police. How about email? Are email providers also required to detect all criminal activity occurring in their emails?
Ultimately it's a massive burden placed on companies if they are required to read and sort through all communication occurring on their platform and it also necessarily removes any and all privacy from every communication platform. Do we do the same thing for cell phone manufacturers or telecom providers? What about monitors that display the messages or keyboards that let people type the messages soliciting illegal activity?
I think it's worth considering just how much influence Facebook has that many of the other entities you mentioned do not. I also think it's worth considering possible solutions to problems that Facebook may or may not be the direct cause of before jumping directly to "Welp! Slippery slope, cant do anything about it i guess!".
I really want to agree with the GP post — it’s the classic business school formulation after all — but you are right.
The nuance I would add is that to the end user Uber is an alternative to a taxi (fits the ecological niche better for the wealthy customers). However your formulation is correct for the drivers, and most importantly for the investors. It has an economy of scale that taxi companies done.
And there’s the “for the wealthy customers” part: taxis have to serve pretty much everyone by law in most places. Uber drivers are free to not pick up customers in neighborhoods they don’t want to. Which is why I can get an Uber at 4 am in Palo Alto but not in Queens.
No it's not. The user communicates with Uber. The driver communicates with Uber. Uber matches the two. Uber charges the user for the fare. There is not even a little bit of peer to peer activity going on.
We have them. HTML/HTTP work great, but the DOM and JS APIs are out of control, and their surface area has no end in sight.
The web actually works great without JS, and doesn’t require gigs of memory to browse.
Every month there’s some new JS API being proposed or developed for browsers, with no care for its impact on the web. The JS APIs are still growing and only getting more complicated too! service workers is a perfect example of the problem. Offline browsing worked great 20 fucking years ago, but now multithreaded Turing complete programming languages have to be used to view a website offline. It’s absolutely absurd.
If engineers fear being on call it means the software isn't properly engineered and development processes have failed. Because if a service is properly engineered to maintain availability, being on-call is a small burden because downtime is a rare occurrence.
However it's often the case that "on-call" means ship broken software and fix bugs after hours.
Ofc there are servers; the point is that its server-independent — and ofc theres a setup and configuration to it: certain ideas still have to exist somewhere, if its no longer implicitly known by your server
What’s the point in being pedantic about the marketing naming? If you’re going to lay critiques, don’t swing wildly at the first thing you see; you gotta hit ‘em where it hurts (eg as always, most codebases don’t need that kind of scaling; the code architectural benefits can be had without buying into k8/docker entirely; auto-scaling always offers the risk of a surprise high bill; limited to short-lived functions; server configuration replaced with cloud services/docker configuration; etc)
Who do you imagine you’re trying to convince? A first year cs grad? Your mother? Does you really believe anyone who could make claim to an informed opinion would be so dense as to never think “wait! There must be something underlying all this magic!”
Serverless is not really serverless! And cloud is just someone else’s servers! Have got to rank amongst the most commonly useless statements in tech; it convinces no one and is pure signalling
Paywalls aren’t enshrined by any law. You’re misinformed.
the web is public, despite SV’s best attempts to subvert and exploit that. If you don’t want someone accessing information don’t publish it as a website that anyone can access.
So is that's your fundamental issue with a paywall? Anything that's available to Google (and Bing, DDG, etc) should also be available to you at no cost?
Restating that from the other perspective: if the information isn't universally available for no cost, it cannot be looked up via a search engine?
Uh yeah. I'm assuming you know how HTTP works, but if not, _basically_ you send a request to GET content, and the server makes a decision on what/whether or not to return. If that user shouldn't be able to see the content because they haven't logged in then its up to the server to decide.
It's crazy to send them the content but tell them not to read it... back to your example would you expect your bank to do that? Here's all the account details and transactions but oops thats not your account. I'm guessing no, you'd hold your bank to a high technical standard.
To be clear, if newspapers/journalists want to work out some special agreement with google (or partner/agreed upon indexers) so their requests are authenticated so that only they have access to the content - i think that is a better solution then pay walls and sending the article and saying "don't read this please"
I agree: it's a crazy strategy. And you're correct: if my bank sent my details to someone with a half-baked attempt to prevent them accessing the data they were given, I'd be getting a new bank.
But regardless of how crazy this scheme is, I don't think it justifies taking advantage of that craziness to unwrap such content.
I think it's reasonable to question the approach of banning the plugin too: the problem is the users' choice to use the plugin, not making it available. But ... when there's no justifiable use for the plugin, and the author clearly intends it to be used to view unauthorized content ... I can see that it's an attractive strategy to just ban it.
I'm less concerned with the implementation than I am with the principle.
In principle, I have reservations about exposing content to search engines but then requiring payment to read it. Especially if it's non-trivial to filter out the sources that require payment.
But a plugin which works around an attempt to restrict visibility of content to those who've paid for it ... I thnk the intent here is wrong.
I think it's ok to have information that's only accessible to a restricted set of viewers.
It's not that it's not possible. It's not that the implementations aren't dumb. It's that the principle of "if I want it, and I can do it, then it's ok" doesn't really hold up, IMO.
You could make moral arguments for and against the companies seeking these protections and even Mozilla itself.
Ultimately businesses will always ruthlessly try to make more money, and software will ruthlessly seek a more efficient user experience.
Often these objective clash. Spotify is the obvious example that seemed to offer a solution in the music space. But we have yet to discover such a solution in online publishing.
How about paying? That will let you do more, in less time, and won't require an extra browser plugin, which means that it will use even less resources than using a plugin to bypass the paywall.
Your lawnmower (your website) is in your backyard (your servers). If I go to your backyard (your servers) and I get/use your lawnmower (your website), I'm 1) trespassing privet property (the paywall) and 2) using something that I'm not allowed to use (your lawnmower, your website that requires me to pay for the content).
No matter how easy is it for me to go into your backyard (bypass your paywall), it's still an offense.
If I can download your content by simply changing my user-agent identifier you don't have any security. In this context the backyard is the local computer and web browser. The lawnmower is the content in question. It is deposited and there. If you don't want the user to access your content then don't drop it into their backyard. The user isn't trespassing by accessing content left in their property.
More simple, if you don't want the user to have it then don't give it to them.
In my opinion, the problem is because content owners/producers want a double standard. They want people to pay for access but they also want there content indexed so people can find it. So if this tool makes it so that the site treats me as an indexer than so what?
Have you ever been in a conversation where someone talks about something and you said “hey I read this cool article on that, let me send it to you.” If so, guess what - you were the search engine for that conversation. Should you then have access to view the non-paywalled content?
So yeah, I have no issue with this add on. If they didn’t want the double standard - to allow free access for some and not others - it is easily possible and in their full control to prevent add ons like these (think of any admin site or service for which you have to login before seeing/do anything.)
Content producers have a choice and they’re choosing to be bullies. I have no moral or ethical qualms when it comes to dealing with bullies or double standards.
"No you don’t. You don’t have to pay your parents debts. Not sure what “debt” you are referring to?"
I can think of lots of debts that boomers incurred that will need to be paid (or absorbed) by subsequent generations.
- A vietnam war whose costs changed our economy and lead to the end of the dollars convertibility.
- A transition to urban life without investment in public transportation leading to a half century of malinvestment and disjointed transport infrastructure.
- Failure to invest the time and thought into learning how to eat and walk when you don't live on the farm anymore. Three square meals a day combined with driving everywhere has lead to an obesity and diabetic crisis.
None of that is debt. You didn’t pay anything for the Vietnam war, and I’m not sure what you’re trying to say about urbanization and driving, but it has nothing to do with debt.
We didn’t need a separate protocol/app and closed servers to do what are actually just blog posts and replies.