Doesn't answer your question directly, but nostr is working on this. Nostr is an open protocol like ActivityPub (which underlies Mastodon and Lemmy). Its main use is as a twitter clone right now, but it also has a very new reddit clone and can theoretically support videos as well. And you can choose your own algorithm. Here's all the choices I get from one of their clients, and there's dozens of nostr clients to choose from. The cool thing is that anybody can make and publish an algorithm and you can subscribe to any algorithm. Your client does all the sorting locally.

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Chat control was beat. This can be too. Contact your MEP, let them know this issue is important to you: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home

Chat control was beat. This can be too. Contact your MEP, let them know this issue is important to you: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home

In the last two months alone, Nostr users (decentralized twitter clone like Mastodon) sent each other 3 million tips over Bitcoin lightning. It works, it scales, it's been out for 5+ years now and continues to improve. I can send money to anybody on planet earth in under a second for a penny in fees which i can't even do with my bank account. But it's a failure. Lol.

And what about the problem of force closing channels and causing the people to pay the fees on chain which can be quite expensive?

On-chain fees are like $.50-$1 most of the time. This only matters if you operate a routing node. If you do, it's something you need to take into account and plan your channels wisely. There's no incentive to force close, non-forced-close is cheaper for everybody, so forced close only really happens if the other node just goes awol for whatever reason. People who are using "regular" lightning wallets never have to worry about this since a lightning service provider (LSP) handles everything. The number of LSPs continues to increase over time and wallets are talking about adding the ability to automatically select LSPs based on published pricing. Importantly, LSPs do not custody funds so there is no rug risk there.

The other situation that gets talked about in relation to channel closes is if a malicious party broadcasts an old channel state to chain (and you have to step in and say hey no actually this is the newest most correct channel state). This is an attack that exists in theory but in practice there is anti-incentive to do it. You lose funds trying it and most lightning wallets and all lightning service providers (LSPs) automatically monitor the chain for this so your chance of actually accomplishing this are basically zero. I have never seen this happen in the wild nor have I ever heard of it happening.

Zeus gets a new version like every month and it's open source. There's plenty of FOSS lightning wallets. Electrum is a good desktop one.

It sounds like you know a good deal about the tech and are interested in it. Encourage you to research more on lightning as well as Ark.

It doesn't. You can run a node on a raspberry pi. The only time having a large amount of liquidity matters is for sending large payments, but multi-channel payments are becoming a thing (break payments up until several smaller payments) so even that is not a problem long-term.

<1% of global energy use to process billions of value transfer every year. Lightning transactions have the energy usage equivalent of an e-mail since they don't go on chain. Main chain, via lightning and other L2 solutions, can process and secure trillions of transactions per year.

Scaling block size is not a long-term scalability solution. Bitcoin Cash forked from Bitcoin to double the block size. Then they doubled it again. They continued this and it's now 16x Bitcoin's block size and there are calls to double it again because "fees are too high". Increased block size=increased resources to run a node. It's why most of Ethereum's nodes are hosted in one of three corporate datacenters. Very dangerous for decentralization.

All of humanity's transactions shouldn't be stored on the ledger, permanently, forever. That is a waste of resources and totally madness. L2s are the solution, they use the main chain for security but store transaction data off-chain. They also inherently increase privacy. Bitcoin has lightning and (soon) Ark. Lightning is secure, mature technology and it works without sacrificing decentralization. In the last two months alone, it has been used by Nostr users (decentralized twitter clone similar to mastodon) to send over three million tips in the last two months. None of those tips were on the Bitcoin ledger because none of them need to be.

Not a distro but Qubes. Incredible security and privacy out of the box. Not for everyone but absolutely one of the most interesting developments in the OS world in the past decade or two.

Firefox user and evangelist of over a decade. Fuck Firefox for this. Condescending snake oil bullshit is what this is. There's many ways that Firefox is objectively worse that chrome. It's supported fewer places, it's slower, whatever. Firefox is only good because they're not the web browser with a monopoly and they're a non-profit so they care about things like privacy. But for some reason, they seem determined to destroy all the goodwill that has brought them over time and push users wanting those things away. That's like Firefox's entire user base. I can use some other minority market share browser. Bye Felicia

Firefox user and evangelist of over a decade. Fuck Firefox for this.

For passwords: Keepassxc (local) and bitwarden (cloud) are great. Keepassxc can be put into a syncthing folder for multi-device access.

For crypto: get that shit in a multi-sig wallet ASAP. You don't want to be one compromised key away from losing it.

If you are an American and care about privacy:

• Write your representatives. Your message can be as simple as "I care about privacy". It's important they know you are watching their votes.
• Participate in elections, particularly downballot elections. Congressional makeup at the federal and state level matters a lot more for these kinds of things than who is president. Many recent laws like "right to repair" etc have happened at the state level since you can bypass federal congressional gridlock.
• Participate in primaries. Most Americans do not vote, most voters do not vote in primaries. If you don't like having to choose "the lesser of two evils", primaries give you much much more choice to express your preferences. As a primary voter, you have an outsized influence on the electoral system and can help determine the options other people get to choose from.
• Donate to PACs and non-profits working to protect your right to privacy. The EFF is an awesome non-profit. One benefit of donating to PACs is that they keep an eye on races across the country and help find and fund candidates who will advanced privacy legislation.
• "Vote with your dollar" when you buy things. In many cases, your purchasing power outweighs the political power of your vote.

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It is nonsense that courts can require an online platform to host content from somebody they don't agree with, this is compelled speech. And we're cheering it on because X is seen as a political opponent. It sure will be fun when the shoe is on the other foot and courts are thinking they have some right to force lemmy to host or not host certain kinds of content that doesn't agree w the new party line or is "misinformation". "COVID was a lab leak" was misinformation until the world government's decided it might actually have merit as an idea. Handing the government speech control powers like this is dangerous. Democracy relies on people being able to choose what they say and don't say and share or not share that information.

It would be annoying to lose your instance, true, but you just move to another or roll your own.

This is a problem nostr solved, and I believe bluesky solves as well though idk as much about the protocol. On nostr, your identity and your instance are different things. Relay goes down? There's no meaningful impact to you. You're typically connected to several, each of which store your content. You identity isn't username@somerelay dot com, it's just username.

As a user, I had this happen to me early in mastodon and it was very frustrating to lose all my follows, followers, tweets, settings, etc. I realize there's now ways to manually backup etc but properly moving an account requires a cooperative instance which can't happen if it's de-federated or just drops offline randomly like mine did.

The Fediverse and ActivityPub will continue to evolve, but unlike SMTP, they were created after the internet became adversarial. This author isn’t the first to try to fearmonger over the future of AP, and they won’t be the last.

This isn't fearmongering, it's him reviewing the ways SMTP tried to solve the spam problem and became centralized as a result. These questions of how we tackle spam and moderation are valid, important questions. And Fediverse, at a structural level, is basically the same as SMTP. We have users at instances (e-mail hosts), they can send messages/tweets/links (emails) to users on other instances. Each instance is free to accept/reject messages from other instances based on their own criteria. That's the whole thing. That's exactly how SMTP works.

And didn’t know it’s possible to defederate an email provider.

It absolutely is, your mail provider "de-federates" aka blocks mail from plenty of other e-mail providers.

Agreed :)

This is an instance moderation problem. If you’re letting spammers in, you need to use a better application process or something similar to that. A big problem with email spam is that most email services allow anyone to sign up for free without any checks.

Which is one reason, this author is arguing, that e-mail has become so centralized. Doing that kind of manual moderation and curation is expensive, the bigger instances out-compete the smaller ones who don't have as much resources to dedicate to it. As more and more instances get "de-federated" for not having as good of anti-spam measures as the bigger instances, more users will sign up at big instances to avoid defederation risk. Just like how many people use gmail simply because their email delivery rate is so good. If I send from g-mail, there's very few servers which will reject my message or throw it in the spam folder. I'd love to run my own mail server, but even as a dedicated sysadmin it's impossible to get decent delivery rates.

The more anti-spam checks we have, yes we weed out spam, but we also make it accessible to less users as well.

AP has been blessed so far with not having to fight too much spam. Look at very popular, very centralized, very resourced platforms like Facebook, spam is still a problem on their platform despite massive resources put towards fighting it.