It might be the case that the designers of email and the designers of ATProto and the designers of AP all assumed the owner never changes. But I think the actual behavior of the protocols in the event of a change is different.
For email, if the owner changes, the new owner gets full control. This is nice for the new owner, but maybe not so for the old owner, because now any emails meant for the old owner can be read by the new owner.
For ATProto and AP, it sounds like in the event of an owner change, things kind of break. This protects the security of the old owner to some degree, but means the new owner can't really do much.
Email is more like physical mail - you send something to an address and whoever lives at that address gets the mail.
The described ATProto/ActivityPub behavior would be like trying keep the address tied to whoever lived there first.
Persistent identities are a nice goal but treating transient identities as persistent is not. A better designed system would use the domain name system only to look up the current identity associated with a name instead of trying to permanently tie the name to an identity.
No, since email is delivered to whoever owns the domain at the time the email is delivered. Besides a spam reputation score — which is a problem — one mail server doesn't retain a long-term trust relationship with any other.
Not really? Email is a dinosaur of a protocol that doesn't properly handle authentication to begin with.
Anyway other protocols or implementations making the same class of error doesn't change the fact that it's an error and that it causes real world problems for users such as described in the linked page.
I did wrote a small open-source tool in Rust. And I too did encounter that kind of issue when I did start to build a .deb.
Honestly, it was the kind of bug that is not fun to fix, because it's really about dependency, and not some fun code issue.
There is no point in making our life harder with this to gatekeep proprietary software to run on our platform.
For distro-packaged FOSS, binary compatibility isn't really a problem. Distributions like Debian already resolve dependencies by building from source and keeping a coherent set of libraries. Security fixes and updates propagate naturally.
Binary compatibility solutions mostly target cases where rebuilding isn't possible, typically closed source software.
Freezing and bundling software dependencies ultimately creates dependency hell rather than avoiding it.
It however shifts a lot of the complexity of building the application to the distro maintainer, or a software maintainer has to prioritize for which distribution they choose to build and maintain a package, because supporting them all is a nightmare and an ever shifting moving target. And it's not just a distribution problem, it's even a distribution version/release problem.
Look at the hoops you sometimes have to jump through or hacks you have to apply to make something work on Nix, just because there is no standardization or build processes assume library locations etc. And if you then raise an issue with the software maintainer - the response is often "but we don't support Nix". And if they're not Nix/Nixos users, can you blame them?
If you've ever had to compile a modern/recent software package for an old distro (I've had to do this for old RH distro's on servers which due to regulations could not be upgraded) - you're in a world of pain. And both distro and software maintainers will say "not my problem, we don't support this" - and I fully understand their stance on that, because it is far from straight forward, and only serves a limited audience.
That is very true. But because it is open source, one can request for packaging, contribute a package, use a third-party repository, or build it from source when needed.
Yeah, in my 20 years of using and developing on GNU/Linux the only binary compatibility issues I experienced that I can think of now were related to either Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader or games.
Adobe stuff is of the kind that you'd prefer to not exist at all rather than have it fixed (and today you largely can pretend that it never existed already), and the situation for games has been pretty much fixed by Steam runtimes.
It's fine that some people care about it and some solutions are really clever, but it just doesn't seem to be an actual issue you stumble on in practice much.
These days Linux binaries usually work fine, even older ones, and when they don't the reason is that they often don't get the same attention as their Windows counterparts.
Probably because your distro purposefully keeps software out of date because it is too fragile otherwise. I don't think that is reasonable at all for desktop use.
Though I personally hope that we'll have enough of a warning to convince people that there is a problem and give us a fighting chance. I grew up on Terminator and would be really disappointed if the AI kills me in an impersonal way.
I don't know why this is downvoted, it's a great question.
1st Amendment: Congress shall make No Law
14th Amendment: Due process... incorporate the Bill of Rights against the states
I often wondered whether the next case after MacDonald vs Chicago and Heller would do the same for the 2nd amendment, i.e. wipe away the ability of cities to require gun licensing and registration.
What a sad, sad take. Do you even know what the word “enemy” means? Just because I don’t like my neighbor doesn’t make them my enemy. We are not going to war with each other, we just don’t like each other’s company. Just because I don’t like your comments on HN doesn’t mean I hate you. Good grief.
You've entered into a logical fallacy there - the parent was saying that not liking someone or what they do is a prerequisite for them becoming an enemy. They did NOT say that everyone you don't like is your enemy, which is the straw man you chose to respond to.
I disagree. If you take statement X to be "you don't like them" and Y to be "they're your enemy". Then OP said "Just because X is true, it doesn't mean Y is true". In other words, "X does not imply Y". Meneth said "yes it does". In other words, "X implies Y".
All enemies are people you dislike and / or people who do things you don't like. This does not make the opposite true, not all people you dislike or who do things you don't like are your enemy. The statement "all cats are black" does not also mean "all black things are cats".
I roughly agree with you on that (with the caveat that e.g. opposing army generals can be enemies but admire and respect each other). I disagree that Meneth was saying what you said.
But if your neighbour actively and deliberately makes your life worse then they certainly could be your enemy.
If I’m queer and Facebook is actively censoring queer content then that’s more significant to me than just being a difference of opinion. The company is actively suppressing my way of life.
Maybe the word “enemy” is too much but if so I think describing the idea as “sad” is equally as so. Giving a corporation a pass on behaviour you consider abhorrent simply because it’s a company and not a person seems pretty sad to me.
>If I’m queer and Facebook is actively censoring queer content then that’s more significant to me than just being a difference of opinion. The company is actively suppressing my way of life.
Why queer community will not find an alternative app?
This is the incredibly profitable contradiction Facebook lives in.
They do everything they can to become the central place for online communication and profit enormously from that. But they reject any of the responsibility that ought to come along with that, the refrain being what you're saying here: "well, you can always just go somewhere else"
Except that when online communication is as deeply siloed as it is it's extremely difficult to set up an alternative. How will people even find out about it when their entire online lives are lived on Facebook? This capture is exactly what Meta wants. Remember internet.org?
No, because then what happens when the place they move to starts censoring them as well? Then all the places start censoring them? You're basically arguing for "separate but equal", and we know how that works out. The correct move is to fight for your rights, not to assuage bigotry.
And you are arguing every business must support your agenda, and if not, they are your "enemy"? What an odd take. Again, you are free to use other means of social media to spread your message but no one is obligated to read or support it. And, that does not make them the enemy.
You already said that. It does not answer the question. Moving to another app doesn't solve anything, because we still haven't answered the question of why they should have had to move in the first place! It's the same situation if they move to a new app, nothing has changed.
At this point we have gone in a circle, I must assume I won't get a genuine answer to the only thing I have asked despite trying to engage genuinely in conversation. Have a good day.
And by your own logic, how does censoring content actively suppress your way of life? Did someone from Meta go to your place of residence and actively threaten to harm you? Sure, maybe you don’t like the censorship, but how does that make them your enemy? Have you openly declared war on them? If you don’t like their content, simply move along.
> And by your own logic, how does censoring content actively suppress your way of life?
Because it erases our existence, which is what a substantial slice of straight society wants. Queer content and spaces are important for queer adults, because it gives us places to comfortably be ourselves without feeling subject to leering or judgement from bigots, and safety in numbers in case someone starts something. It gives us people to be among who we can talk to, form community with, and support one another. And for people just coming up, it's literally lifesaving. Numerous studies have shown that queer-leaning teens and kids are MUCH safer when they have access to safe places to explore who they are, even if they don't "turn out" that way, prevents awful, irreversible things. [1,2,3] Not to mention it can be lifesaving also when their parents are bigots themselves and they need a way out.
> Sure, maybe you don’t like the censorship, but how does that make them your enemy?
The bridge between "they suppress expressions of who I am" and "they participate in my extermination" has been proven to be quite short and easily traversed for queers many times, and for racial groups, and for religious groups too. [4]
By your definition they may not be my enemy today, but they may be in a short period of time.
> If you don’t like their content, simply move along.
This is actually great advice for people who keep trying to take down queer content.
Edit: And this is exactly what figures like Breitbart have been openly trying to do for over a decade. And it isn't just him either, you have the Family Research Council, Fox News hosts, Daily Wire personalities like Matt Walsh, and Libs of TikTok have all made careers out of normalizing queer erasure. For them, "winning the culture war" is not only their stated, in-text goal, it's a means of pushing us out of public life: sometimes just running us out of town, other times things too ugly to say aloud.
Erases your existence? Would your existence be threatened if Meta was not a company? What about the countless number of other companies who are not pushing your content? Do you feel threatened by them? Now I see why you chose the word "hate"...
No, my existence isn’t contingent on Meta existing. But when a platform with billions of users decides queer content is unwelcome, it erases us from one of the largest public squares in the world, at a time when public squares are at a premium. That’s not the same as "some random company doesn’t carry my stuff."
There's also a difference between not amplifying something and actively suppressing it. Neutral omission is one thing; deliberate censorship is another. When queer content is singled out for removal, it sends a message: you don’t belong here. That's erasure.
History shows us that erasure is rarely neutral. It's part of a continuum: silence leads to exclusion leads to violence. Pretending censorship is harmless ignores the fact that queer people have lived through this cycle many times before, and we're far from alone.
Never have I ever used an LLM.
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