It’s fascinating how the absolute majority of people is trying to solve both social and technical problems at the same time via only social or only technical means. Again and again.

You need both.

Fediverse works right for moderation, but technically communities and users are part of an instance, and an instance is a physical thing that may go down. Just like most of our Web has vanished. And also, of course, it uses Web technologies.

Further my idea as to what should be done about this (one approach is Nostr, unloved here because of people who use it ; I also think it’s too primitive):

The storage must be full p2p. Like Freenet, but probably optimized so that people would only store what they themselves need, and give some space to others in the communities they participate in. Not to all the network, like Freenet, but only to whom they want.

The identities should be “federated”, as in communities allowing moderation. Moderation should be done via signed “delete” records, and users would then not replicate “deleted” information.

This way even when “an instance goes down” (say, instance admin has lost their private key or something like that), its stuff will still be replicated.

One can even make “an instance” inherit another instance (again, instance admin has lost their private key or, say, someone has stolen it), so that its users would replicate that.

One can imagine many mechanisms on top of that. But what’s described would allow libraries and allows a thing similar to DNS (again, like a community, to which you subscribe for naming service that associates names with entities) and a thing similar to a static website, and something like Usenet with user identities, moderation and communities.

Dynamic websites are possible too - but I’m not really knowledgeable about smart contracts and such required for it.

I’m actually describing something in the middle of a few things far smarter people are already doing.

This would allow agility between social and technical solutions.

Malware and porn banners are going to make this a feature always turned off.

They have a few legacy things working in their favor. Hardware compatibility is one, but seems to be a thing of the past now when people don’t care. Application compatibility is another, and that is with Windows, not with NT.

And they don’t have to change the core parts, because NT is fine. Windows is not, it’s a heap of legacy, but it’s not realistically replaceable.

Unless they develop from scratch a new subsystem, like Embrasures or Walls or Bars, and gradually deprecate Windows. Doesn’t seem very realistic too, but if they still were a software company and not a malware company, they’d probably start doing this sometime about now.

Well, was spyware-ridden Kazaa malware?

I mean, I agree.

It remained in the OS business to the extent that is required for the malware business.

Also NT is not a bad OS (except for being closed, proprietary and probably messy by now). The Windows subsystem over it would suck just as bad if it would run on something Unix.

Well, either that or we have to explain zero-knowledge algorithms to voters.

What if you lose a job because of the way you voted?

In some sense that’d be a good thing to have fewer connections to people who’d do such a thing. But in fact, of course, that would lead to voter coercion.

If there was a reliable way to find out who someone else voted for in the most recent election, there would be huge social implications.

There’s another solution, which is strictly speaking not voting. Using sortition with no unknown components - a predictable pseudorandom number (say, from timestamp, amount of UN member states, and something else) and some public citizen register, and the register of those willing to be chosen. The changes of that register would be very volatile (deaths, births), and so those of willing participants. And just like with checksum algorithms, the smallest changes in sources would cause the biggest changes in the result. At a firmly defined moment in time (no shifting day forward, day back and so on) it’d be calculated which people become, ahem, electors. Due to no unknown components it’d be verifiable by everyone and hard to tamper with.

And then they would vote non-anonymously, as it happens now. Not direct sortition to a presidential post, because there has to be some degree of security from madmen.

EDIT: Actually one thing I like about this is that the art of politicking, as in campaigning, as in selling yourself to the public, becomes less relevant.

It’s a huge problem in today’s world, where outside of the West everyone knows that who’s considered the victim and the good guy and who’s the aggressor and the bad guy is determined by spending on such campaigning and efforts to sell the point.

Westerners generally think that the best point of view will sell itself to them. And Yazidis in Sinjar could do that worse than ISIS supporter countries, while ISIS was murdering them.

And also remember that Kuwayti nurse who “testified” before UN who was in fact a daughter of a prince, if I’m not mistaken.

So I like sortition quite a lot, but there should be mechanisms to alleviate its results (randomization and all that). Like non-anonymous voting on top of it. And maybe with 2/3 of electors being selected this way, and 1/3 of them via anonymous popular vote.

OK, I gave a thought to this and realized that it’s the kind of argument where I assumed this is mostly male.

There’s a solution of vote not being anonymous, so that everyone can check if their own vote has been stolen, and everyone can see if there are anomalies in distribution of voters.

They’ll just be afraid.

Ye-es, but nobody in the West said so. Maybe if in that one moment things went differently, Russia would be at least a very flawed democracy today.

Russian Supreme Court in 1993 when ruling that Yeltsin and the parliament should both resign and have new presidential and parliament elections. Yeltsin’s opposition agreed, Yeltsin said he’s the president and it’s democratic and legal that he decides everything and sent tanks.

Since the US was friendly with Yeltsin, this was considered business as usual.

Those mass disinformation campaigns are being done by (sometimes “almost”) nation state level actors. Governments are going to counter only some of them.

As for my own opinion - in 2020 during Artsakh war there were a few Turkish immigrant events in European countries where they’d march, yell Turkish neo-Nazi stuff, yell that they are looking for Armenians and so on. I don’t remember governments of those countries (who are already in charge of regulating fascists on their streets) doing anything about that.

I think this is going to be the same here - a regulation is a price tag in disguise. Smaller actors will be barred from doing those disinformation campaigns, bigger ones or friendly with the right governments will not be.

Killing and splitting corporations is better, but the previous part about price tag is the exact reason they are not doing this. Those governments want to have bot campaigns of their own, to manufacture consent, to see what people are saying, to control the public discourse. They just don’t want others to do it too.

This is a toad fucking a viper, as they say in Russian.

I guess his PoV is that Xitter is his property, thus when he does whatever there, it’s not censorship, but when state demands from him to do whatever there, it is.

But his position would be easier to defend were he not Elon Musk.

Most of all about neo-colonial politics. Many actions presented as the opposite of that are in fact neo-colonial. Such as the kind of governments and forces and “recognized borders” all European and related countries (including USA and Russia) support very firmly (as in - helping suppress every movement contrarian to them with any amount of cruelty being allowed).

Sadly we live in an age where non-tech people, a bit like LLMs do, can say all those words and not understand them.

I genuinely think using PDP-11 level (in feel, can be more performant) machines as our PCs (with hardware accelerators for cryptography, some sound and some graphics) would be beneficial for the humanity. Limit them to things they can use differently from a squirrel using a wheel.

Digital voting is just the same human error with more steps. Nearly all of the issues with paper voting are present in digital voting and then some.

I wonder if one can use ghost keys for an anonymous voting system, which still ensures that a voter only votes once, and still makes all votes verifiable.

That would have much fewer issues.

Running unique code that cannot be run elsewhere, and is 100% open source such that the source can be viewed by anyone without exposing itself to risk that a smart enough bad actor can cause havoc?

No need to use some fantastically obscure hardware. Source code being open is not bad.

A voting system is the easiest thing to emulate. Except for load.

Would it be a weird question to ask how many Black people were in that commission?

I mean, sometimes racism can take priority over party affiliations.

Well, thx, but I already have a couple of noname Chinese cables with braided cover (to avoid breaking) which seem to be as good as anything else I’ve touched, and were kinda cheap.

No strategy was involved in buying them, though, so I’ll remember you advice.

“This shit” was said in the context of a society exactly opposite to anglosphere, where being “poor” is an indulgence for violating every moral rule, every promise, every obligation and every law.

More than that, it was said about the exact people who are, relatively speaking, not poor, rather almost privileged, but are hateful and envious of everyone actually doing useful work, and consider corruption good because in their opinion a bureaucracy worker stealing something entrusted to them is “a respected in the society person collecting rent from their position” or something like that.

The profession of a schoolteacher in Russia pays shit, which is why 3 kinds of people want that - those who are too dumb for other work, those who are idealistic, and those who want to feel that they are important and powerful (power over children) even more than to be paid well.

There are more people of the 2nd kind than you think, but those were of the 3rd undoubtedly. 1st kind is almost extinct - it’s not hard to find a job that pays better, if you don’t want power over children.

I think it’s clear how the 3rd kind intersects with sympathies to sociopathic behavior, and sympathies for corruption and organized crime.

EDIT: Oh, I just realized you thought they were bootlickers and hateful of poor people in this memory of mine. No, they considered that BS to be good for poor people. Basically hateful of capitalism most when it’s many small businesses honestly competing, but thinking oligopoly and state capitalism would be better. They considered me to be on the side of some “rich” people who hurt the poor. While big company owners and such were not, because they are apparently doing lots of charity etc and are respected people. So the “rich” they’d hate would be the “middle class”, not the “boss class”.

Judges are not supposed to work for the majority. They are supposed to work for justice.

Justice in most cases means opposing political power (formal in this case).

Thus they should be selected in some way radically different from how political power is formed.

Sortition is one way, if you don’t want some entrenched faction reproducing itself. Would be better than US too. But still sortition from the pool of qualified people, that is, judges, and not just every random bloke who applies, of course.