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i'll let kropotkin explain strict mandates: "the delegate is not authorized to do more than explain to other delegates the considerations that have led his colleagues to their conclusion. Not being able to impose anything, he will seek an understanding and
will return with a simple proposition which his mandatories can accept or refuse". unlike representatives, delegates do not provide their own perspective, but summarize their mandatories' collective perspective to another group of actors.
instant recall is the enforcement mechanism to ensure this happens. if the delegate deviates from the mandatories' desires, they can be recalled and replaced with someone who can summarize their views accurately.
2 repliesok wow thats neat alice, what the fuck. well yea idk thats what im thinking bro. literally what is anyone talking about. i glided past the tech federation thing but it has like nothing to do with anything????? i get that it's like the metaphor people use and we're kinda stuck with it, but i agree
with christine that this is like the most absurd, incongruent, misleading set of metaphors in the world. people are not servers. in fact, people run the servers, and there are relations of power within the organizations that run them that are usually like way more important
don't get me wrong like the ability for multiple actors (and actors can be internally organized in any number of ways) to communicate with one another is fucking awesome, and theres a ton of potential here for FOSSy shit that i'm really into
BUT ALSO GUESS WHAT - i don't even like agree with christine because she was making a totally separate point ???? and like yea its a concern but SHES DOING THE METAPHOR THING I HATE AHHHHHH WHATS GOING ON
this whole thing is literally such a clusterfuck. i have political philosophy autism and people keep saying things and i keep trying to make sense of them when actually i think its just a complete waste of time and it's all jumbled nonsense and im gonna have a breakdown
bc its hard to tell when im just like genuinely retarded and missing something (all things technical) vs. when the tech-bros are tech-broing my comfort character
i do think that if we're using the metaphors, the relationship between ActivityPub instances could fairly be called confederated. i literally do not see any universe in which atproto is a federated republic blawg.
there are no representative mechanisms whatsoever. like with the concepts i laid out above, the social arrangement of power almost doesn't arise??? because we're talking about the linkages of servers to other servers, and kinda proxying the human ownership of those servers as power holders.
but this is literally just confused and worthlessly messy. i do not see a meaningful, useful way in which the arrangement of networks can be described without parasitically referencing human relations, but the reference to human relations is actually entirely ignored.
i think it is entirely a worthwhile endeavor to theorize about how the tech we interact with is structured, but these loose metaphors suck fucking ass and i wish computer scientists of all people would be more discrete with their engagement
to demonstrate my point, like you can also just call all protocols federated because erm actually a bunch of servers (separate actors) utilize a standardized communication method, and so they are operating under its authority
BUT THATS STUPID. AND TOTALLY WORTHLESS. like then ig the follow-up is like ok sure after we establish federated vs non-federated (what would a non-federated protocol look like? it probably exists i just can't think of how), then we can talk about "centralization". so like who owns the computers