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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
talking to each other. if they're all owned by one actor (remember, actors can be organizations of people, like bsky pbc), then they're centralized, and the degree to which there are many actors means it's decentralized. and again this is coherent but i actually don't think it tells you anything
REMOTELY MEANINGFUL. it's nowhere near sufficient to get at the type of things FOSSy fucks like. and maybe its like ok fine thats our bare minimum, and they're really just defining two attributes they dislike and saying any of the cool kids can't have that shit.
but... bro.... there's no shot you're just sit down all satisfied after serving that absolutely worthless, vacuous drivel. i asked you what your ethics are and you said that you hate murder. ???? cool ig???? i mean i know that people have strong strong preferences with how networks are designed,
but those are actually quite discrete. which in a way is great! people are having very grounded debates without the mess, in a way. but what that means is
that there is this massive under-theorized chasm between "we're a federated republic hur de durr" and some hyperspecific nerd shit i've never heard before in my life (/pos). i think the philosophy matters a lot, everyone just sucks at it, and a lot of the competent people just ignore it, fairly.