It's a great write up thankyou. I propose we build and distribute easy to use services designed to run on our own devices, in our own homes, to take full advantage of 1st and 4th amendments, then distribute these services widely with billboards so that people have alternatives and can take advantage of these protections.

We are trying, but the interop of these self hosted services currently suck. Fediverse is hard to get in to unless you have many users or you just have to join a popular instance. Who knows what they do in this instance, and it turns back into a loop.

I just don't think it's gotten to the point that anyone is interested. I wonder if we did do a better job that the aggressive filtering and monitoring wouldn't naturally move down the stack.

for example we could completely obviate Facebook by having a standard mechanism for something like an rss feed. individuals or organizations could publish my stream(s) from their own leaf connections, set up cloud instances, or pay someone to host them. there could be a whole ecosystem of readers with various UIs and policy filters. people/organizations could add value by aggregating trusted streams or filtering them for content some people might find offensive. and at the end of the day it doesn't require people who just want to use it to set up persistent networking and storage.

in any case we just got suckered into handing the keys to the internet to companies like Meta and Google, which make vast amounts of money to control the discourse in corrosive ways. all because we bought into the notion that nothing is real unless someone is making a buck off it.

having a standard and a whole space of compatible programs doesn't preclude people from making lifestyle money selling filters and aggregators and content, but it kind of removes the Meta-style leverage over the whole system.

Fediverse doesn't actually solve a problem I have. I'm not on xitter or instabook or myspace and don't want to be. The one saas i really need is email, which is 1. Already decentralized and 2. Getting harder to self host every year due to the escalating war between slopspammers and security measures.

Signal solves the async messaging and phone surveillance satisfactorily for my "threat model".

I host my own mail, I really did not have any issues for around 3-4 years i've used it. As long as you get your records correct imo it is also very easy to host and use, though Google keeps sending me TLS reports every day.

How about this, but also send them usb sticks with loads of data available on them that they thought was "private" including surveillance footage taken from flock cameras etc. That might be good motivation to be more aware. Not sure about the legality of this though lol

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You mean the 3rd amendment, right?

Third Amendment is about not quartering troops. Fourth Amendment is protection against warrantless seizures.

https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-3/

https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-4/

Gotta take the "not" out friend.

I'm pretty sure 1st and 4th are the ones GP meant.

The 1st amendment (free speech) in order to protect the right to host the service in the first place and the 4th one (unreasonable search and seizure) to protect against surveillance.

Not sure how the 3rd (lodging of soliders in peacetime) would be relevant.

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I mean 1 and 4. But you have me thinking about what 3 could mean in the future....and....I would be thrilled to provide a service with my compute to usa solider in need if that's what the future holds. Providing quarters meant food and beds back in the day, but I could see how this could translate to general web services, coms, ect in the future.

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