Christopher Lemmer Webber @cwebber@octodon.social

So I have an announcement. I sent an email to my work saying that I wanted to be able to focus on my work on taking advancing the federated social web to the next level. Read: better security / abuse resistance, richer interactions, virtual worlds.

How will I be funded to do this? I don't know. I do know that the state of the political world scares me enough that I feel I have to do this. If you want to support me: https://www.patreon.com/cwebber

Wish me luck. More updates soon.

privacy is your local scope where you perform your local reasoning

maybe people who don't think privacy is important are okay with programming by only mutating global variables

the safest way to use computers is still abstinence

#introductions

Hi! You may most likely know me as co-editor of ActivityPub, the decentralized social network message which is more-than-likely how you're actually receiving this message! https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/

Other things you may want to know:

- I'm a user freedom activist (free software, free culture)
- I post a lot of leftie politics stuff
- Expect lots of tech posts around lisp, decentralized network stuff, obscure-ish programming history

game prep game prep game prep

good news:
- the full electrical exorcism of our house is done and it isn't likely to suddenly burn to the ground anymore
- our house is not being actively eaten alive as I feared it was

Maybe if this goes well it could be a fun (free culture licensed) Fate or Freeform Universal supplement, and I could write up the starter scenario. Would people enjoy if I did that kind of thing?

I have a lot of these, and I have a thesis that RPGs could be good free culture generator fodder.

Running an RPG tonight. It's going to be kind of like ghostbusters, but instead of the players being ghost exterminators, they're more like ghost therapists.

Lemmy is apparently a federated Reddit alternative using ActivityPub written in Rust https://github.com/dessalines/lemmy

> In this way, the concept of digital privacy shares similarities with weighty crises like climate change. Both are what the theorist Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects,” a concept so all-encompassing that it is impossible to adequately describe [...] which invite skepticism because their scale is so vast and sometimes abstract.
> At its heart, privacy is about how that data is used to take away our control.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/opinion/privacy-technology.html

Yes!

Mark Zuckerberg leveraged Facebook user data to fight rivals and help friends, leaked documents show https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/mark-zuckerberg-leveraged-facebook-user-data-fight-rivals-help-friends-n994706

a n t i t r u s t

(arguably, this is true even in a centralized system, and preventing these things through centralized control is usually constructed where only the powerful get to prevent anything)

I have a lot of thoughts about which of these are preventable and how that I'd like to write up. Briefly, if we engineer our systems differently, I think column 1 can be mostly mitigated. It gets harder as we move to the right, and the upper right might be impossible to completely prevent in a decentralized system (but even there, some cooperative work can be done, but not as much)

My friend @sandro (who also was the W3C staff member on the Social Working Group as it turns out) has put together a chart about "ways to harm people online" (whether you agree all are harms, most are, and all are claimed as such) that I think is really useful: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZQDWwh3J6c_RAVlIAPAKI6eRB4HI7HlrBwAJrP8btkQ/edit

What's interesting is that most of these are about harm caused by *distributing* information.

I also need to add a free software license. I'll get to it.