6 ms·

You're always building a castle in someone else's kingdom. If you're publishing on your own website instead of a social media platform, your new Kings are your

You're always building a castle in someone else's kingdom. If you're publishing on your own website instead of a social media platform, your new Kings are your domain registrar, registry operator and ultimately ICAN itself, your hosting provider, Let's Encrypt, all the email providers you need to be able to deliver to (notably Microsoft and Google), and probably also your payments provider. Despite what people say, the internet is not decentralized, and it's no longer possible to build a site that isn't in anybody else's kingdom. This is mostly a good thing, if this wasn't true, somebody would have set up a site that was a safe haven for child porn, and there'd be nothing that anybody could ever do about it.

lolinder 2y ago
When you get to this level of granularity the metaphor really starts to fall apart, but the principle is still there: identify your points of failure, the risk of them failing, and ensure there's a plan B. Most businesses can treat their domain name as fail-safe. If you have a .com/.org/.net, pay well in advance, and aren't doing anything that's currently illegal in the US, you're not going to lose it unless there's a dramatic political shift that's earthshattering for ~everyone. On the other hand, social media platforms arbitrarily locking you out is a daily occurrence for tens of thousands of innocent people per day. This isn't just a hypothetical risk, it actually does happen to people and businesses all the time. Even the most law-abiding business should not build their castle in a social media platform.
- Veuxdo 2y ago
  > On the other hand, social media platforms arbitrarily locking you out is a daily occurrence for tens of thousands of innocent people per day. If you're at all legit, you don't have to worry about being locked out. Everyone has to worry about being downranked to oblivion, which is the new normal on most SM sites.
  - BadHumans 2y ago
    > If you're at all legit, you don't have to worry about being locked out. Complete ignorance of the people who arbitrarily get flagged by algorithms to no fault of their own or get on the bad side of someone at these companies who have a grudge.
    - zdragnar 2y ago
      You mean like the Texas home schooling Facebook group that keeps getting dinged because Facebook keeps asserting that the word "Texan" implies they are selling drugs?
      - Slava_Propanei 2y ago
        [dead]
  - dandellion 2y ago
    > If you're at all legit, you don't have to worry about being locked out. That's not correct, just on HN you can frequently see articles about people getting locked out of Google, Paypal, Facebook, etc. with no explanation given. I've been banned for suspicious activity on a social media site on an account I hadn't used in years, probably because someone was trying to steal the username.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    My wife got randomly banned from Facebook Marketplace for a year. Appeal after appeal was ignored, then randomly they restored access more than a year later. A year is enough time to kill a business.
  - strken 2y ago
    I was once involved in my friend's SaaS startup and he got locked out of Facebook ads for having an inactive account and then spending too much money in the first day. "Too much" in this case was a few hundred dollars. Turns out you're meant to slowly increase your spend over a week while doomscrolling shitty clickbait, otherwise Facebook thinks your account has been compromised.
  - navigate8310 2y ago
    > If you're at all legit, you don't have to worry about being locked out. This is simply false. We were locked out of Meta Ads Manager for no apparent reason. When we contacted Meta customer support—setting aside the casual racism I faced for not being a native speaker—all they could offer was, "Oops, that shouldn't have happened; we'll refresh your account." As a result, we lost approximately $5k in business because we couldn't reach our audience at its peak.
- throwaway48476 2y ago
  This is not a safe assumption. You're just one crazy person willing to harass the family of whoever runs the registrar away from being 'too difficult to work with' and getting your account nuked. They don't charge enough to stick their neck out for you.
  - account42 2y ago
    The registrar does not own the domain, they just registrar it for you. If push comes to shove they need to let you transfer the domain to another registrar of you choosing after which your users will be able to reach you the same way as always. Not so much with social media where the respective tyrant has a TOS that makes it clear they can tell you to pound sand whenever they feel like it.
  - pyrale 2y ago
    We're also one button press away from thermonuclear apocalypse. Knowing what's more likely and what's less likely is still useful information: social media turning bad is a daily occurence, while dns registrars' family members have been safe for a pretty long time now.
    - throwaway48476 2y ago
      Nuclear security had many buttons and many people. Harassing people is far more accessible and has a proven track record of success.
      - pyrale 2y ago
        > has a proven track record of success. Do you have examples of someone successfully harassing a registrar employee into breaking the registrar's ICANN accreditation terms?
    - ctxc 2y ago
      Agreed. I don't know why the other thing is even an argument.
  - 2y ago
SigmundA 2y ago
At this point you only have your own kingdom if you have a standing army with nuclear weapons, you are sovereign, everyone else rents, this is just physics, the details are social contracts.
- tshaddox 2y ago
  Having your own nuclear weapons is probably like having firearms in your home in that you’re actually more likely to be the victim of that class of weapons.
  - account42 2y ago
    Your claim about nuclear weaposn increasing the risk of being subjected to nuclear attacks has no historical basis. If anything, there is evidence for the opposite. Even for private firearm ownership you'd need to show more than just correlation to make that claim.
  - SigmundA 2y ago
    The alternative is you don't have them and you rent protection from someone who does.
    - tshaddox 2y ago
      Right, I’m hinting that it’s probably not worth maintaining your own nuclear weapon system in order to host your own website and email newsletter.
      - SigmundA 2y ago
        "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe"
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- EarlKing 2y ago
throwaway48476 2y ago
This logic extend to governments as well. It's a spectrum which in many ways the mega platforms are directly comparable in their economic impacts to governments. This requires a more nuanced analysis than a reductive "it's a private company".
bitnasty 2y ago
This is addressed in the article…
- xeyownt 2y ago
  Yes, but you had to scroll to see it. Way too hard these days.
6510 2y ago
You can make a html website in a torrent. Works surprisingly well. One time I had a copy of someones website that got deleted and experimented a bit. The index was paginated linked page titles 50 per page. I combined the paginated pages so that each had 2000 entries (I think it was, maybe 5000) Then I wrote a bit of js that takes a search query from the url?q= looks if it exists on the page, if nothing is found load the next html document and append the query to the url. To my surprise it paged though the pages remarkably fast. If you want to you could, in stead of display the content, display a search box on each page with the query in it, have a row of dots for the page number (on page 4 display 4 dots) Displaying 50 or 500 blank pages one after the other goes pretty damn fast if you load them from the file system. They can also be pretty damn big. If you put the content in comments the rendering engine wont touch it at all. When you update the website you can make a new torrent that has the same folder name and the same files inside. Run a check and the client will discover you had nearly everything already. The only restriction is that it may not change existing html documents. For that you can just attempt to load non existing scripts in the folder. Have script1.js attempt to load script2.js and 2 look for 3 etc Can publish updates on a telegram channel.
- Y_Y 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Compiled_HTML_Help https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Compiled_HTML_Help
roenxi 2y ago
> This is mostly a good thing, if this wasn't true, somebody would have set up a site that was a safe haven for child porn, and there'd be nothing that anybody could ever do about it. I doubt it is true, and I'd assume people have set up a site. If the media industry failed to exterminate torrenting with enormous economic incentives to do so why would the crusade against child abuse achieve more success? It isn't technically possible to stop people communicating with each other over the internet.
- throwaway48476 2y ago
  It's already happened. The Trump shooters brother was arrested for CSAM only because it was discovered during the investigation of his brother.
  - Slava_Propanei 2y ago
    [dead]
  - ThunderSizzle 2y ago
    Well, for all the "safety" of the kingdoms there, it didn't stop it. So the kingdoms have not prevented it, and many probably have facilitated it, and maybe not always unintentional (as in, someone from inside the company was "in on it").
    - throwaway48476 2y ago
      The FBI also temporarily ran a CSAM site which raises ethical and legal questions.
dartos 2y ago
> Despite what people say, the internet is not decentralized. Do people say this? I’ve never heard anyone outside of web3 land say this. IIRC it’s one of the big disappointments of the internet that is evolved in such a centralized way. But also you can deploy a website which doesn’t rely on ICANN or a hosting provider, lets encrypt, email, or any of that. Your only “king” would be an ISP (which you could also run yourself, if you were so inclined) It wouldn’t be an easily accessible castle, but it’d be yours.
- immibis 2y ago
  You still need an IP address. You can build your own network on top of point-to-point layer-2 connections, which have no central authority, but it won't be reachable from the Internet. BTW: anyone interested in this should join DN42, which is an alternative central authority, and does more-or-less this. Although 99.9% of DN42 links are internet VPNs because that's cheaper, physical links are also accepted because they're cooler. (This reply was delayed by an hour by HN's rate limit)
  - dartos 2y ago
    I’m not an expert (or all that knowledge, honestly) in ISP level stuff. I just know it can be done. If you ran your own ISP and purchased wholesale bandwidth, would that not just include an ipv6, at least?
    - immibis 2y ago
      You can get an IPv6 range from your ISP, or directly from the central authority in your region. (IPv4s are too scarce to get a range, so you'll only want to have one and that will have to be part of your ISP's range because you can't advertise just one.) Purchasing wholesale internet bandwidth is another way of saying purchasing internet service (a lot of it). The company that sells you that is your ISP.
croes 2y ago
>But wait! Your mailing list is hosted by Mailchimp which is another company, and your website is hosted by GoDaddy or Squarespace? Aren’t they evil kingdoms too? >Not really. They are just hosting platforms that are invisible to your followers. >The general public doesn’t have to go to Mailchimp.com to read your newsletter or squarespace to view your blog. Your readers go to your domain.
Gud 2y ago
Just because you are using someone else’s services doesn’t mean you’re in their kingdom. Self hosting (which I think you should be) is more like being Luxembourg. Sure, you still have to appease the neighbours, and occasionally you might be invaded, but overall you still get to see your own taxes and keep the culture somewhat independent.
rchaud 2y ago
> your new Kings are your domain registrar, registry operator and ultimately ICAN itself To whom have these bodies caused problems, to anywhere near the same extent as mass market social media networks?
- appendix-rock 2y ago
  Nobody said that this happened? The commenter is pointing out the faulty absolutist suggestion of the clickbait title.
- piyuv 2y ago
  OP is close to defending sovereign citizens. Well-regulated, established organizations are not threats to liberty; on the contrary, they’re required for a well functioning community (of netizens) Some kings thought that they were bound to gods so in the name of total freedom they announced themselves as “god-kings”
  - int_19h 2y ago
    It's not an either-or. Organizations are required for a well-functioning community, but they're also threats to liberty insofar as they represent easily capturable concentrations of power.
  - Andrex 2y ago
    I'm 33 and this is an argument I haven't considered, or have heard worded in such a way. Thank you for giving me a lot of food for thought the next few days.
veunes 2y ago
Full independence is nearly impossible
rendaw 2y ago
> a site that was a safe haven for child porn, and there'd be nothing that anybody could ever do about it They could arrest the person and take down their servers, same as now.

lolinder 2y ago

When you get to this level of granularity the metaphor really starts to fall apart, but the principle is still there: identify your points of failure, the risk of them failing, and ensure there's a plan B. Most businesses can treat their domain name as fail-safe. If you have a .com/.org/.net, pay well in advance, and aren't doing anything that's currently illegal in the US, you're not going to lose it unless there's a dramatic political shift that's earthshattering for ~everyone. On the other hand, social media platforms arbitrarily locking you out is a daily occurrence for tens of thousands of innocent people per day. This isn't just a hypothetical risk, it actually does happen to people and businesses all the time. Even the most law-abiding business should not build their castle in a social media platform.

Veuxdo 2y ago
> On the other hand, social media platforms arbitrarily locking you out is a daily occurrence for tens of thousands of innocent people per day. If you're at all legit, you don't have to worry about being locked out. Everyone has to worry about being downranked to oblivion, which is the new normal on most SM sites.
- BadHumans 2y ago
  > If you're at all legit, you don't have to worry about being locked out. Complete ignorance of the people who arbitrarily get flagged by algorithms to no fault of their own or get on the bad side of someone at these companies who have a grudge.
  - zdragnar 2y ago
    You mean like the Texas home schooling Facebook group that keeps getting dinged because Facebook keeps asserting that the word "Texan" implies they are selling drugs?
    - Slava_Propanei 2y ago
      [dead]
- dandellion 2y ago
  > If you're at all legit, you don't have to worry about being locked out. That's not correct, just on HN you can frequently see articles about people getting locked out of Google, Paypal, Facebook, etc. with no explanation given. I've been banned for suspicious activity on a social media site on an account I hadn't used in years, probably because someone was trying to steal the username.
- lolinder 2y ago
  My wife got randomly banned from Facebook Marketplace for a year. Appeal after appeal was ignored, then randomly they restored access more than a year later. A year is enough time to kill a business.
- strken 2y ago
  I was once involved in my friend's SaaS startup and he got locked out of Facebook ads for having an inactive account and then spending too much money in the first day. "Too much" in this case was a few hundred dollars. Turns out you're meant to slowly increase your spend over a week while doomscrolling shitty clickbait, otherwise Facebook thinks your account has been compromised.
- navigate8310 2y ago
  > If you're at all legit, you don't have to worry about being locked out. This is simply false. We were locked out of Meta Ads Manager for no apparent reason. When we contacted Meta customer support—setting aside the casual racism I faced for not being a native speaker—all they could offer was, "Oops, that shouldn't have happened; we'll refresh your account." As a result, we lost approximately $5k in business because we couldn't reach our audience at its peak.
throwaway48476 2y ago
This is not a safe assumption. You're just one crazy person willing to harass the family of whoever runs the registrar away from being 'too difficult to work with' and getting your account nuked. They don't charge enough to stick their neck out for you.
- account42 2y ago
  The registrar does not own the domain, they just registrar it for you. If push comes to shove they need to let you transfer the domain to another registrar of you choosing after which your users will be able to reach you the same way as always. Not so much with social media where the respective tyrant has a TOS that makes it clear they can tell you to pound sand whenever they feel like it.
- pyrale 2y ago
  We're also one button press away from thermonuclear apocalypse. Knowing what's more likely and what's less likely is still useful information: social media turning bad is a daily occurence, while dns registrars' family members have been safe for a pretty long time now.
  - throwaway48476 2y ago
    Nuclear security had many buttons and many people. Harassing people is far more accessible and has a proven track record of success.
    - pyrale 2y ago
      > has a proven track record of success. Do you have examples of someone successfully harassing a registrar employee into breaking the registrar's ICANN accreditation terms?
  - ctxc 2y ago
    Agreed. I don't know why the other thing is even an argument.
- 2y ago

SigmundA 2y ago

At this point you only have your own kingdom if you have a standing army with nuclear weapons, you are sovereign, everyone else rents, this is just physics, the details are social contracts.

tshaddox 2y ago
Having your own nuclear weapons is probably like having firearms in your home in that you’re actually more likely to be the victim of that class of weapons.
- account42 2y ago
  Your claim about nuclear weaposn increasing the risk of being subjected to nuclear attacks has no historical basis. If anything, there is evidence for the opposite. Even for private firearm ownership you'd need to show more than just correlation to make that claim.
- SigmundA 2y ago
  The alternative is you don't have them and you rent protection from someone who does.
  - tshaddox 2y ago
    Right, I’m hinting that it’s probably not worth maintaining your own nuclear weapon system in order to host your own website and email newsletter.
    - SigmundA 2y ago
      "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe"
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
EarlKing 2y ago

throwaway48476 2y ago

This logic extend to governments as well. It's a spectrum which in many ways the mega platforms are directly comparable in their economic impacts to governments. This requires a more nuanced analysis than a reductive "it's a private company".

bitnasty 2y ago

This is addressed in the article…

xeyownt 2y ago
Yes, but you had to scroll to see it. Way too hard these days.

6510 2y ago

You can make a html website in a torrent. Works surprisingly well. One time I had a copy of someones website that got deleted and experimented a bit. The index was paginated linked page titles 50 per page. I combined the paginated pages so that each had 2000 entries (I think it was, maybe 5000) Then I wrote a bit of js that takes a search query from the url?q= looks if it exists on the page, if nothing is found load the next html document and append the query to the url. To my surprise it paged though the pages remarkably fast. If you want to you could, in stead of display the content, display a search box on each page with the query in it, have a row of dots for the page number (on page 4 display 4 dots) Displaying 50 or 500 blank pages one after the other goes pretty damn fast if you load them from the file system. They can also be pretty damn big. If you put the content in comments the rendering engine wont touch it at all. When you update the website you can make a new torrent that has the same folder name and the same files inside. Run a check and the client will discover you had nearly everything already. The only restriction is that it may not change existing html documents. For that you can just attempt to load non existing scripts in the folder. Have script1.js attempt to load script2.js and 2 look for 3 etc Can publish updates on a telegram channel.

Y_Y 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Compiled_HTML_Help https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Compiled_HTML_Help

roenxi 2y ago

> This is mostly a good thing, if this wasn't true, somebody would have set up a site that was a safe haven for child porn, and there'd be nothing that anybody could ever do about it. I doubt it is true, and I'd assume people have set up a site. If the media industry failed to exterminate torrenting with enormous economic incentives to do so why would the crusade against child abuse achieve more success? It isn't technically possible to stop people communicating with each other over the internet.

throwaway48476 2y ago
It's already happened. The Trump shooters brother was arrested for CSAM only because it was discovered during the investigation of his brother.
- Slava_Propanei 2y ago
  [dead]
- ThunderSizzle 2y ago
  Well, for all the "safety" of the kingdoms there, it didn't stop it. So the kingdoms have not prevented it, and many probably have facilitated it, and maybe not always unintentional (as in, someone from inside the company was "in on it").
  - throwaway48476 2y ago
    The FBI also temporarily ran a CSAM site which raises ethical and legal questions.

dartos 2y ago

> Despite what people say, the internet is not decentralized. Do people say this? I’ve never heard anyone outside of web3 land say this. IIRC it’s one of the big disappointments of the internet that is evolved in such a centralized way. But also you can deploy a website which doesn’t rely on ICANN or a hosting provider, lets encrypt, email, or any of that. Your only “king” would be an ISP (which you could also run yourself, if you were so inclined) It wouldn’t be an easily accessible castle, but it’d be yours.

immibis 2y ago
You still need an IP address. You can build your own network on top of point-to-point layer-2 connections, which have no central authority, but it won't be reachable from the Internet. BTW: anyone interested in this should join DN42, which is an alternative central authority, and does more-or-less this. Although 99.9% of DN42 links are internet VPNs because that's cheaper, physical links are also accepted because they're cooler. (This reply was delayed by an hour by HN's rate limit)
- dartos 2y ago
  I’m not an expert (or all that knowledge, honestly) in ISP level stuff. I just know it can be done. If you ran your own ISP and purchased wholesale bandwidth, would that not just include an ipv6, at least?
  - immibis 2y ago
    You can get an IPv6 range from your ISP, or directly from the central authority in your region. (IPv4s are too scarce to get a range, so you'll only want to have one and that will have to be part of your ISP's range because you can't advertise just one.) Purchasing wholesale internet bandwidth is another way of saying purchasing internet service (a lot of it). The company that sells you that is your ISP.

croes 2y ago

>But wait! Your mailing list is hosted by Mailchimp which is another company, and your website is hosted by GoDaddy or Squarespace? Aren’t they evil kingdoms too? >Not really. They are just hosting platforms that are invisible to your followers. >The general public doesn’t have to go to Mailchimp.com to read your newsletter or squarespace to view your blog. Your readers go to your domain.

Gud 2y ago

Just because you are using someone else’s services doesn’t mean you’re in their kingdom. Self hosting (which I think you should be) is more like being Luxembourg. Sure, you still have to appease the neighbours, and occasionally you might be invaded, but overall you still get to see your own taxes and keep the culture somewhat independent.

rchaud 2y ago

> your new Kings are your domain registrar, registry operator and ultimately ICAN itself To whom have these bodies caused problems, to anywhere near the same extent as mass market social media networks?

appendix-rock 2y ago
Nobody said that this happened? The commenter is pointing out the faulty absolutist suggestion of the clickbait title.
piyuv 2y ago
OP is close to defending sovereign citizens. Well-regulated, established organizations are not threats to liberty; on the contrary, they’re required for a well functioning community (of netizens) Some kings thought that they were bound to gods so in the name of total freedom they announced themselves as “god-kings”
- int_19h 2y ago
  It's not an either-or. Organizations are required for a well-functioning community, but they're also threats to liberty insofar as they represent easily capturable concentrations of power.
- Andrex 2y ago
  I'm 33 and this is an argument I haven't considered, or have heard worded in such a way. Thank you for giving me a lot of food for thought the next few days.

veunes 2y ago

Full independence is nearly impossible

rendaw 2y ago

> a site that was a safe haven for child porn, and there'd be nothing that anybody could ever do about it They could arrest the person and take down their servers, same as now.