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Three problems with this: 1. Removes the pain of age verification, encouraging some people to stay in the proprietary walled garden when everyone would be bett
by neilv 8mo ago
Three problems with this:
1. Removes the pain of age verification, encouraging some people to stay in the proprietary walled garden when everyone would be better served by open platforms (and network effects).
2. Provides a pretext for more invasive age verification and identification, because "the privacy-respecting way is too easily circumvented".
3. Encourages people to run arbitrary code from a random Web site in connection with their accounts, which is bad practice, even if this one isn't malware and is fully secure.
- rippeltippel 8mo agoProving that something is possible doesn't mean encouraging it. This was a beautiful work of reverse engineering, that shows how hard it can be to verify personal data without invading privacy. I prefer this awareness to blind trust. The code was released, therefore it is not arbitrary (problem #3). Should companies react with more invasive techniques (problem #2), users can always move to other platforms (problem #1).
- FMecha 8mo ago>users can always move to other platforms (problem #1) Until the cycle restarts again with new platforms. Also, I am convinced self-hosting or getting a new platform (including return to traditional forums) to run might as well be bureaucratically harder at this point, given the case of lfgss' shutdown: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42433044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42433044
- jen729w 8mo ago> everyone would be better served by open platforms Oh cool, which ones?! …aaaand there's the problem.
- unethical_ban 8mo agoThis suggests that the immediate availability of a drop-in replacement today means there is no utility in encouraging that growth. There are multiple open-source tools that do everything Discord does. There are few-to-none that offer everything Discord does, and certainly none that are centralized, network-effect-capture-ready. Short term: * Small group chats with known friends: Signal, whatsapp, IRC, Matrix * Community chat: Zulip, Rocket.chat * Community voice: Mumble, Teamspeak * Video / screen sharing and voice chat: Zoom, BigBlueButton, Jitsi I've heard about Stoat but haven't read up on it.
- Valodim 8mo agoNone of those play in the same league as discord for hosting a community, and none of them look in a position to be there in the foreseeable future. It sucks but that's how it is.
- einr 8mo agoThis is how it always is, until suddenly one day it isn't. Linux didn't play in the same league as serious and commercial UNIX systems until one fateful day it killed them all dead forever.
- jen729w 8mo ago> until suddenly one day it isn't Thread OP here. This is exactly my point: today isn't that day. I need it to be. Some future server that I can migrate my community to isn't useful.
- Cthulhu_ 8mo agoThat was true for the Twitter alternatives too, and look how fast they grew.
- jabroni_salad 8mo agoIf you want to host your own stoat server, you will also need to recompile the apps to use your URL and distribute them to your friends, and they will not be compatible for any other server.
- unethical_ban 8mo agoYes, I learned in the Zulip promo discussion earlier this week that self-hosted push notification servers have to have certs compiled directly into the app. I can't tell if it's malice, indifference or incompetence to have that design; any answer is completely believable. Is there an architectural opportunity to build a "Self-hosted push notification" app and business, where the push broker builds an app to deploy to play, then the self-hosted apps build trust with the broker. The broker app sends push notifications to the user device, which can inform them of the message sent and open arbitrary app windows?