There’s a big difference between meeting the criteria for being a war criminal and having an arrest warrant issued by the ICC.

The thing that’s tougher to shrug off is that he now has a rotating list of countries where depending on who’s in power he cannot visit without being arrested.

How can any line that is on the surface of a sphere be straight rather than a curve?

Ordinary Mexicans

I don’t think they should have barred Machado from running, but I also don’t think the US should sanction them over it. American meddling never improves this sort of situation, especially when in the form of hurting a country’s economy.

This is in very poor taste as a comment on an article about the US increasing sanctions that really will make Venezuelans go hungry.

Kbin is still a thing? Or I guess not…

Good luck to the Palestinian freedom fighters! Apartheid must end!

I like it, seems like a good way to get to critical mass on the small subs here. Can’t really offer any help, but good luck and thanks!

Yeah you are spot on, the big problem with Mastodon is that they have all these ideas about how to be better than twitter that actually just break what people are looking for from the twitter experience.

Gross

I agree large instances have a bigger voice proportional to their larger size, but I don’t think that’s really an issue as long as there are plenty of instance options and no single one is so powerful it can force the system to conform to it rather than conforming itself to the system.

Hmm domination in what sense? Maybe in terms of winning the competition for biggest instance, but clearly that’s not big enough to impose their will on the whole.

I’m fine with criticisms of the fediverse, my issue with this article is how the author repeatedly makes these negative comparisons of the existing fediverse to some ‘dream’ of what it is supposed to be like that seemingly exists only in the author’s own head. You can see in each of my quotes where the author makes claims about how the fediverse should be much more decentralized than it actually is to live up to that dream, even if he doesn’t necessarily claim to agree with that dream himself. As to the “does three equal one” question - clearly having three big instances sharing half the space and a long tail of thousands the other half is a very different scenario from having a single dominant instance.

Yes I get what the article was arguing. My critique is that it doesn’t seem to have a firm grasp of the fediverse model, since it thinks there’s something problematic about the sizes of instances follows a power distribution and refers to “the federated ideal, where all instances are created equal” in the sense of having the same number of users.

3 is a different number from 1. If a single instance had over 50% of signups it would be reasonable to describe it as dominated by a single big player. If the biggest instance only has 20% or whatever the reality is, then it is not dominated by a single big player.

Definitely there’s a tendency to centralize up from thousands of little shards to a few big professional units - though as we see in every one of these examples, that doesn’t mean the little ones have to disappear. You still have plenty of small email clients and small instances. What’s important is that if one big one goes down or goes evil the other big ones are there, and that there’s always the possibility of new small ones blowing up if they do something better than the big boys.

I actually do think it’s messed up that we make the ability to drive a car a prerequisite for living in most of the US - especially since our solution ends up being to make the driving test easy enough for everyone, even unsafe drivers, to pass, and then don’t do anything to make sure people continue to be able to drive safely.

Clearly it cannot be dominated by a single big player if you have to add up the top three instances to get to 50% of the users

They’re not advocating for federation at all, but their criticism of the fediverse is based on it supposedly falling short of the “dream” that everyone or at least every technically able person will host their own server:

In the decentralised dream, every user hosts their own server. Every toddler and grandmother is required to become their own system administrator. This dream is an accessibility nightmare, for if advanced technical skills are the price to privacy, all but the technocratic elite are walled off from freedom.

Federation is a compromise. Rather than everyone hosting their own systems, ideally every technically able person would host a system for themselves and for their friends, and everyone’s systems could connect. If I’m technically able, I can host an “instance” not only for myself but also my loved ones around me. In theory, through federation my friends and family could take back their computing from the conglomerates, by trusting me and ceding power to me to cover the burden of their system administration.

None of the federated systems mentioned are dominated by one big player, and I don’t see why we should expect that to be the trend.

I appreciate the call for democracy, but I think this totally misses the point of federation with it’s complaint that not everybody is going to host their own server. The benefit of federation is not that every individual or small group will run their own server, it’s that there will be multiple server options to choose from so if the one you’re using goes bad you can just switch to another one. Even just getting to an email like system with a few major players and many smaller ones would be a big improvement over a single centralized server, but what makes Mastodon style federation even better than that is that you can move your account from one server to another in a way you really can’t for email.