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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • They could set up an account on one of the larger well established Canadian instances or even better start up their own.

    Both of these options have their pros and cons, and I think it is important to explain these well to the council if you want to have any hope of convincing them.

    A line of argument that has had some success in Europe is what has become known as “Digital Sovereignty”, basically a fancy term for saying government should control its own infrastructure. So you might want to sell it as an easy way to have a permanent archive of public communication and a method for it that is under their direct control, rather than as a way to find more engagement.

    As others have said self hosting has a maintenance and moderation overhead, but this can be lessened by running an instance together with other cities while still retaining most of the benefits of self hosting.

    Seeing from the linked cross-post that this is about Port Alberni, and considering that http://portalberni.ca/ returns an empty reply while https://portalberni.ca/ lets me know I have been geoblocked because I’m outside of Canada and the US, I’d say you have an uphill battle before you though. These people made a website (probably paid for it, too), and then killed much of its use by geoblocking most of the world.

    Good luck.



  • I don’t think capitalism is necessarily at fault, nor must the working/middle classes be struggling for fascism to emerge. If anything, quite the opposite. It is the better off countries that end up turning fascist. All fascist countries are/were first world countries, in various states of advanced development.

    That’s not right, at least not for the fascist regimes in Europe that emerged prior to WW2. The countries where it happened (specifically Germany/Italy/Spain) had all seen civil unrest or even civil war in the recent past, they were hit hard by the global financial crisis in the twenties and had high unemployment and widespread poverty. This was the very thing the fascists used to ingratiate themselves to the public at large, by creating jobs through massive public building and rearmament projects.

    By the way “first world countries” is post-WW2 terminology and didn’t originally have a connotation of superior economic status, but was referring strictly to ideological alignment. Whether a country belonged to the capitalist/communist/unaligned block in international politics during the cold war.



  • Right so WhatsApp and messenger are gatekeepers and they must allow interoperation with who anyone who wants to ie me running my own signal instance?

    There are several stipulations on interoperability in the new regulation (Ctrl+F “interop”). To my understanding it is stipulated that they have to make interoperability possible for certain third parties, but how to go about this is not exactly specified on a technical level - meaning the specific way to implement this is left to the gatekeeper. So your Signal server may or may not be able to depending on how exactly they go about this.

    They also need to interoperate with signal hence if a works with b and c works with a why wouldn’t b work with c?

    No they need to enable interoperability period. Says nothing about Signal (the software) per se. Meta has announced they plan on implementing it based on the Signal protocol (not Signal messenger software, not Signal server software).

    Cos if thats hoe it works or if im not allowed to interoperate with WhatsApp or messenger in the first place then this juat seems like its handing the monopoly away from the companies to the government and giving the people fuck all.

    To my knowledge the aim of the regulation is exactly that, to allow anybody interoperability with these “core platform services”. The status quo is that the regulations has been announced by the EU, it has gone into effect, and Meta has announced how they will implement interoperability to comply. Once the implementation is available and then found lacking in regard to the regulation it would be up to the affected third party to sue Meta over it.










  • there must be a bit more to it than that. AIM, Skype, and several others were viable options with existing userbases.

    Once upon a time in a messenger landscape far far away there lived a king called XMPP. It had a lot of powerful children, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google+, and even Skype amongst them. And they all worked together in a big federation towards the commonwealth of all, freely sharing their metadata. But then some of the children grew greedy, jealously guarding their own gardens behind higher and higher walls, breaking down the federation. And thus the era of the warring messengers began. But prophecy foretells of a prince to unite all the disparate standards in one big Matrix again, completing yet another revolution of the XKCD 972 wheel of time.

    For real though it was phone numbers. WhatsApp always worked based off of phone numbers, which is an identity confirmation method that was immediately familiar to most people at the time, even more so than email.