It’s funny how these people feel like cockroaches.

This seems to confirm my critique of “manual” solutions with torrents and such offered in other comments, resulting in the idea shortly described in the comment you were answering.

Yes, this would require a lot of people, but some would contribute more and some less, just like with other public P2P solutions.

From my POV the biggest problem is synchronizing indexes (similar to superblock maybe) of such a storage, and balancing replication based on them, in a decentralized way. Because it would seem that those indexes by themselves would be not small.

There should also be all the usual stuff with controlling data integrity.

I think it’s realistic to attract many volunteers, if the thing in question will also be the user client, similar to Freenet and torrents socially, and bigger storage will allow them to faster get things they access more often, as a cache. But then balancing between that and storing necessary, but unpopular parts of the space, is a question.

I think I need to read up.

My first freenet impression from reading some articles gives me 90s internet vibes based on the common use cases they listed.

That’s correct, I meant the way it works.

Since I’m spamming with this same idea right now - the description is similar to Freenet (the old one, the Hyphanet), but you’d need some kind of ability to choose parts of which collections of data get stored in your contributed storage, while with Freenet it’s all the network (unless you form a separated F2F net, there is such an option, but no way to be sure that all peers, ahem, store only IA data and not their own porn collections, for example, taking precious storage). I’ve described one idea in my previous comment, but it’s purely an idea, I’m nowhere close to having the knowledge to make such.

There’s an issue with torrents, only the most popular ones get replicated and the process is manual\social.

Something like Freenet is needed, which automatically “spreads” data over machines contributing storage, but Freenet is an unreliable storage, basically like a cache where older and unwanted stuff gets erased.

So it should be something like Freenet, but possibly with some “clusters” or “communities” with a central (cryptography-enabled) authority of each being able to determine the state of some collection of data as a whole, and pick priorities. My layman’s understanding is that this would be similar to something between Freenet and Ceph, LOL. More like a cluster filesystem spread over many nodes, not like cache.

Israel more likely. Making an attack completely useless for Palestine and calling yourself a pro-Palestine group - would be exactly their kind of braindead, but capable.

Why is this a problem, how would it affect real availability of ads? Except maybe tracking users.

I’ll give you my opinion though you haven’t asked for it:

Some right wingers (libertarian mostly) don’t want to ban books, they want books in fact to be reliably available, and having one centralized Internet Archive to store all of them is not reliable.

(Or in the same logic for humanity to be knowledgeable and resistant to propaganda, and treating sources’ availability as a given being harmful towards that goal - naive people can believe wrong things.)

See Babylon V example with kicking the ant hive again and again to some well-meaning goal, of the evolution kind.

Mind that I don’t think these people have such an intent.

It’s just in my childhood someone has gaslighted me into trying to be optimistic in such cases. Like “if someone is digging a grave for you, just wait till they’re done, you’ll get a nice pond”. Same as a precedent that is created with one intent and interpretation, but works for all possible intents and interpretations, because it’s a real world event.

So, other than gaslighting, real effects are real. Including positive ones, like all of us right now realizing that a centralized IA is unacceptable, we need something like “IA@home”, with a degree of forkability without duplicating the data, so that someone who’d somehow hijack the private key or whatever identifying said new IA’s authority wouldn’t be able to harm existing versions and they wouldn’t require much more storage.

Shit, I can’t stop thinking about that “common network and identities and metadata exchange, but data storage shared per communities one joins, Freenet-like” idea, but I don’t even remotely know where to start developing it and doubt I’ll ever.

How do you imagine this working?

As I said, a compromise here would be to have a client security certification program, where no other clients outside it would be able to use Signal.

You mean running a trojan “as a mean of security”, similar to anticheats? Are you sure this is a good idea?

Or if by “program” you mean having some allowed clients as opposite to only the official one allowed, it’s a social thing, not a technical one. So it still won’t prevent anyone from connecting with another client.

Yes, that’s exactly what I meant. Also proper approach to ergonomics pays back in development costs, so probably not even that.

Neither do I, but I do need shell scripting to automate tasks. I’m not against there being some visual user-friendly environment for doing that. That would be the right way to go, not saying people don’t need shell scripting. Something like Scratch.

OK, making borsch is a more fitting analogy. With it being edible and not yielding muffled “heresy” cries from people from Eastern Europe.

Also you should be more creative with your sandwiches probably.

That’s not what I meant, I just took a leap from complaining about the usual advice in the Web involving CLI to the only way to prevent it - as in having some particular GUI as universal, if not more, as CLI, for advice involving it to work.

I mean, for example, in OpenBSD there are no distributions and X server is part of the base system, so they in theory could make a GUI configurator, but OpenBSD configuration is already much simpler than usual Linux, yes, with editing config files. It’s simpler than OpenWRT subjectively. That configurator likely wouldn’t be in demand.

In FreeBSD they still could have some GUI configurator maybe not completely official, due to there being no X11 in the base system, but still functional. Maybe that even exists.

But with Linux various distributions exist.

If you are talking about user-friendly GUIs fit to do various stuff in a particular distribution, OpenSUSE’s one is better than those proprietary things you mentioned. I think Mageia and Calculate Linux too had nice GUI configurations, and maybe OpenMandriva. Obviously Fedora has one, as the go-to “user-friendly” distribution, being from Red Hat and all.

No Linux distribution that I know of has reached the same level of usability, and I think it’s because Linux is a platform built by nerds, specifically for nerds to use.

So you have tried all in the list above and have this impression?

I hate GUI configurators due to my own personal issues with modern UI\UX. They make me anxious. But OpenSUSE’s one in particular even for me felt as good as it gets.

So you want to severely inconvenience the vast majority of people for your own personal gain?

That’s what they do with walkways, is it not?

No, I wouldn’t and I don’t.

This feels similar to cyberpunk “I’ve been a corporation once, kids” stories, and something about gold rush.

I had a fraction of Bitcoin mined, not bought, in early years when you could do that on a desktop PC. It was so unimportant for me, that this is the first time I’ve remembered about this. I suppose it costs now enough to care, but I still don’t.

While

he goes a little nuts and searches his entire apartment for it, but obviously has never found it

happens to me with searching for childhood’s toys, old drawings, attempts at poetry. But not this.

Most likely he won’t find that treasure. Instead of wasting years of his life, and not the worst of them, he could be spending time with girls or working his ass off for some more certain value to spend as he sees fit.

“We”.

Try being autistic and not disabled and using smartphones with sweaty hands and tired eyes. And modern UI design in general.

I’ve been dreaming of a certain legislation for PC user interfaces and the Web since 10 years ago ; in essence that would mandate that everything governmental and commercial should be usable for blind people (because with modern UI\UX I want to close my eyes and pretend I’m blind) with screen readers and Braille terminals.

That legislation would absolutely kill what clueless crowds call “user-friendly UIs”, and I would be happy and gleeful, because it wouldn’t kill UIs following good old industrial ergonomics.

It would, of course, present a lot of challenges for such a transition.