Darius Kazemi @darius@friend.camp

I've been building a Facebook Events style event organizing system for the Fediverse. It's based on the simple, open source, privacy-respecting event organizing tool https://gath.io

The attached video is a work-in-progress preview and shows compatibility with Mastodon. My hope is to get it working with lots of software, including stuff like Friendica that supports events and calendars.

Check out more at my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/organizing-on-32729070

I finished my stint as a Mozilla Fellow and now I'm relaunching my Patreon with a focus on, well, fixing social media.

This means I'm going to continue my concerted work trying to make the fediverse a better place, in the form of best practice guides for running instances, external advocacy, and technical tutorials and training so that more people can contribute software to the fediverse at large.

You can read a partial summary of my work so far at my new Patreon page!

https://www.patreon.com/tinysubversions

Perhaps our obsession with third-party trackers is the online equivalent of focus on "stranger danger": yes it's worth putting energy into solving but I think it's low-hanging fruit that addresses ultimately a small amount of online abuse and makes for good PR. Meanwhile it tends to sucks up resources, leaving not much left over for work on intimate/targeted attacks.

Maybe I'm putting words in Alex's mouth, but the article more or less matches my thoughts at the time I was doing W3C stuff (2011): we are already fingerprinted and tracked to death. Alex points out that simply not using Tor means you are fully trackable no matter what other protections are in place. Since we are already living in this fully-tracked world, why not actually enhance browser features that will lead to better security along OTHER vectors like the one in my above post?

Apple's "structural under-investment" (as Alex puts it) in the browser is the main reason why iOS users on my instance have to resort to third-party apps to read posts on this server (no native notifications). This results in them having to use code that is authored by strangers instead of code that is maintained and run by me, their trusted admin. (Yes I suppose I could write an iOS app but it would take me a few years to learn to do that.)

A well-argued piece from @slightlyoff as to why we need to bring more capability to web, and why the privacy concerns brought up by Mozilla and Apple are kind of a red herring.

https://infrequently.org/2020/06/platform-adjacency-theory/

My brief time in W3C-land was filled with people yelling 'but fingerprinting!' any time someone proposed something useful. (Fingerprinting is the idea that the more features your browser exposes, the easier it is for a third party to track you as an individual collection of features.)

I Know Why the Chandler Bings

Here's a (former?) insignia of PEO STRI, the US Army's main R&D arm for virtual simulation of war. Hell of an ideology

36,336 variations on a meme

https://tinysubversions.com/stuff/known-places/

I'm on the Lawfare Podcast today talking about the bot panic on mainstream social media and also the benefits (and drawbacks) of decentralized social media:

https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-darius-kazemi-great-bot-panic

This was a really funny/fun conversation with the hosts, it should be a pretty entertaining listen.

Here is a paper in the November 1922 issue of the Bell System Technical Journal about mechanical switching systems for telephones where the author says "probability math sucks so I'm also restating all my math as equivalent dice rolling problems"

https://archive.org/details/bstj1-2-69/mode/2up