Matrix is an absolutely pale imitation of Discord.

Yes it is very upsetting that the most popular chat platform in the Western world is in league with Sauron, but Matrix as a replacement is a glorified ICQ client that regularly yells at you that your device is untrusted now and there’s no hope of fixing it, you loser.

I am not American

Great, congratulations.

it is reasonable to be sceptical of Substack’s claims

What “claims”?

People in other countries get severally beaten up (or even killed) in an attempt to do real journalism

IDK if you’ve been paying attention, but they’ve been putting journalists here in ICE detention for doing real journalism. IDK why you are trying to frame pro-journalism as a thing that is somehow unique to non-America, or in any way related to Substack. That framing just makes literally 0 sense.

Journalists good. Beating up journalists bad. Hopefully we can agree on that.

Also, hosting journalists good. Hopefully we can agree on that. No? Or does the first thing mean the second one is bad somehow? This is the type of weird circuitous framing I always see when people are bringing in some kind of bullshit narrative. “Substack hosts Nazis, I don’t like that” makes perfect sense, I can dig it, we can talk about it. This is just some weird circuitous nonsense.

Where did I make any claims about how the A16Z money was used?

I mean, you sure brought it up as a bad thing. Which, yes, it’s pretty suspect. I would actually describe the centralization of Substack (which means it’s vulnerable to a single legal action or something torpedoing the whole thing or putting them in a position where they actually do have to skew their journalism in some sort of pro-fascist direction) as the biggest problem, but you didn’t touch on that, because it can’t be summed up in a bite-sized “What about the A16Z money!” nugget.

Sure, it likely was used to fund journalists on the platform, including people who do good work. It is a good thing that they are getting paid.

Great! Glad we finally agree on something. Yes, it is, and it’s why the centralization and VC money was maybe a necessary evil to some extent where something like Ghost will have a harder time sending bunches of money to journalists, which is why all these good left-wing journalists are on Substack right now. Which is a good thing. I mean, at least we’re getting somewhere on that part lol.

I just don’t buy the colourful story about “commitment to free speech”

Honestly, why not? If a platform is 80% left wing voices and raised money specifically to give to those left wing voices, and then also hosts a tiny minority (much less than 20%, just kind of the ones who show up who don’t cross certain objective lines, like being Nazis) of right-wing voices, why would “free speech” not be the most logical explanation for why they’re doing that?

I am aware that “free speech” is often used as a code-word to excuse Nazi platforms, but those ones are usually pretty easy to identify because they host majority Nazi voices, they kick the left-wing ones off instead of raising funding for them, and so on and so on. I get the knee-jerk suspicion of “free speech” at this point in the American media landscape, but I don’t get why someone who took more than a cursory look at what Substack’s doing would come to any other conclusion about why they’re doing it.

and the uncritical view of the A16Z investment.

Sounds good! If I find anyone taking an uncritical view of the A16Z investment, I’ll let you know, and you and they can hash it out.

(it would be funny if they created the Nazis blog themselves to stir things up).

Jesus Christ, see this is what I was talking about. You’re making up nonsense. What they actually did was invested a bunch of money in paying actual journalism people to do actual journalism things, and then create a new way of doing things that invited a ton of qualified mostly leftist journalists to do real journalism on a platform that’s a little closer to how people actually consume media now, and get paid for it, and in a sustainable fashion now that all the previous media empires are either crashing down or getting replaced with explicit propaganda.

That’s where some of that A16Z money went: To journalists (some of it literally and directly, to get the ball rolling). That’s why there are all these people like Robert Reich and Tim Snyder on Substack right now, doing journalism and getting paid for it. It’s a good thing.

Of course, it’s super easy to pretend they created a bunch of Nazi blogs instead. They didn’t do that, but “it would be funny” is easy to say. Man, get lost.

This is of a piece with “Mamdani isn’t left wing enough for me” / “AOC supports genocide” / Bernie is a Zionist" kind of glib one-liner reasons why left-wing people need to stop supporting left-wing things, because they’re not really virtuous enough, and so we need to abandon them in pursuit of some kind of imaginary virtue solution instead of just having unity.

TL;DR: They took some funding from Marc Andreessen long ago, they were willing to give blogs to everyone including Nazis (bc free speech) and the whole internet yelled at them, so they caved and removed the Nazis. IDK how this particular push notification happened, but I would bet that the blog will be removed. They are not wholly ideologically pure, I think Richard Spenser is the worst person they willingly host and he’s pretty bad, but they don’t allow Nazis anymore specifically because of the hue and cry it raised up the first time.

More conversation about it here, I don’t have the patience right now to write up a full explanation. TL;DR someone who’s panicked at you about the Substack Nazi problem is listening to something that’s mostly designed to hurt a mostly left-wing platform.

Or do we just have some bad actors trying to stir the pot?

Yes.

People are hostile idiots sometimes, also, so that doesn’t help. But yes, people are definitely trying to stir up deliberate ballache for whatever weird reasons of their own.

Yeah. As far as I know, there are some theoretical state-actor attacks, but nothing that anyone’s ever been able to make work in practice. Compromising something else is just always easier.

It was literally designed by professional spies to be resistant against state intelligence agencies. It was originally made by US intelligence for secret communication with their assets, and only released to the public when they realized they needed a bunch of additional traffic on the network that the US intelligence traffic can blend in with. At least as of the Snowden leaks (which showed NSA compromise of huge amounts of the internet including most HTTPS traffic), they hadn’t figured out a way to undo it for their own spying purposes, either.

Were you under the impression I thought I was the first person to come up with these ideas or questions? In history? No, the point is that you don’t want to answer them, not that they were somehow untouched by scholarship.

I’m happy to make the same offer for you, you can try to expose the flaws in my thinking by trying to ask questions I really don’t want to admit the answers to or am just unaware of.

But like I say, it’s clear that you prefer soapboxing to that sort of interactive discussion (even the Playskool version of it with one word answers). I wonder why…

It’s okay if you don’t know! I think you do, though, at least most of these answers you are probably aware of. I’ll make them simpler so there’s no time needed to put together a little essay or anything (which is probably better anyway, since it’ll be less subjective). One or two word answers.

• What did Stalin have done to most of the KPD members who fled Hitler to the Soviet Union?
• Which country currently embodies what you’d like to see, as the successful Communist model to emulate?
• Which direction did people generally flee across the Berlin wall?
• How would you characterize China’s modern government, in one or two words?

I know, I know, you don’t want to participate. It’s easier just to talk down to me and soapbox, and from that format you can really easily refuse to analyze things that you don’t want to analyze that undo your mental models if you do analyze them. But there’s no reason you would be unwilling just to admit the answers, since your model is super-correct and I’m the wrong one.

Up to you

I’m not a debate pervert.

I mean it definitely sounds like you are lol

The fact that you use Trump and Stalin in the same sentence shows profound ignorance on your part.

They both aspire to throw their domestic enemies into a network of shadowy prison camps or kill them outright, they both claim the establishment opposition needs to be disposed of, they both claim that censorship is necessary because some ideas are wrong and the leader needs to be in control so he can keep the wrong ideas away. There are some important differences, too, but certainly they belong in the same sentence. Trump’s just a lot less effective, is actually the main difference I see.

There is no point attempting to have a discussion with people who have strong opinions on subjects they have no understanding of.

Sounds good! Let me check your qualifications, that’s a really good point, I did have a sense that there was no point to having this conversation with you, and this sort of gets to the heart of why lol.

• What did Stalin have done to most of the KPD members who fled Hitler to the Soviet Union?
• Why did the USSR ultimately collapse? What should be done differently to raise up the next massive wonderful communist state? Or nothing, they did everything fine?
• Which direction did people generally flee across the Berlin wall? Why?
• How would you characterize China’s modern government, in one or two words? Marxist, communist, gangster-capitalist, what?

Okay, this is clearly going to be a waste of time. Tell you what: You’re clearly never going to admit that you’re wrong about this, and obviously I can’t force you. It seems like you’re actually sort of enjoying how easy it is just to keep typing “freedom is an illusion anyway and that’s why I had all the opposition shot and that makes perfect sense” and similar things and no one can stop you.

Let’s do this: Tell me a format within which we can have this conversation, and get some kind of feedback or judgement about who it is that’s able to prove their case. If you want to propose a framing of some sort, and go within that, I’m happy to talk about it with you. If not, I think it’s just going to be you insisting that Stalin-style/Trump-style governance is justified until I get bored or frustrated and abandon the conversation.

The difference is that communists accept the need for censorship and are open about why some ideas need to be suppressed.

Because some ideas are so destructive to your whole model that they have to be suppressed, because these models in their practical application are often sort of un-defendable, and so the only option is to have secret police running around shooting dissidents.

It doesn’t mean that liberal democracies don’t fall into the exact same pattern, to some extent large or small. It is in the nature of human power struggle. It’s not innate to any particular political system (or it is innate to all of them because they’re all made of people). The difference is that we don’t celebrate it or make excuses for it. We publish books about what a lie the government is telling, we have a constant struggle between the forces of freedom in the streets and the government trying to stamp it out. Sometimes different factions get the upper hand, or it switches.

The difference, as you brilliantly demonstrated here, is that some of the most thickheaded of communist supporters get themselves turned around sufficiently that they start supporting the government trying to stamp it out. Most sensible people, when the government tells them that some ideas need to be suppressed, and they need to imprison or shoot anyone who’s opposing their power, can figure out that’s a bad thing. You apparently cannot.

Something like Lemmy could form a pretty good foundation. Onion routing already has created a “parallel internet” that depends 0% on DNS, and Lemmy instances would federate today (with whitelisted federation) via /etc/hosts with no DNS involved. It wouldn’t work well, it would have problems, but if someone actually tried to make it work moderately well, the whole model of “admins running servers which it’s your problem to get connected to, and then they know how to federate to each other because all the admins talk with each other” could work itself around over time into something that actually had some pretty strong robustness to it.

There are other attempts (Holepunch, Freenet, all that jazz), but actually Tor and Fedi things probably have the best claims to being able to turn into something realistic that didn’t need DNS, over time. You just couldn’t talk to it until you set your machine up to be able to get the initial connection going, but that’s not fatal, the whole internet used to be a lot like that way back when.

Dude you’re on the instance where it is forbidden in worldnews to say “Fuck (a particular country which will remain nameless)”.

Literally the only one. You can say “Fuck the United States” or “Fuck Israel” everywhere on Lemmy, or near enough, which of course is as it should be. But if I start stepping on the wrong massive state actors’ toes from one particular instance…

Seriously. The reason CSAM merchants and drug dealers use Tor is because it actually protects their privacy successfully. Whereas, if you’re using a VPN or whatever cobbled-together solution, the feds just have a hearty laugh about it, send a subpoena by email or use some automated system that’s even more streamlined, and then come and find you.

Tor is not bulletproof; they regularly run operations where they take down some big illegal thing on the dark web. But they have to do an operation for it, and if there were any solution that was any better, that thing would be even more infested with illegal material than “the dark web” is. That’s just how it works. And listening to the newspapers when they tell you that it’s a sign you need to stay away from those actually-effective solutions because “terrorism!” or whatever is a pretty foolish idea.

Tor is slow and has a reputation of being used by pedophiles and drug traffickers. I2P is scattered in implementation and cannot handle high load.

Physical bluetooth mesh networks or other technology is an example. Maybe even a new version of dial-up.

These are incompatible statements lol

Tor is fine, I’m looking at this on Tor Browser right now. I would say the jank level is about 20%. Quokk.au, actually, for some weird reason has significant problems with it (significant slowness and sometimes refuses to load a page). I actually have no idea what’s going on with that, but it and I think one other site are the only Fedi sites that have any kind of problem at all. The majority (but not all) news sites and things work fine. Some things do not and I have to bounce over to some normal browser. The jank level is definitely not 0, but it’s bearable.

I actually do agree about needing to set up a better architecture overall. Tor is an extremely special-purpose architecture for one thing only (near-bulletproof privacy and firewall traversal even against extremely aggressive government attempts to defeat both), which is honestly a pretty fantastic start, but there’s a lot more that goes into “the internet” than just slapping a slightly janky but super-safe VPN over the front of it.

The main point is: Hey! Don’t badmouth Tor, it’s good (and the jank level of starting from scratch instead will be super high for any forseeable future.)

Matt and Trey really don’t give a fuck. They tried to show Muhammed in multiple cartoons, and when the network vociferously shouted them down about it (because it might get them killed or their offices attacked), they snuck him in anyway in multiple places and just didn’t tell anyone. When one of the foundational members of their cast didn’t want them to trash Scientology, they trashed it ten times harder and told him not to let the door hit him on the ass on the way out. They made out with each other for a long time in “Baseketball.”

However valuable or not you feel like their message / their humor is, they are among the very few voices in mainstream media who are simply unafraid and doing their own thing, completely without reservation.

Cops have a saying, “We don’t catch the smart ones.” It is self selection, a lot of it.