debanqued

The elitist idea that it’s okay to exclude people from public service for not having property cannot be framed as “harm reduction” when in fact it fails at that. The people who have mobile phones and subscriptions are the same people who can afford Wi-Fi at home, data plans, etc. These are people who are already served by the private marketplace. You merely give them a convenience at the expense of spending money in a way that marginalises the needy. It’s not just discrimination you advocate -- the money is poorly allocated when it should go toward serving precisely those you exclude; the ones underserved by the private sector. By catering for the more privileged you only introduce harm by creating a false baseline that harms the excluded groups even more. Libraries were more inclusive 10 years ago, before they needlessly introduced these SMS-imposing captive portals. And some still are inclusive. Some poorly managed libraries have gone in an exclusive direction and this trend is spreading.

We’re at #2.

Who? Which library is at #2? Some libraries are entirely inclusive and treat everyone equally. Some libraries have regressed and have no pressure to join the inclusive world. You’re opposing the pressure that’s needed to make them better. That’s not helpful.. that just enables the problem to worsen.

Having services for some rather than none is quintessential harm reduction.

No it’s not. It increases the harm. We have already reached a point where many governments assume everyone is online and they have used that assumption to remove offline services. So people who are excluded are further harmed by the exclusivity as it creates more exclusivity. If a public service cannot be inclusive then nixing it ensures the infrastucture is in place to compensate knowing that the service is not in place.

extremely childish and harmful.

Elitism is extremely childish and harmful. Respect for human rights is socially responsible. It’s the adult stance.

Unified Declaration of Human Rights, Article 21:

“2. Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.”

If a library is exclusive the threat of defunding has two outcomes:

• compliance -- to become inclusive and (if necessary) show the door to elitists therein who think it’s okay to exclude people
• closure (unrealistic, see below)

Either outcome is better than directing public money toward exclusive services. In the case of closure, the same money can rightfully be redirected toward other libraries that are inclusive.

Compliance splits into two possible outcomes:

• exclusive services dropped entirely; inclusive services like book/media access continue
• exclusive services reworked to become inclusive

Both of those are better outcomes than inequality. Dropping an exclusive service invites pressure to fix it. In any case, the elitism of exclusive public service is unacceptible because it undermines human rights.

(edit) One thing I did not consider is the exclusive services getting non-public funding. If Wi-Fi is going to be exclusive/elitist, perhaps it’s fair enough to continue as such as long as Google or Apple finances it. The private sector is littered with exclusivity and that doesn’t pose a human rights issue. In any case it’s an injustice if one dime of public money goes toward a service that is exclusive, which has the perversion of potentially excluding someone whose tax funded it.

I’m scared.

The irony, hypocrisy, and injustice here is that the UN’s own website itself discriminates against some demographics of people and denies access to the UDHR of 1948:

And this same UN will be creating the Digital Global Compact.

I would love to put my code where my mouth is. It’s on my long list of projects. The defects I describe in this thread probably do not justify a forking effort and I’m not enthusiastic about learning JavaScript, which is not just a shitty language but also it’s the wrong tool for the job. Although Rust is probbly a decent choice for the backend (but Ada would probably be better).

The biggest deficiency is that there is no decent threadiverse desktop client. I am just baffled that a majority of threadiverse users are using phones. There are like a dozen different mobile clients to choose from and not a single decent client for the desktop. So if I build anything it will be a proper client for a sensibly sized screen (non-portable).

As for fixing the defects exposed in this thread, the upstream Lemmy devs are rather stubborn but I think devs of an existing fork (Lenny?) might be more open to improvements.

Who would use a well-designed variant? You can see from the thread that millennials & gen Zers actually expect designs that prioritise the anti-bot agenda above the needs of both the direct user (the admin) and the end user. A majority of the population does not see how Google, Spamhaus, and Microsoft have broken email. This threadiverse crowd entered after email was already ruined. The emotional attachment to gmail (calling it what it is.. there is no generic netneutral email infra anymore) trumps software that avoids the dog food problem. I might be the sole user of such software, especially if I also code it to enforce decentralisation (which would necessarily include anti-centralisation features that would be unpopular).

to have not actually had an account yet makes it pretty obvious when you try to login and fail that the application has not been accepted.

That would be a blunt non-transparent/non-specific message to send. It’s not obvious /why/ the reg was denied.

If the instance admins wanted to talk about it, they’d have emailed you; or published some means of contacting them outside lemmy.

Lemmy software is designed as comms software itself with email address disclosure optional. An admin can make it mandatory, but Lemmy’s design should cater for the email-free option regardless of how an admin toggles that setting.

I wouldn’t expect to receive the reason for refusing the application via any other means than the email I’d provided in that application.

I get that. People are accustomed to relying on email. But this is not an excuse for software deficiencies.

That’s the entire purpose of providing an email; so you could be contacted when/if there are updates to your applications status.

That can be accomplished without email. Email is a convenience at best. Some users have decided email is an inconvenience and do not use it. And Lemmy supports that -- partially.

Let’s be clear about who the software is expected to serve. The comms feature of giving feedback to users without an email account is not to directly serve the end user. Software should serve its user (the Lemmy admin in this case). A Lemmy admin does not want to take the time to express themselves on their decision only to have their msg blackholed. They don’t necessarily know that an email address is disposable. The end user benefits by extension, but it’s about creating software that serves the direct user of the s/w. If you’re an admin who makes email optional, you might still want to be able to get a msg to a user.

The core purpose of the Lemmy platform is communication. So relying on out-of-band tech is kind of embarrassing. Think of it from the dog food angle. An in-band msg has the advantage that the admin has more control (e.g. they can edit a msg later and they can know whether the msg has been fetched). Lemmy relying on email as a primary means of comms is a dog food problem.

The only sensible concession I would see to make is that there are a hell of a lot more important things for Lemmy devs to work on because the software has a lot of relatively serious defects. I’m talking about how great software would be coded, but extra diligent handling of denials should have a low triage in the big scheme of the state of where Lemmy is right now.

The cognitive dissonance in this

It seems you don’t know what that phrase means. It doesn’t follow from anything else you wrote why you think that.

You don’t think providing an email from a throw away service would strike the software as a malicious user/spam bot???

You don’t think that legitimate streetwise users secure themselves by supplying disposable email addresses???

You keep talking like you know everything

The post intends to solicit intelligent and civil discourse with logical reasoning, not the sort of ego-charged emotional hot-headed pissing contest you’re trying to bring here.

I’m not seeing how this is a good justification for login refusals to lack information and transparency. When you are denied a login, a well designed system tells you why you are denied and the rationale the server gives you should either include enough info to imply a remedial course of action (e.g. “re-apply and tell us more detail about why you like our node”), or at least make it clear that the refusal is final for reasons that are non-remedial. Users should not have to guess about why they are denied a login when countless things can go wrong with email at any moment. The denial rationale should be emailed and also copied into the server records to present upon login attempts.

The only exception to this would be if they really believe they are blocking a malicious user. Then there is some merit to being non-transparent to threat agents. But the status quo is to treat apps rejected for any arbitrary reason as they would an attacker.

There is no valid reason for the United Nations blocking Tor.

A mom & pop shop selling cupcakes would have a valid reason (lack of funding, lack of competence, no conflicting principles). Blocking Tor is a cheap and sloppy attempt at separating ham from spam which inherently entails blocking ham, ultimately against the principles the UN theoretically supports. The UN should have the funding and competence to support their own values.

The UN probably should not be drafting rules about digital inclusion when they themselves have an embarrassing display of digital exclusion.

I don’t want to be an enabler of the drivel, so without posting the full URL to that article that’s reachable in the open free world, I will just say that medium.com links should never be publicly shared outside of Cloudflare’s walled garden. I realise aussie.zone is also in Cloudflare’s walled garden, but please be aware that it’s federated and reaches audiences who are excluded by Cloudflare.

The medium.com portion of the URL should be replaced by scribe.rip to make a medium article reachable to everyone. Though I must say this particular article doesn’t need any more reach than it has.

Anyone who just wants the answer: see @[email protected]’s comment in this thread.

A website isn’t a common carrier

We were talking about network neutrality, not just common carriers (which are only part of the netneutrality problem).

you cannot argue that a website isn’t allowed to control who they serve their content to.

Permission wasn’t the argument. When a website violates netneutrality principles, it’s not a problem of acting outside of authority. They are of course permitted to push access inequality assuming we are talking about the private sector where the contract permits it.

Cloudflare is a tool websites use to exercise that right,

One man’s freedom is another man’s oppression.

necessitated by the ever rising prevalence of bots and DDoS attacks.

It is /not/ necessary to use a tool as crude and reckless as Cloudflare to defend from attacks with disregard to collateral damage. There are many tools in the toolbox for that and CF is a poor choice favored by lazy admins.

Your proposed definition of net neutrality would destroy anyone’s ability to deal with these threats.

Only if you neglect to see admins who have found better ways to counter threats that do not make the security problem someone elses.

Can you at least provide examples of legitimate users who are hindered by the use of Cloudflare?

That was enumerated in a list in the linked article you replied to.