Response to psztrnk re: Mastodon

psztrnk responded[1] incredibly quickly to my own response to this original post

about Mastodon and the spirit of decentralisatoin, which I appreciate! This is

just a quick response (well, quick by my standards!) to comment on and claify a

few things. But on the whole it seems like he and I are actually more or less

on the same page.

Firstly, psztrnk thought it unfair that I characterised his post as an "attack"

on Co.So, and was upset about this in particular because he identifies as a

pacifist. Sorry about this, psztrnk! I have changed my entry to call it

instead a "criticism" of Co.So, which is more accurate and which I hope you are

happy with. I don't think that useing the word "attack" necessarily has to

imply anything like an active effort to stop/remove the service, but I'm not

really interested in fighting over semantics. It was definitely not my

intention to upset psztrnk or misrepresent his stance at all. I very much

intended for this to be a friendly and open discussion, so I have happily

changed my wording as a show of good will.

Secondly, psztrnk, your English is really excellent for a non-native speaker,

you should not worry about it or apologise for it. If there was any kind of

misunderstanding in what you were talking about it was at least as much my fault

as it was your own that I interpreted it the way I did. I have been a little

bit touchy lately on the subject of what is and is not to be expected/allowed/

tolerated on decentralised networks (I will eventually write aout this once I

fight through all the other things on my to-phlog list) and this was probably a

contributing factor to my response.

I absolutely agree that:

• Mastodon, whatever its flaws, was created with good intentions to make the web

a better place. While I have a lot of gripes with Mastodon, I absolutely

applaud the idea of ideological people trying to make the net a better place

by active means, i.e. picking up a keyboard, setting up a server and writing

code. I am "pro-hacktivism".

• Writing off entire nations as "hostile" is stupid and probably does more harm

than good in many cases.

• The particular way Co.So have forked Mastodon, while permissible under the

license, is pretty distasteful (I was not previously aware of the extent to

which they had tried to "file off the serial number", actually I didn't

realise they had changed the code at all).

Finally, psztrnk says he "has a deep understanding of the nature of "possible",

"permitted" and "ethical". I was happy to hear this, and would be happy to hear

more about it. It's something I have come to consider quite important myself,

in thinking about ethics/morals. I think there is an important distinction to

be made between stuff which is "evil"/"wrong", whatever you want to call it,

i.e. something so bad that it is morally permissible to actively attempt to stop

it, even by violence if necessary (I am not a pacifist myself, although I am

definitely also not of the "shoot first, ask questions later" persuasion), and

then stuff which is "not nice", but ultimately a valid way for somebody to

exercise their personal autonomy which needs to be tolerated - that's not to say

I can't grumble about it, or not invite that person to my birthday party, but

it's not okay to kill them, arrest them, fine them, or anything like that. This

is not a terribly deep or complex idea, but it's one that I think many people

overlook and one which I which I wish there was a standardised set of

terminology for so people could unambiguously call something one or the other

without being misunderstood.