The tape is a circle, but who really cares?

For example, the recent calls for unscale or anti-scale or whatever shit lend much amusement in how they can't avoid centralist logic. The most recent comments on moderation demonstrate a distinct kind of brain rot induced by believing that federation is a useful form of decentralisation. The design suggested is more or less an automated approach to being told to leave a server and move to another. Again, the roles of community moderation and system adminsistration are confused, and the end result is that social disagreements end up with an actually quantifiable waste of hardware and energy, rather than one which would only brought up as a joke.¹

The proposal also only fragments "communities", and never merges them. As time goes on, either no one will ever have a disagreement because they will all have each other blocked, or everyone will have their own domain of moderation. I suspect the latter is more likely.

I have consistently advocated for a more collaborative system for the best part of four years, which allows free association between users, in that any arbitrary "subscriptions" for moderation actions can be made, and subscriptions can be retracted whenever deemed necessary. As such, that system does not assume that discrete communities exist, nor does it have to split communities upon a disagreement.

Recall a quote from the original Federation without Decentralisation article:

The peer to peer situation means that each individual is captain of their own ship and makes their own decisions about who to connect to and what to share, but this may sometimes involve a lot of duplicated curation effort.

It appears that Fediverse weenies struggle to not act like the strawmen they made of anything else!

As L.A. Onda wrote: "We hereby reject any form of self-imposed austerity." There is an assumption made that any system that is actually desirable, with fault tolerance, trustlessness, privacy, &c, must lose other qualities, such as having mutable data. This assumption is only based in a lack of imagination, and a lack of awareness of any distributed computing systems of the past 35 years.

The oldest of counter-examples to the idea that we must give up mutability to gain fault-tolerance may be the Paxos algorithm, which implements a transaction log that multiple computers can come to a consensus upon, even if some computers go down. The end result is that one can implement a normal looking imperative program, if they so choose to, and the actions are replicated over multiple computers.

However, such consensus algorithms assume that, if a computer is not down, then it is behaving correctly. In other words, the algorithm is not trustless. There are at least two solutions: we may use a blockchain to implement a transaction log, and everyone will hate us for a multitude of reasons, or we may lower our expectations and settle for eventual consistency. The Matrix chat protocol replicates a message log across multiple computers, but with weaker ordering guarantees, and current implementations rely on having "homeservers" in a federated system. The Netfarm replicated object system allowed writing and running eventually consistent object-oriented programs over a peer-to-peer network. Most people who complain about "scale" or not on the Internet have probably heard of either (and most likely the former).

Hence the introductory quote: the reasons to settle for less than ideal conditions are purely imaginary and self-imposed.

The idea of "unscale" computing reproduces the logic of "scale", merely trying to make the insults flung at it sound like compliments. An actually distributed system might scale better than any centralised system, but it remains without a central point of control. Thus a notion of "scale" is independent to a notion of "power". What is one to do with this truly shocking revelation? I don't know, I quit trying to make anything more bearable half a year ago. Go and clean up your own shit already.

I saw you behind the wall, I even heard you laugh at me

You disgust me tonight, with your answer to something new, that's you