Provided the criteria are transparent and directly applicable I don't see the issue. I wouldn't object to a grocery store that offered standardized discounted rates if you applied with documentation of your financial situation. Whereas an opaque operation with the goal of maximizing the final bill on an individual basis using entirely arbitrary criteria is dystopian and clearly extremely consumer hostile.
I can hardly claim omniscience but my understanding is that by and large universities bin students into broad categories and apply a uniform rate schedule based on demonstrated financial need (plus academic performance in some limited cases), with international students generally billed at the highest rate.
Grocery stores already do this! Why do you think there's "senior discount day"?
The thing is nobody will pay more than the advertised price so they want to not list a higher price, and then offer discounts. They do it via coupons and other mechanisms, but they'll never get anyone to pay $20 for a $5 bottle of Coke.
I realize that. My point is that you can view university financial aid favorably while also being against individualized offers from retailers. The current or historical practices of grocery stores isn't the primary issue under contention here.
A coupon that you must be over a certain age to redeem is an entirely different beast than one which was sent only to you specifically with an individualized price based on opaque criteria aimed at directly and immediately optimizing revenue. It is entirely possible to outlaw the latter (though Maryland appears to have failed to accomplish that) without restricting the former.
Most markets have also had a wide variety of regulations. It seems perfectly reasonable to me that large retail operations would be prohibited from attempting a predatory scheme depending on individualized pricing. There's a tangible difference between one off purchase contracts and selling into the consumer market at large.
Sure, haggling was historically the standard but that just isn't the way these modern operations work. If an outdated practice gets caught in the crossfire when protecting consumers from imminent harm I'm okay with that.
Yes, the RTA header was primarily a solution specific to porn sites. The broader problem is that parental controls don't have reliable standardized signals to filter on which has led to the current nonfunctional mess.
So ideally you want a standardized header that can be used to self classify content into any number of arbitrary and potentially overlapping categories. The presence of that header should then be legally mandated with specific categories required to be marked as either present or absent.
So for example HN might be "user generated T, social media T, porn F" or similar with operators being free to include arbitrary additional categories (but we know from experience that most of them won't).
While this would be required by law, I imagine browser vendors might also drop support to load sites that don't send the header in order to coerce global compliance.
Because it isn't in their financial interest. They've either done nothing or actively lobbied for these ID laws. You can plausibly explain it in a number of ways, including regulatory capture, deanonimization, spam reduction, etc.
It's the exact same problem that age verification faces. There are different laws in different jurisdictions and operators have to figure out how to comply with the ones that matter to them.
Think of the (current) header as meaning "we would have blocked you if we saw you were under 18" or whatever equivalent and it should make sense.
Regardless of name and precise technical details, there are central service components that can ban you. If a proper ecosystem of those ever springs up then the equivalent of fediblock (ie guilt by association) oriented at individual accounts or PDS is the next logical step. At present (last I checked) there's only (approximately) one primary provider plus blacksky making the situation even worse.
This isn't some wild hypothetical - we also see guilt by association in the matrix ecosystem.
Most bans today are at the "appview" level: the big indexed view of all the data, that combines the firehoses ("relays") marks accounts as banned & doesn't show their stuff. But the relay and the PDS still work.
Agreed that there aren't many public appviews for Bluesky posting right now, really just the two. Tangled itself though is an appview, of a different sort: one not for posting but for git issues/pr's/rtc. This appview isnt gated on Bluesky or Blacksky's permission. And folks could pretty comfortably host Tangled aplview themselves, subscribing their Tangled instance to any of the dozens of firehose/relay instances, getting all pre-filtered Tangled activity. And that really is quite decentralized a model that is imminently doable. Regarding the technical properly, the concern here about banning feels premature & naive: it assumes Tangled depends on these appviews at all, and it doesn't.
I will note that Phil's constellation project just tackles the key reverse indexing that comprises much of the appview work: taking all the firehose records, and connecting all the threads and likes together. Constellation runs ok as a public service on an rpi. There's a lot of challenges to making new appviews, but it is astounding and comforting seeing the core indexing for a sizable multi-media social network running on an rpi. What seems like a dire situation may actually be opportunity, if folks actually tried.
Whatever problems we want to foresee dooming us, whatever slopes we want to hypothesize sliding down, what we have here sounds way way better than anything else available to me today. Personally I'm much more bright blue sky sunnier about the prospects rather than your dark raincloud doom fall scare-away. The risk imo is immensely more weighted in not trying more than trying.
I'm not saying people shouldn't build things, merely disputing the idea that the logical equivalent of instances (and the ills they lead to) don't exist on ATProto. Guilt by association currently exists as a fairly common practice on all the community protocols I've made use of - including federated, p2p, and whatever else - so I see no reason to expect it won't also infect ATProto.
The key difference is that ATProto currently only has a small handful of instances, ie it remains largely centralized. Certainly it's a blessing that the operators appear to have generally acted with benevolence to date but that's not really relevant to the point I'm making.
Don’t they already have extensive block lists that you can “subscribe” to? I think some official blue sky account was added to some and they got super mad?
That's an additional (but closely related) issue. AFAIK those lists work at the user level to filter what you see, so while they aren't a network breaking "guilt by association" practice they're a form of centralized, lazy, delegated moderation that has outsized impacts on any borderline cases or false positives.
Unlike Mastodon? What's the difference? Anyone can use AP regardless of politics, you just might get banned from other's infra the same as for ATProto.
Witch hunts and guilt by association are generally seen as toxic. If you disagree with that I'm not really sure what to say as it's a rather fundamental principle from my perspective.
> sounds like people you probably don't want to interact with anyways?
That's all well and good when it's a single user instance or small group of friends. But often enough it will be a much larger one with unknowing participants caught up in it. Blaming them for choosing the "wrong" instance is about as productive as blaming people for using facebook - technically correct but that's about it.
That said, the AP model seems like the least worst to me. Every option I'm aware of has significant downsides.
> there's no way to answer the question of "who am I going to lose if I migrate from x to y."
Ahckchually, once you create an account you can use the API endpoint for remote lookup to test in an automated manner which nodes are and aren't reachable.
Probably, but if a business cheated me out of that much I wouldn't be doing business with them again regardless so at least to me it would make no difference.
I can hardly claim omniscience but my understanding is that by and large universities bin students into broad categories and apply a uniform rate schedule based on demonstrated financial need (plus academic performance in some limited cases), with international students generally billed at the highest rate.
reply