Back

One risk in Flancia is that the tools we use to reach it might turn out to also be sufficient to reach Antiflancia; by building or improving such tools we could be enabling futures that are opposed to pro-social good.

I try to think often of this risk, keep it in check. To manage it, among other things, it is that I try to keep Flancia friendly and maximally inclusive.

@flancian

Flancia must be strongly and actively strategic against capture by Antiflancians then no?

Perhaps counterantidisintermediation is of interest as an instructional parallel.

@neil I think it should be; the first line of protection is to make Flancia 1. fully optional, in the strong sense that people should be able to ignore it without ill effects -- hopefully this quality is symmetric w.r.t. Antiflancia -- and 2. made up of/supported by tools which are free and easily reproducible, so they can't be "captured", at worst only cloned/coopted.

@neil The Agora is meant to have both qualities, plus a seed of well-meaning intent (representing the community) which hopefully can't be coopted easily even if cloned by adversaries.

But I'm bad at adversarial thinking, I think both because of limited analytical skills and an optimistic bent. We need to think as a group :)

[[counter anti disintermediation]] is a new concept to me, thank you; exploring.

@agora http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Counter-Anti-Disintermediation

@neil very interesting indeed.

I think centralization is just one of a number of possible strategies with competitive advantages for entities working on a certain space. If I look around, I don't think corporations will be able to hold their grip on the internet. We have our own advantages.

@neil in particular, centralized entities tend to build with one pattern in mind: the walled garden, and I think those are local optima -- we can build bridges and siphons and run them for the good of the people and the internet.

@neil but I fully agree that learning from CAD is much in the menu.

@neil [[fission]] is of course in this space, it seems to me, as well as the whole web 3/distributed/serverless movement.

@neil

Started noding based on

http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Counter-Anti-Disintermediation

Interesting how the Agora, although server-based, could be thought as meeting the recommendation in the next-to-last paragraph by virtue of actually being an integration of the user's self hosted notes -- I guess most users host notes on github.com, but migrating off github.com (or at least keeping a freer mirror) is not that hard.

@neil a serverless agora would be ideal though of course, even if it's not currently within my skill set

@vera @trailmarks what would you build this on? [[fission]]?

@flancian I find the discussion of centralised/decentralised/distributed really interesting too.

I do like P2P but I'm not sure how far I go with the extreme 'no servers' view of e.g. Kleiner.

There's a clear benefit from something like anagora or micro.blog, providing a service for others who would not be able to set something up themselves. A server for 50 friends is different from a server for 5 million.

Beaker Browser was cool though.

@neil @flancian
It took me years to realize
that while the network became the computer with the rise of crytpographic hashing DHT and other technologies the network became the commons based peer to peer database, which means silos are history. We can build an InterPersonal People centered internet that would promote Open Commons based peer produced, born interoperable software where the participant in the network will benefit.

@trailmarks @neil that sounds lovely!

Gyuri, do you think Trailmarks and Agora users should interop at the protocol (network) level or at the storage layer?

@trailmarks @neil as in, for example, should we set up explicit interop/cross referencing or instead write to the same index or db (ipfs?)