Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 in the US which demanded network unbundling, splitting up the fiber/connections versus the internet service, demanding wholesale rate access to infrastructure. It was good.
Verizon also sued, and said, sure, there's laws for unbundling. But, we really don't like them. We aren't going to deploy fiber if we have to share. And the court once again said, oh, yeah, well, that's fine, we'll grant that: we'll strike down congress's law because "innovation" sounds better.
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cadc/1...
It's just so so so much corruption, so much meddling from the court to undo everything good congress worked so hard to make happen, that was such an essential baseline to allow competition. I remain very very angry about this all. This was such a sad decade of losing so much goodness, such competition. These damn cartels! The courts that keep giving them everything they want! Bah!!
If you also want to host or build interesting social apps, you should definitely do an isolated atproto / Bluesky service!
https://blueskydirectory.com/
As for actually doing this... running a PDS and relay isn't that hard, and the red dwarf web client is online and can be configured to point to whatever appview you want. There's significantly less experience running your own appview, but there are options & folks are happy to help.
That you phrase it like that implies that you haven't used atproto very deeply, and aren't aware of how versatile the protocol is, and how many apps it hosts.
I linked you a directory of apps already! You could use any of these! You'd have to set up your own instances to use it on a private service but that's doable, and since you'd have the main atproto systems up, it would be much lower lift than you might expect!
PDSls let's you browse people's PDS. This shows you what apps I've used! It's quite versatile, capable of hosting all manner of social systems. There's nothing else that will give you the ability to build a neat rich social community like this: everything else has specific purpose and intent, and you are rather stuck with that design, but atproto is versatile and generic and ready to form whatever kind of social systems you want with it. To look at what's here and say atproto is very twitter like is to barely scratch the surface.
https://pdsls.dev/at://jauntywk.bsky.social
I no longer recommend ATProto, in part because the public by default was a terrible choice. People prefer privacy, not anyone in the world able to read all of their activity. Bolting permissioned buckets on after the fact is not the way, it needs to be core to the protocol design.
I just started looking at the At Protocol for another side project - do you think the protocol will eventually support such privacy settings by default, or is heading in that direction?
Just another day owning the libs, and the planet, and humanity in general. The assault against humanity reason judgement science and the world goes on!
On social media, I've been using the hashtag hostis humani generis. A latin designation usually used in maritime contexts for pirates slave traders and war criminals, for enemies of all mankind. They remind me of The Affront in The Culture series. I suspect the administration like that Affront would gladly take the name. https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/Affront
Much easier to do when you exist 40ms and a firewall away from the world. The cloud companies ability to not share the experience of those using the service, to be remote, is a much greater retreat than what was possible 101 years ago, it feels like.
The leadership team of Meta (and all other giant mega corps) are much more isolated from the real world than 40ms and a firewall. These people don't interact in any way with normal people. They live in a different world than us, and don't even think about us, let alone wonder if their actions are hurting us. Do you think Zucc does his own shopping and has to interact with store employees? Do you think he talks to any of the staff of plumbers, electricians, HVAC repair people, gardeners, who maintain his homes? Do you think he flies commercial and sits next to randos in business class? Do you think he goes down to the DMV and stands in line to renew his driver's license? These guys have staff in their orbit who arrange for all these things to just magically happen, so royalty doesn't have to come into direct contact with the commoners. The billionaire class is thoroughly insulated from us through multiple layers of staff and staff of staff.
There are some reasons they may have to: risk of being kidnapped, risk of random people bothering them for money, risk of random crazy people attacking them, illogicality of waiting hours in a TSA line for no other reason than "that's what poor people do".
Exactly. If I was one of those people, no one but my 30-50 most trusted friends and family members would be allowed 100 yards near me.
I would be afraid for my safety 24/7, for my children's... For my private life (I would never talk about my personal opinions to anyone outside of my immediate family). Etc.
Think Taylor Swift in Walmart. She could probably get trampled over and die (no joke). Zuckerberg or Gates in a bar or a county fair? Probably beaten to death or shot.
It's easy for us to imagine they live isolated from regular people because they think they're better than us (although they probably think that)... But the reality is that regular people are dangerous for this kind of people.
> Zuckerberg or Gates in a bar or a county fair? Probably beaten to death or shot.
I think you’re probably right about these two. However if I try and imagine someone like, say, Warren Buffet or Jimmy Carter at a public place like that I think they’d do ok. The difference being of course that they’re not arseholes.
I hear lots of talk about concentration of power, but too little about its amplification. It was a quieter world before amplifiers, both literally and figuratively.
Ford and Stellantis are meanwhile busy trying to partner with Chinese companies, to make their own battery factories. Even though it seems like maybe they'll end up making more batteries for stationary power than for vehicles.
In general the Trump administration is the most emergency based folks on the planet. If it's not for emergency reasons, it's for national security reasons. None of it is explained or backed. They just take the hallpass and fuck off to do whatever the hell they like.
Brazen mis-governance. I think it's particularly insulting to call so many things emergencies, threats. This is the work of the rankest, lowest cowards, to sabotage our nation with such false lightly thrown around accusations, for such fake purposes. Exploitative creeps!
Edit: what timing! Oh look, new Constitutional crisis just dropped, with Trump again seizing the power of the purse from congress! He's declaring rule over OMB to fund DHS, because (you guessed it) National Emergency!! https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/04/libe...
Thanks for the links. Hopefully things get bad enough people actually take control of government again. I personally used to scoff at CalExit but now seeing how easy it is for a government to abuse you from a distance, I would much prefer Sacramento the ultimate seat of power for my community, family and interests.
A marginally less-extreme option would be to start subdividing larger states.
The Constitution does not permit amendments to change the "equal" representation of states in the Senate, but we can even the playing field by making it easy for large states to subdivide for the benefit of the people.
Awesome idea: Texas can become four states, Northern California can become a state, Northwest Dakota, Northeast Dakota, and Upper New York can all become states too with equal Senate representation.
Or did you perhaps have some gerrymandering-esque idea to limit these 'benefits' to liberal metropolitan areas?
> Awesome idea [...] Or did you perhaps have some gerrymandering-esque idea to limit these 'benefits' to liberal metropolitan areas?
What? It sounds like you're crowing over some kind of "gotcha", but what is it?
If we both agree on the same principle, what's the problem? Namely, that citizens being disproportionately (un)represented in their "democratic" government is typically bad, and especially when it's just from ancient quirks of boundary line development.
On reflection, I suppose there's another explanation: Some people go through life with no real principles, flip-flopping based on whatever is temporarily advantageous to "their team". Is that it? Are you projecting your lifestyle onto me, and feeling the thrill of "winning" at being badder?
But they weren't just "ancient" quirks. They were commitments made to your fellow Americans in smaller states. Commitments that were required to allow the formation of the country at all; and as such should be shown a little more respect than being referred to as ancient quirks. That's not to say that they should be forever set in stone, but we should at least proceed with an honest portrayal of why we're in this situation in the first place, and what's at stake for the different parties affected.
How else would you describe the way populations grew more places labeled X and not places labeled Y over the course of 250 years?
> They were commitments made to your fellow Americans in smaller states. Commitments that were required to allow the formation of the country at all;
Is this just a complaint about phrasing, or are you claiming some commitment would be broken?
My proposal has no effect on any commitments made to states, neither in letter nor in spirit. It doesn't change the rules for Senate nor House representation, and it doesn't infringe on the sovereignty of any state. If anything is restores state-sovereignty in one narrow scenario, a scenario no signatory ever believed was an intended feature.
Namely, the betrayal which happens when when humans (residing within the borders of a high-population state) are partially disenfranchised, and coalition of low-pop states vows: "Even though it's entirely within your own borders, we will veto any attempts to fix it. No other states except us can be small, we are pulling up the ladder. In order for us to keep an advantage your residents must suffer."
> If anything is restores state-sovereignty in one narrow scenario, a scenario no signatory ever believed was an intended feature.
The most direct fault leading to that is the massive expansion of the Commerce Clause and the following elevation of every major issue to the federal level. The founders never expected this because the federal government wasn’t even supposed to be able to dictate most intra-state things.
The idea of the Senate makes sense, at least to me. States give up some sovereignty to be in the union, the Senate gives each state equal representation because they’ve each given up the same level of self-governance. The House reflects people equally as members of the union, and the Senate reflects states equally as members of the union.
Without the Senate, small states are giving up way more sovereignty than larger ones. Eg Rhode Island would have practically no sovereignty, they’d just be captives of Texas, California, etc. They don’t have enough people to swing a vote, so no federal party is going to campaign there or listen to what they want.
Making more states dilutes power in the Senate, and I don’t see a clean way to do that. If we allow arbitrary divisions of states, we invoke a race to the bottom where states can just fragment into a million tiny states and chaos ensues. If we enforce a lower population limit then the Senate just reflects the populace and becomes a pointless copy of the House.
Representation in the house is supposed to be proportional to population. Unfortunately that's no longer the case and we should fix that.
Yammering on about unequal representation in the senate as though it's some great injustice is either partisan or ignorant. The senate was never supposed to provide representation relative to population and attempting to game the system by subdividing certain states but not others is no better than attempting to pack the supreme court or any other blatantly disingenuous behavior.
> attempting to game the system by subdividing certain states but not others
Oh, so you're against sneaky "some but not others" schemes? Great! Me too! So why are you going the opposite direction?
You're supporting a status-quo where a partisan bloc on the federal level can already go: "It's OK for Florida, but prohibited for New-York", or vice-versa.
You're opposing something that'd fix the-thing-you-hate by giving both of those states equal capability.
> The senate was never supposed to provide representation relative to population
So what? That doesn't change. It's non-changing was a core requirement in the proposal, and I've pointed it out several times now. That aspect literally can't change via amendment. Why are you suggesting it'd change anyway?
This is about enabling people (enough of them, anyway) to (re-)choose their states. It's always been an entirely different segment of the pipeline!
I'm supporting a status quo that was voluntarily and very intentionally entered into by our predecessors.
You are arguing that the current arrangement is somehow a "quirk" and that we should attempt a legally dubious end run around the constitution. It's a self serving line of reasoning directly equivalent to packing the supreme court.
What is this thing I hate exactly? Because I very much support the way the senate and house were set up originally prior to the house being frozen. I think that the disproportionate representation is a good thing provided that state's rights are respected and thus we really are a union rather than a monolithic whole. Unfortunately there are a number of issues in that regard such as the rampant abuse of the interstate commerce clause; I think we should try to fix those things rather than abandon the system.
For the record I'm not opposed to the subdivision or agglomeration of states in the event that there is a direct and legitimate reason for it. But such a reason must convincingly hinge on the internal politics of the state itself as opposed to being an end run around the constitution because a segment of the population doesn't like the way the system was intentionally designed to work.
> That's not to say that they should be forever set in stone
In fact, they were intended to be _actively_ reviewed and updated every 2-3 decades. But we don't and haven't done that, for and around the EC in particular, since at least the Civil War.
And when people talk about it, they're immediately assumed to have ill intent. In fact, they too, by talking about it, are also following the covenants of the same people who made those "commitments".
We gotta imagine a few steps further in time and toss in some game-theory.
Imagine a big swing-state split between Yellow and Purple parties. It's legislature is controlled by Yellow, and they pull a sneaky: They partition into 10x Small Yellow states (5% pop each) and one Big Purple state (50% pop) Let's also assume the whole effort somehow evaded requirements in the state's constitution, referendums, etc.
At first glance, you might think Yellow has "won" by adding more/safer seats on the federal level, right?
Except now the folks in Big Purple are kinda pissed, and they control themselves now. They could choose to split again, leaving things as 10x Small Yellow and 10x Small Blue. That puts the partisan balance is back at square one, except for a shit-ton of disruption and pain and a bunch of Yellow politicians are out of a job. So did they really win? Knowing the likely outcome, would they have tried anyway?
In short, it's very different from district gerrymandering. For starters, every division becomes independent, and it won't even happen if residents are asking tough questions like "Then how do I get my water from the river!?" It'll be a very slow and very deliberate process stretched across multiple election cycles.
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