A critique of the fragility and impracticality of modern smartphones, urging a
shift toward more durable, repairable designs, and a call for manufacturers
and users alike to prioritize function over aesthetics.
I’ve recently learned that the device Sun first made Java for was, well, almost a smartphone in idea. So those Java phones and now Android are not a perversion of the initial intent.
I also think that, if you only compare various places in reality and various casinos by the amount of endorphine per minute spent, you’ll choose casinos (OK, maybe brothels).
The reason you don’t choose a casino is because you know that in average the casino always wins. That’s a knowledge of how casinos work.
The reason you don’t choose a brothel is because you know that many people working there are disadvantaged, and because you can control your impulses. That’s also a knowledge of how brothels work.
This means, that if we make an analogy between casinos, brothels and the computer industry, including smartphones and the web, the user has to know how it works to make the right decisions.
So the commonly repeated point about grandmas and casual users is simply wrong. There’s no way they don’t get deceived by the other side profiting from their ignorance, other than learning how things work.
So - I think we need a global social network. We have siloed services because it doesn’t bring profits to make such a global service, and the one Sun, Netscape, Macromedia (yes) and many universities made in the 90s has gone obsolete. The Internet itself allows to make a global Facebook. But instead of solving the problems of technical debt and adoption for that, it’s simpler to use a centralized service which was relatively easy to launch initially.
From Facebook (or others) you ultimately need 1) search of 1.a) contacts, 1.b) groups and 1.c) posts, 2) storage of 2.a) contacts, 2.b) groups and 2.c) posts, 3) universal forward identifiers of 3.a) contacts, 3.b) groups and 3.c) posts.
With cryptography and #3 you can use untrusted services for #1 and #2.
If they can be untrusted, services for #1 (indexer crawling the network and answering search requests in a standardized way, similar to RSS, maybe just with RSS ; the crawler service and the search result storage can be separated too) and #2 can be contributed to their respective pools like with SETI@home or other projects.
There is the question of a financial incentive to providing such a service. That can be done with using, say, (maybe number 4), a pool of billing services. A user makes a payment and before requesting a search service or a storage service, requests a billing service on which they are registered, providing it with the identifier of a resource they are going to use, that billing service and that resource interact in the sense of payment in background, giving the user a token with which they request the service itself. To pay for used storage or a heavy search request (or a request above a threshold).
Well, that looks ugly, maybe some other way is possible.
Those search results from search services and objects fetched from storage services are presented in a native application similar to Facebook, perhaps.
Contacts would be just PKI certificates or something, with a valid certificate for a registrar domain someplace in chain.
So you’d request in DNS (or someplace else, I dunno) pool.search.nihilsoc.org for a bunch of uniform indexer services, pool.store.nihilsoc.org for a bunch of uniform storage services (if we don’t have a paid service saved, probably even encrypted on some available storage service), pool.relay.nihilsoc.org of a bunch of notification servers similar to IRC (except not used for chat directly, or maybe even that), pool.billing.nihilsoc.org to pay for services requiring it. It wouldn’t matter much which ones you’d hit, because every post, contact and group identifiers would be global, containing parent identifiers and such.
It would supposedly be seamless for the user. You search for a group on a few indexers, you get a few lists of results showing on which storage services it’s present and how much of it, you deduplicate those and you ask those directly by global identifiers, check signatures yadda-yadda.
Seems very archaic, I dunno why nobody is doing this, probably because things seeming simple are complex.
OK, about smartphones and casinos - just like the way to fight gambling lies in knowing that the casino always wins and there’s no luck, the way to fight enshittification lies in users caring what they use. Yep, technologies and systems involved are complex, then maybe those should be made simpler for users to understand. Simpler inside, like OpenBSD, not simpler outside, like ChatGPT.
I’ve recently learned that the device Sun first made Java for was, well, almost a smartphone in idea. So those Java phones and now Android are not a perversion of the initial intent.
I also think that, if you only compare various places in reality and various casinos by the amount of endorphine per minute spent, you’ll choose casinos (OK, maybe brothels).
The reason you don’t choose a casino is because you know that in average the casino always wins. That’s a knowledge of how casinos work.
The reason you don’t choose a brothel is because you know that many people working there are disadvantaged, and because you can control your impulses. That’s also a knowledge of how brothels work.
This means, that if we make an analogy between casinos, brothels and the computer industry, including smartphones and the web, the user has to know how it works to make the right decisions.
So the commonly repeated point about grandmas and casual users is simply wrong. There’s no way they don’t get deceived by the other side profiting from their ignorance, other than learning how things work.
So - I think we need a global social network. We have siloed services because it doesn’t bring profits to make such a global service, and the one Sun, Netscape, Macromedia (yes) and many universities made in the 90s has gone obsolete. The Internet itself allows to make a global Facebook. But instead of solving the problems of technical debt and adoption for that, it’s simpler to use a centralized service which was relatively easy to launch initially.
From Facebook (or others) you ultimately need 1) search of 1.a) contacts, 1.b) groups and 1.c) posts, 2) storage of 2.a) contacts, 2.b) groups and 2.c) posts, 3) universal forward identifiers of 3.a) contacts, 3.b) groups and 3.c) posts.
With cryptography and #3 you can use untrusted services for #1 and #2.
If they can be untrusted, services for #1 (indexer crawling the network and answering search requests in a standardized way, similar to RSS, maybe just with RSS ; the crawler service and the search result storage can be separated too) and #2 can be contributed to their respective pools like with SETI@home or other projects.
There is the question of a financial incentive to providing such a service. That can be done with using, say, (maybe number 4), a pool of billing services. A user makes a payment and before requesting a search service or a storage service, requests a billing service on which they are registered, providing it with the identifier of a resource they are going to use, that billing service and that resource interact in the sense of payment in background, giving the user a token with which they request the service itself. To pay for used storage or a heavy search request (or a request above a threshold).
Well, that looks ugly, maybe some other way is possible.
Those search results from search services and objects fetched from storage services are presented in a native application similar to Facebook, perhaps.
Contacts would be just PKI certificates or something, with a valid certificate for a registrar domain someplace in chain.
So you’d request in DNS (or someplace else, I dunno) pool.search.nihilsoc.org for a bunch of uniform indexer services, pool.store.nihilsoc.org for a bunch of uniform storage services (if we don’t have a paid service saved, probably even encrypted on some available storage service), pool.relay.nihilsoc.org of a bunch of notification servers similar to IRC (except not used for chat directly, or maybe even that), pool.billing.nihilsoc.org to pay for services requiring it. It wouldn’t matter much which ones you’d hit, because every post, contact and group identifiers would be global, containing parent identifiers and such.
It would supposedly be seamless for the user. You search for a group on a few indexers, you get a few lists of results showing on which storage services it’s present and how much of it, you deduplicate those and you ask those directly by global identifiers, check signatures yadda-yadda.
Seems very archaic, I dunno why nobody is doing this, probably because things seeming simple are complex.
OK, about smartphones and casinos - just like the way to fight gambling lies in knowing that the casino always wins and there’s no luck, the way to fight enshittification lies in users caring what they use. Yep, technologies and systems involved are complex, then maybe those should be made simpler for users to understand. Simpler inside, like OpenBSD, not simpler outside, like ChatGPT.