There's no technical reason that email isn't public, just social convention. Emails are like postcards, and the content is visible to all routers that they pass through on the way to their final destination.
In theory, we could have decided that email was an open discussion platform (more like USENET) with almost no technical changes.
I know they could just setup their own Pod but these values are what makes them any different from the likes of Twitter and I would've expected them to stand by them a bit more.
Yeah that's probably because the ISIS is known for suicide bombings, cutting off heads, video taping it so that the families and friends of the victim can see how gruesome their loved one died, killing unbelievers and tying multiple women to poles at the Mosul Dam to be raped. Not exactly the kind of thing you want to use to promote your values unless you're a psychopath. What the fuck.
All they need to do to is say, "Censoring this is not possible", as they seem to be doing, and that promotes their software. They don't need to talk about, approve of, or even be aware of the horrific things that ISIS does. It's enough to know that people really, really don't like what they're posting.
On the other hand, by actively attempting to censor the content, as Diaspora also seems to be doing, they're also sending the message that they don't actually truly believe in openness as a value, deep down, even though they designed their software to provide it. That actually hurts them a bit in the long run, I think.
However, my conflict comes from the fact that censorship doesn't really solve the root problem. In child molesters, the problem is better treated in psychiatric care and in extremism the problem is better treated through education, peace, and tolerance.
Whether or not they thought through the ramifications of all edge cases, how they feel about it, and what they do about is another matter entirely.
I for one would like Twister to take off as alternative to Twitter:
EDIT: It also seems to be compatible with Tor now:
If a group that posts videos of journalist executions can use it without getting shut down, it is certainly usable for any other group that may be unpopular with their local majority: Tibetan nationalists, Falun Gong, breastfeeding moms, cop watchers, Iranian women's rights groups, Ukranian rebels, homosexuals, German Nazis, Quebec secessionists, eco-terrorists, unschoolers, conspiracy theorists, anarchists, red-state liberals, blue-state conservatives, and people who text while driving.
To get the good, you have to take the bad with it. The same Bitcoin that can buy a pizza can also buy a murder. The same typewriter can write both a beautiful poem or an extortion note. A hammer can build a house or crack a skull. A fire can chase away the cold and the dark, or it can burn your home to ash.
The early adopters are going to be the most blatantly offensive, and the most suspiciously paranoid, and the most idealist. The mainstream people already have their mainstream network, and won't see any reason to switch until they find themselves penalized in some way for being different from the owners of the system.
This is good. If someone as nasty as a journalist beheader can't get silenced, I know with reasonable certainty that if I go to Diaspora, there's likely nothing I would ever do myself that would result in me being erased from the network. And I can share information with just my friends, rather than my friends plus all paying Facebook customers.
And in addition to all that, how can you expect to get more jaw-jaw and less war-war if you slap a gag on the other guy every time you see his lips move?
And you can plan a murder. The conversation itself is not a crime. But it is very damning evidence if the prospective victim that was discussed actually turns up dead, showing that the crime was, in fact, premeditated murder and not a less severely punished type of homicide, and that accomplices were involved. The speech is not the crime. It is evidence of malicious intent if a crime subsequently occurs. It may also be useful intelligence that could allow someone to interfere with a crime in progress.
If you overhear the murder conversation, you might be able to prevent a murder. But those guys could have been talking about their clan strategy for a MMORPG raid, and you simply misunderstood the intent. You don't know for certain until someone acts.
Censorship cannot stop crimes. It can only conceal evidence.
They have good uses but I can think of plenty of bad uses and I suspect that the bad uses will outnumber the good uses at any moment in time.
How many pedo-pervs would you allow to trade images such that one political dissident may speak without fear of persecution?
If a political dissident would approach me I'd more than happily attempt to smuggle his words out of whatever dictatorship he or she is currently living in, that would be my call to make. But whoever gets unfettered access to my network interfaces is going to have to be known to me in person.
"diaspora* is completely Free Software. This means there are no limits on how it can be used."
Sounds like the IS people are using it as intended.
(Life will get complicated for any pod admins in western countries though.)
Xerox cannot stop IS using photocopiers.
Sanford cannot stop IS using pencils.
BBC cannot stop IS listening to World Service.
etc.
"admitted"? What's with the tone of this article? What crime are they "admitting" to?
In my experience, BBC should be better than this.
In this case the Diaspora team is using their free speech to suggest that various pod administrators choose not to publish some particularly nasty speech.
My own perspective is largely reflected in the early post of logfromblammo, which puts me in the extremist free (i.e., decentralized/uncensorable) speech camp, i guess. logfromblammo's observation that early adopters rarely come from (anywhere near) the mainstream seems an especially salient aspect of the good-with-the-bad argument in this case.
The only thing i'd add, as an old school free speecher, is that the traditional anti-censorship answer to bad speech is more good speech. ...still thinking about how that model plays out on a distributed social network (social networking being an activity i personally mostly avoid).
Anyway...GRATITUDE for the cogent, respectful conversation i've had the pleasure of eavesdropping on.
As it was said before, saying that certain assholes should shut up does not equal betraying the principle of freedom of speech. Now, that is philosophical subtleties aside. Of course this invokes hard questions, like, who gets to decide which assholes should shut up. But let's not split hairs -- IS case is not a borderline case. That is, if we all agree that what they do is universally harmful.
If someone doesn't then I think there's not much to discuss.
That would have been a great quote to have on the crowdfunding page.
https://libertypod.org/posts/7a778c00f3a201319eb700163efe12c...
Sounds like a quality criteria to me.
(and for the record, "IS" is not a synonym for "ISIS")
Sounds pretty extreme to me.
Not so much. You are using the definition from an article geared towards ousting extremists -- and therefore their definition is "extreme". An IS can very much-so be a legitimate non-extreme government. (albeit, different from what most of us would prefer as a government)
