#social 2018-02-17
2018-02-17 UTC
rowan_, ben_thatmustbeme, timbl and xmpp-social joined the channel
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melody cwebber2: reading up on petnames, concerned about the sharing/introduction part -- thinking through harassment use cases, the most obvious concern to me is using something like this as a way to harass transgender people by widely spreading their "deadname" through this introduction mechanism -- any thoughts or other resources i should read?
# melody yeah, i think the big risk there is that there's a tension between letting people be the authoritative source for their names and the desire to avoid mimicry and forgery
# melody to an extent, but there are centralizing authorities that can contextually act as authoritative
# melody which ig uess you could do with petnames too
# melody but it gets messy
# melody but like, state and federal governments track names
# melody and those are used on identification that is broadly considered trustworthy
# melody even when it's patently wrong (trans people setting the example again here)
# melody it's just worth thinking through the edge cases, the place where names absolutely fail or become harmful IRL will do so in any structure looking to mirror it with high fidelity
# melody so it's worth looking there for where this fucks up
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cwebber2 I hear from joeyh that Secure Scuttlebutt implements petnames in practice btw https://octodon.social/@joeyh/99542030755787438
# melody i think one of the risks becomes that the existing systems tend to fall apart for people who are already vulnerable, and it's hard to find ways of rearchitecting them so they don't compound that harm while remaining useful for the cases that the real life structure is uncontroversial for
# melody i find SSB interesting but distressing for a lot of the same reasons i'm consitently nervous about immutability and decentralized systems in general
# melody lol
# melody of course! i'm always a little afraid i'm just not understanding things well enough to ask the right questions about it
# melody but i seem to have a knack for at least stumbling face-first into real problems
# melody haha
# melody i'm using a linux desktop os for the first time in ages, so that's been sort of fun mixed in with a dash of frustrating
# melody cwebber2: elementary os -- i've been backing their patreon for a while but not using the OS because it didn't seem ready for prime time, but they're really the only distro in the space that has my attention at all and i do want to see them get there
# melody it still doesn't seem ready, but i bought a cheap laptop and decided to give it a swing anyhow
# melody hm
# melody that's interesting, i think, but definitely solving a problem outside the list of ones i generally feel like are blockers for linux on the desktop to be a great experience :)
# melody lol
# melody yeah i mean, i like that there's a distro that's incubating a packaging/distribution system that might solve that problem
# melody and i'd hope that's something that could also be made to work with something working on consistency, integration & user experience eventually
# melody i'm skeptical of a few of elementary's choices, but i also really respect that they are working on sort of like, these really long term investments like a monetizable app store and publishing workflow, good documentation, and interface guidelines
# melody rather than just like, papering over what's there
# melody which is what every other "user friendly" linux has tried to do and failed
# melody like on the one hand it makes them sort of increasingly divergent, they're a bit of a silo that way
# melody but it's still a F/OSS operating system and it's doing what others have not been able to so far, and they've done it working against the grain of a culture that treats UI as an afterthought/unnecessary eye candy
# melody that's fair, i think mostly gnome's "problem" is that it's only able to focus on like, their piece of things, and developers writing GTK apps don't really do so with any sort of unified vision about interfaces
# melody so tackling at the level of a distro where you can sort of impose additional consistency and pathways for communication
# melody treats UX as a more holistic process
# melody you can build an entire ecosystem that way, the desktop environment being just one piece
# melody i'm not super familiar with gnome's recent efforts, so i guess we'll see -- elementary's big failing is that it doesn't have enough apps native to its toolkits and everything else doesn't work like an elementary app should
# melody so the same problem as ever really :P
# cwebber2 though it's true they can't stop outside applications from diverging, though I'm not sure that's unique... probably Elementary will ship Blender, and there's only so much Elementary can do to prevent the fact that it implements its own universe of UI concepts (which remain their own universe on Windows and OSX as well)
# melody but i think their strategy for tackling it i think has potential in a way i haven't really seen otherwise
# melody they actually don't ship anything non-native in the default distribution, you can install blender of course, but they are putting in a LOT of work to try to make it complete out-of-the-box
# melody and haven't gotten there yet haha
# melody will keep it in mind, don't have a super good venue to do so right now unless i wipe this machine again and put another distro on it
# melody i try not to judge distros too much on how pleasant they are to use in a VM
# melody i haven't used fedora since version....4?
# cwebber2 is spending their evening going through https://beautifulracket.com/
# melody neat
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