I’m confused.

What’s the point of the article?

How’s the author compromised by the Mossad?

What would the attack be?

Agreed it’s not a great article because it expects the reader to have context and a little imagination, but last I checked what the nostrilfolk were up to it was typical for a web app to ask for your private key (Nsec) and you’re just supposed to trust that app to take actions on your behalf (why nostr isn’t a browser extension that simply signs transactions clientside I don’t know)

So the attack vector is you change what you do once you get a nostridumbass to enter their nsec, Mossad is just mentioned as a catchall for potential attackers.

Seems like the age old ease of using a website, vs running your own copy of open source software after reading and understanding it in its entirety (unsolvable mess)

The article is about accessing a service (nostr) through a hosted web app. The domain or server that is hosting the app could be compromised and serve a bad app.

Posts on nostr use a key pair so when you see a post from foo you know it's the same foo you knew from last week. Also, posts are shared to and stored on multiple independent servers (called relays).

A compromised app could serve you fake posts or censor stuff.

Let's be honest, there is no real alternative.

"Not using it." is a completely acceptable alternative. It does not actually solve a problem in one's life.

Definitely.

RSS is still great for news and Signal/Telegram/Whatsapp are more than enough to keep connected with friends&family.

What's wrong with Bluesky?

Bluesky is not a real decentralized system as the company behind it say. Bluesky (the company) controls most key parts of the network, and it is basically impossible to setup a really decentralised alternative provider for the ATProto network, like you can do today with ActivityPub (Mastodon) or Nostr.

Sure, you can setup you PDS and own your data, but it is useless without the Relays and a self-hosted Firehose, and running you own website is basically impossible.

And lastly, let's keep in mind that BSky is a commercial entity, not a no-profit like Mastodon or a commmunity effort like Nostr.

And yes, I am ignoring the political toxicity of the network because I think the technical aspects are bad enough.

Multiple people have set up their own relays (which, by the way, is the firehose), and multiple people have set up their own application backends (which I think is what you're calling the relay)

It's fully possible to stand up the network on your own infrastructure, and to communicate with other providers

It's irrelevant, no body uses it

Interestingly, I became better at learning human languages after learning a couple of programming languages. I was good at math at the beginning. I guess programming kinda bridged the gap.

It makes no sense to build a social network nowadays.

With Mastodon and Bluesky around, users have free options. Plus X and Threads, and you can see how the market is more than saturated.

IMHO they should look into close collaboration/minority stake with Bluesky or Reddit instead. You have a huge pool of users already, without the need to build it up from the ground up from scratch.

Heck, OpenAI probably has enough money to just buy Reddit if they want.

I don't know about Reddit, but Bluesky would never in a million years partner themselves publicly with OpenAI. I can't comment on the opinions of the team themselves because I just don't know, but the users would revolt. Loudly.

Is there anything stopping openai from scraping all the bluesky content without partnering?

Yes, they can. All Bluesky data (and ATProto in general) is publicly available.

It is already happening and nothing can be done against it at a protocol level: https://mashable.com/article/bluesky-ai-dataset-using-one-mi...

Also, what is their USP? "Join our social network so we can train our models on your data!"

...free AI slop right from the tap? Like the latest ghibli fad.

It is even more deep that this.

Archeology tells us that common people of ancient Judea/Israel were more flexible in their practice than post-Roman orthodoxy implies.

From Asherah statues to an entire Temple (Elephantine island on the Nile) working in parallel to the Jerusalem Temple.

The matter of strict adherence as a National identity/religious practice became important following the Diaspora following the Rome-Jewish wars.

When times are good, it’s everyone for themselves, and individuals can entertain various identities and alliances. But when times are tough, community is protective, and individuals have to pick a side.

Sounds like modern politics.

If this was the case, why Jewish practices from Eastern Europe and the Middle East/North Africa are so aligned?

And even communities that are even further away like Ethiopia, Yemen, and India, are mostly following the same pattern?

Modern Judaism is very much connected to the state of affairs of ancient Israel/Judah from 24 centuries ago.

They were not so aligned until the 20th-century when Jews from all communities mixed again. I am not disputing that Jewish practices today and for the last two millennia are connected to practices in Judea at the turn of the first millennium and to texts that had been written even earlier. What I'm saying is that strict and regulated adherence by large parts of the population came relatively late. That, as far as I can tell from the research, is not at all controversial.

I recently switched from Fedora to Linux Mint Debian Edition (I work mostly with Debian servers so I am more comfortable with apt than dnf), and the switch has been smooth for me.

I keep my home directory organized and backed up on my NAS, so for me reinstalling is straightforward. Also I use Flatpaks whenever possible, so reinstall them is just looking at ~/.var/app and reinstalling what is there.

Other files to back up might be custom /etc confs, and maybe lists of packages you need (dpkg -l or rpm -qa are your friends).

I also use Linux brew for some more up to date software (e.g. golang) and just brew list is your command to get what you have installed.

In general, keep a backup of your home folder (I suggest skipping backing up ~/.cache to save some time and space) and you are mostly good to go.

- `brew list` doesn't include apps you install from 3rd party taps, or casks, so `brew list --full-name` + `brew list --full-name --cask` is better

- Many apps store their config and user data outside of the home dir. I always find it dishonest when people say backing up home is enough on Linux. You did say "mostly ready to go", but that's exactly the tricky and important part that most people pretend doesn't exist

E.g. Docker volumes are in /var/lib/docker

So /etc/... and /var/lib are generally worth checking as well, but that probably still doesn't cover everything, as not all apps behave as maybe XDG specifies.

Ideally you shouldn't have to backup /var/lib/docker, as your docker configs should live in your docker-compose.yaml or whatever you use to start your docker containers.

Also I have included backing up /etc confs in my original post.

I agree on the brew list being incomplete, totally forgot about casks. Not even sure if they work correctly under Linux to be honest. I literally just use brew for golang and awscli :P

Re Docker I said volumes, not config. Some volumes you might have mapped to the host and maybe picked a home subdirectory, but others maybe not. For example the Ollama 3rd party UI `open-web-ui` suggests to run it like this in their documentation:

`docker run -d -p 3000:8080 --add-host=host.docker.internal:host-gateway -v open-webui:/app/backend/data --name open-webui --restart always ghcr.io/open-webui/open-webui:main`

Then "open-webui" will be in `/var/lib/docker/volumes/open-webui/`.

Sure you can change it, but what I mean is that a lot of software by itself, or by you following documentation, puts data that you usually want to back up outside of your home.

What is meant is that instead of ~/.app/config, you are getting now ~/.config/app/config.

It’s much cleaner and it comes with a more logical and useful split of config and cache stuff, e.g. you can just skip .cache when rsync-ing to a remote storage instead of having a long list of per-app escapes…

I understand what was meant. They're both dotfiles.

Uh, clearly that's a dotdirectory

Fair enough.

Not really. Now when I want to uninstall something, I have to look in multiple places for its artifacts, rather than just nuking .<appname>. And there is no universal pattern of use. It's even worse than /usr vs /opt.

This is an issue that really can't be fixed imo. If use the scheme "app/storage" then migration/deletion of singular apps is easy, but if you want to touch just a part of every program (e.g. delete the cache) then its filled with the same tedium you were initially complaining about with regards to uninstalling. On the other hand, the scheme "storage/app" allows you to "nuke" the cache for every installed program without touching the config at all (while lessening the ease of complete removal).

As I don't usually remove programs (or install new ones, for that matter) the scheme that works best for me and many others is "storage/app". In an ideal world a hybrid scheme might be possible, but as it stands now it is not an option and one way has to be chosen over the other.

Similar experience for me. Facebook groups, WhatsApp groups and telegram groups. Some years ago somebody tried to move people to signal groups, but it went nowhere… and this is Germany, where there is no sympathy for Meta and in general people are quite privacy aware.