augustuspolius

It’s a false dichotomy only if you indeed believe that Russia has “created” Ukraine and that Ukrainians are not a real nation. Russia has as much right to claim Ukraine as Ukraine - Russia. None.

While I don’t necessarily agree with the commenter you are replying to - I can relate to how hard it is to separate Russia’s contributions from what is currently happening in Ukraine.

Modern Russia is fascist in all meaningful ways. This—at least emotionally—overshadows the positive contributions the country made in the past.

Wonder if the person you are replying to meant Russia, not USSR.

I am aware that genocide is a disputed term in this context. I lean towards it because the famine disproportionately affected Ukrainians (and Kazakhs) and was at least in part not mitigated intentionally to punish minorities with a stronger anti-Soviet sentiment.

We have to agree that either “modern Ukraine” was created in 1920s from Russians and Russian territories or there were different people on that land long before that.

If you are leaning towards the former then this could be extended even further: Soviet Union only ever harassed itself. There were no occupied Baltic states, there was no Ukraine, etc etc - just one big happy family called USSR.

Never really thought of that in this way. Do you think Russian poets, writers, composers, artists of the early and mid 20th century were a product of the Soviet culture more than the Tsarist/pre-Soviet world?

Interesting - I never attributed that to moving borders. USSR had a pretty mixed society with many people moving between different republics during their lifetime (especially in the 40-60s). Don’t think borders changed much during that period.

Just to clarify - native Russians in Ukraine or outside of it? If the former then it’s not surprising, the genocide was directed at specific territories.

I am curious to know whether this Western perception was supported or opposed by the Soviet state. They have definitely “prioritized” Russian culture internally, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this conflation was at least in part created by the Soviets.

Commenter didn’t say anything about “modern Ukraine”. Russia has been harassing Ukraine for a very long time, modern or ancient.

That sounds good - thanks for clarifying. Excited to see this project grow!

The phrasing they use is a bit confusing. "Speech" is not a clear quality description, so it's odd to compare speech to a CD quality recording (presumably 44.1 kHz). Speech can also be sampled at CD quality. If they meant to emphasize the difference in frequency range or dynamic range - there were, perhaps, better ways to do that (e.g. "telephone conversation" vs "symphonic orchestra recording").

Shazam produces an embarrassing number of false matches, which I assume are hash collisions or something similar in the world of their fingerprinting system?

The interesting part to me was that they used specifically a 64kbps example, not a higher bitrate that would be more appropriate for music listening. Just speculating, but if they managed to get 10x higher compression rate compared to 64kbps MP3, could they achieve an even higher compression rate when compared to 320kbps MP3? If the algorithm is so good that it can compress audio down to 6kbps with just a few artifacts, would it sound almost good at 12kbps? 24kbps?

Between this effort and the recently announced Google-led multi-channel/immersive audio codec initiative, I am pretty excited about the future of audio streaming and distribution.

It's quite amazing how they can build something so ingenious and yet make such a glaring mistake in the announcement post (48 kHz CD quality).

On your second point: they probably meant that there is no loss in perceived quality, of course it's a lossy algorithm.

6kbps sound demo is really impressive! Initially I was turned off by aliasing artifacts (hiss) but to be fair 6kbps is a really really low bitrate.

I found this announcement by write.as (check out the video): https://write.as/new/blog/federated

Seems like it's possible to implement just enough of ActivityPub functionality that Mastodon users will be able to follow you.

Yes, you are describing a hosted instance. Masto.host looks good, and the cheapest option is only $6/month. The problem with this federated approach is that the actual federation features can become pretty expensive. Hosting is cheap but if you have thousands of followers from different instances federation processes will become very expensive.

I was just investigating this. You can run your own Mastodon instance on your custom domain (e.g. masto.host), but due to how Mastodon federation works, your instance will 1. host all your content 2. handle a ton of requests when people interact with you or your content: follow, favorite, boost, etc.

Also every time a user follows you from an instance not federated with your instance it's a whole complicated process because federation has to be established between your instance and their instance (and, I think, every instance that they follow users from).

So if I understand your question correctly: there is no way to separate your identity from your content. If you want to own your identity you will need to self-host.

I am realizing now that the solution to these concerns is likely going to emerge from matrix.org, not Mastodon.

Hm, do they stream user's camera feed to their server? Seems like a questionable practice if the user is not made aware of that.

I like the idea of asking to hold the same document in the selfie. Not a full-proof solution but way better than asking for any non-specific selfie.

I agree. The idealist in me wants all of these aspects to be completely independent from the host I choose to use. But realistically I am not that worried about losing data, the social graph is far more valuable. Even if I have 100 followers, I would still really want to preserve their connection to me if I am banned.

I understand that I can do this by hosting my own instance - that's a good enough solution (for me).

This looks great!

A somewhat tangential question: what are the ways KYC can be made less vulnerable to identity theft? Do people who verify the uploaded document use some automated government services to check for stolen documents?

It seems like a process like the one in this flow (upload a document and a selfie) is useless if a document is stolen (since in most cases you can just look up the person's social account and download their selfie). And even worse, it would give a badge of authenticity to the scammer.

And if the backend people do use some government service to verify the document, then what is the value of submitting a selfie?

Is it fair to say that now if I follow you on any instance and then you are banned from that instance, I will continue following you and seeing your posts because your identity is owned by your self-hosted instance?

Thanks. I am more worried about the identity than the posts. If my identity belongs to the host, then in that sense this is no better than a centralized Twitter. Just theoretically speaking (I have not been banned from anything ever), if a mastodon.art user is banned from mastodon.art - everyone who followed them will have to find them on another instance and subscribe again? If exporting data is a process that depends on the host instance, when they ban you - that's it, your identity is not recoverable.

This looks great, definitely more active and offers a good variety of topics/profiles.

Got it. Does it make any difference where I register first? E.g. if that instance disappears overnight, will I be able to recover my account or not? I understand that I can access posts from all instances in the instance I use, but not sure how account handling/ownership works.

(not familiar with Mastodon tech) Would I be able to move my social graph as well in your example, or just content? E.g. if I first registered an account at mastodon.se and many other mastodon.se users followed me, would they still see my updates if I move to a different instance (or if I am banned from mastodon.se)?

So is the only meaningful difference the scale of an instance? If a single Mastodon instance becomes Twitter-size, then its owners will have the same power over the users and will face the same challenges as the current Twitter? They won't be able to ban users cross-instance, but if they ban you on that instance, wouldn't you have to create a new account somewhere else (i.e. start from zero).

Is there a non-niche general Mastodon instance that's really popular? That would be the easiest way for me personally to embrace it. I checked a few instances and it's all very niche and very empty.

(To clarify, I don't mind niche instances, just at this stage there isn't enough discussion or interesting profiles to follow.)

Interesting. Wonder if it could be clearer if they were still showing a comment field or a reply button to non-logged in users. Just to surface the feature.

Thanks for the info on Peertube, I heard the name before but didn't realize it's a federated app.

Reply to the edit: thanks for the pointer! Reading about ActivityPub made me feel pretty excited both about the technology and about Mastodon.