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Cake day: March 10th, 2024

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  • Call it a server, then. Tons of people already call them Discord servers. And it’d be a lot more true of Flotilla than Discord. Functionally, from a UX perspective, there’d be VERY little difference to an end user. You’d get an invite somehow, probably through a link, maybe combined with whitelisting your identity for more private communities, and you’d be in, using a client remarkably similar to Discord once it’s in a good spot. For most users, they can fully ignore the technical complexities.










  • No, they’re upset that the cops themselves flagrantly violate the law to beat and arrest protesters without sufficient cause when they’re leftwing protests, but when it’s a bunch of literal Nazis, everything is handled politely, and suddenly, protester rights are a priority again.

    For example, take kettling. The cops make the protesters move in a given direction. Again. Again. Until they’ve pushed the protesters into a dead end or another wall or two of cops. Typically, they keep moving in, tightening the space until there’s no more. When the crowd has no choice to push back, they call it assaulting an officer, say it’s turning violent and label it an illegal protest, and arrest everyone.

    Of course, this is illegal as shit, which is why most protesters arrested this way get the charges dropped. The judge knows there’s no case, and neither judge nor cop wants the tactics more widely publicized. But they’ve already broken up the protest. They’ve given these citizens arrest records. They’ve won. That protest, at least, is over, and they’ll just do it again if another starts.

    And that’s not even counting the violence. Look at some of the footage from the 2020 George Floyd protests. If you don’t agree with the protests, put aside your differences and just look at what was done to protesters and what they were doing when it was done to them. Some of those protesters that got kettled didn’t just get arrested, some were attacked with less lethal options like rubber bullets. For all their reduced lethality, a couple dozen American citizens still died at the hands of their own police force. More were maimed for life with injuries including lost eyes.

    I personally saw dozens and dozens of videos of police ruthlessly abusing those protesters. Things like a man laying face down on the ground when the cop standing over him shot him in the back point black with a bean bag round. An old man shoved over and cracking his head on the ground, only for the cop to just step over him and leave him there. That shit doesn’t happen at Nazi protests. The cops play nice and remember how to do their fucking job for the Nazis, but try to get the cops to stop hurting people unnecessarily and see what they do.








  • No fucking shit, I’m tired of it, too. But grown ups deal with the choices in front of them instead of throwing a tantrum and trying to take their toys and go home. If the thing you really care about is Gaza and Palestinians, you have to deal with the immediate issue, which is that four years of active encouragement from Trump is going to do a fuckload of damage that can’t just be undone, even if your protest does encourage some change from Democrats. Now, Democrats don’t seem to have learned a fucking thing, and Trump is trying to make american soldiers active participants. I understand why you’re upset and why you want change, but the tactics you’re using are actively making things worse. And then, when your protest vote ushers in “the doom of the USA”, who do you blame? The people you refused to vote for because somehow, the greater evil was preferable to the lesser evil.



  • Sure glad that’s not why they did it because you’re right, that’d be kinda stupid. That’s not why they made a secondary layer, though. They made a secondary layer so transaction throughput can grow exponentially while maintaining the security of the blockchain without significantly impacting fees or requiring the blockchain itself to become proportionally larger.

    That last part is the real motivation. The goal is to above all else, remain decentralized. That means the average user needs to be able to run a full node capable of verifying any transaction it needs to. To do that, the blockchain can’t grow too quickly, or people will get forced out. If it grew exponentially faster as transactions grew likewise, nodes would eventually centralize in fewer and fewer hands until someone could exert control over the network.

    The blockchain is currently something like 650-700 GB, which is a lot, but most people can manage it, even if it might be pushing it for poorer regions. Without the lightning network and with substantial user growth, the only option is to increase the block size, and to achieve an actually usable capacity of strictly on-chain transactions, you’d be looking at sizes on the order of hundreds of TB or pushing into PB territory. Nobody would be able to store the blockchain without a dedicated server rack. Not a single server, a whole rack. It’d costs thousands and thousands of dollars to run a node. Instead, we acknowledge that you purchasing a pack of gum at the convenience store doesn’t need to be immortalized on the blockchain and use the lightning network to secure your transaction without having to create a permanent record.


  • There are no hard coded minimums. Some providers may demand a minimum commitment, but there’s nothing to stop people in poorer regions from opening smaller channels, especially between individuals. Any business attempting to operate in the region will have to work with that.

    There is also a lot of work being done on… I think they call them channel factories? Might be off on the name, but basically create as many channels as possible in as little space as possible to keep it efficient and minimize costs for individuals.