In April, Nigeria asked Google, Microsoft, and Amazon to set concrete deadlines for opening data centers in the country. Nigeria has been making this demand for about four years, but the companies have so far failed to fulfill their promises. Now, Nigeria has set up a working group with the companies to ensure that data is stored within its shores. Just onshoring the data center does not solve the problems. You can't be sure no data travels to the US servers, some data does need to travel to the US servers, and the entire DC is still subject to US software and certificate keychains. It's better, but not good or safe. I need to channel my inner Mike Ehrmantrout to the US tech companies and government: you had a good thing going you stupid son of a bitch. You had everything you needed and it all ran like clockwork. You could have shut your mouth, cooked, and made as much money as you needed, but you just had to blow it up, you and your pride and your ego. Seriously, this is a massive own goal by the US government. This is a massive loss to US hegemony and influence around the world that's never coming back. It has never been easier to build sovereign clouds with off the shelf and open source tooling. The best practices are largely documented, software is commoditized, and there are plenty of qualified people out there these days and governments staring down the barrel of existential risk have finally got the incentive to fund these efforts.

What I'm speaking about is that it should be impossible to do some things. If it's possible, they will be done, and there's nothing you can do about it. To solve the problem of twiddled social media (and moderation used to assert dominance) we need a decentralized system of 90s Web reimagined, and Fediverse doesn't deliver it - if Facebook and Reddit are feudal states, then Fediverse is a confederation of smaller feudal entities. A post, a person, a community, a reaction and a change (by moderator or by the user) should be global entities (with global identifiers, so that the object by id of #0000001a2b3c4d6e7f890 would be the same object today or 10 years later on every server storing it) replicated over a network of servers similarly to Usenet (and to an IRC network, but in an IRC network servers are trusted, so it's not a good example for a global system). Really bad posts (or those by persons with history of posting such) should be banned on server level by everyone. The rest should be moderated by moderator reactions\changes of certain type. Ideally, for pooling of resources and resilience, servers would be separated by types into storage nodes (I think the name says it, FTP servers can do the job, but no need to be limited by it), index nodes (scraping many storage nodes, giving out results in structured format fit for any user representation, say, as a sequence of posts in one community, or like a list of communities found by tag, or ... , and possibly being connected into one DHT for Kademlia-like search, since no single index node will have everything), and (like in torrents?) tracker nodes for these and for identities, I think torrent-like announce-retrieve service is enough - to return a list of storage nodes storing, say, a specified partition (subspace of identifiers of objects, to make looking for something at least possibly efficient), or return a list of index nodes, or return a bunch of certificates and keys for an identity (should be somehow cryptographically connected to the global identifier of a person). So when a storage node comes online, it announces itself to a bunch of such trackers, similarly with index nodes, similarly with a user. One can also have a NOSTR-like service for real-time notifications by users. This way you'd have a global untrusted pooled infrastructure, allowing to replace many platforms. With common data, identities, services. Objects in storage and index services can be, say, in a format including a set of tags and then the body. So a specific application needing to show only data related to it would just search on index services and display only objects with tags of, say, "holo_ns:talk.bullshit.starwars" and "holo_t:post", like a sequence of posts with ability to comment, or maybe it would search objects with tags "holo_name:My 1999-like Star Wars holopage" and "holo_t:page" and display the links like search results in Google, and then clicking on that you'd see something presented like a webpage, except links would lead to global identifiers (or tag expressions interpreted by the particular application, who knows). (An index service may return, say, an array of objects, each with identifier, tags, list of locations on storage nodes where it's found or even bittorrent magnet links, and a free description possibly ; then the user application can unify responses of a few such services to avoid repetitions, maybe sort them, represent them as needed, so on.) The user applications for that common infrastructure can be different at the same time. Some like Facebook, some like ICQ, some like a web browser, some like a newsreader. (Star Wars is not a random reference, my whole habit of imagining tech stuff is from trying to imagine a science fiction world of the future, so yeah, this may seem like passive dreaming and it is.)

I'm just sad I'm too young to have ever seen that old internet, and what it was like... Makes me more determined to try and steer the current internet back in that direction though.

It's not just tax credits for new cars, they are also getting rid of the Used EV Tax Credit which has helped to keep the prices of used EVs (relatively) lower.

I hate google enough to pay 5$/mo for Kagi - it puts a smile on my face everytime I go to search and know that I'm not supporting google

Obligatory Knowledge Fight Reference: [https://knowledgefight.libsyn.com/1044-june-2-2025](In this installment, Dan and Jordan discuss a strange day on Alex's show where he spends a fair amount of time trying to dissuade his listeners from getting too suspicious about Palantir.)

Really? [image: 60a7b1c3-946c-4def-92dd-c04169f01892.gif]