iirc phones supplement satellite GPS with other indicators to be more accurate and reliable, maybe distance from cell towers is one of those

That’s difficult when there are lots of people who will say that and be serious about it. No way to know if it’s hyperbole.

But the meme is making the more extreme claim that no uses exist, so any counterexamples mean it’s untrue. Not the best way of criticizing companies that don’t know or care what a technology is good for imo.

So what? It may arguably be not a developer’s fault, but it is everyone’s problem, given the growing dystopian alternatives to an accessible distributed software ecosystem. A problem can be acknowledged without admitting blame. Happy cake day btw.

Yeah, documentation isn’t as good as it could be, and it would increase the accessibility of software if it was better.

Michigan’s bill would charge internet service providers with detecting and blocking VPN use, as well as banning the sale of VPNs in the state.

Sounds like they are basically planning to tell ISPs to just figure it out, and suing VPN companies that don’t block people from their state.

I’m not assuming that, I just don’t see why would it even matter if it’s from another instance.

Is it a mistake? Wouldn’t federated content still count the same way legally, since an instance is also a website?

I don’t think this is true, but a lot of this impression is probably because much of the growth in actual use of cryptocurrency for everyday finance is happening outside of places like the US or Europe:

In the 12 months ending June 2025, APAC [Asia-Pacific] emerged as the fastest-growing region for on-chain crypto activity, with a 69% year-over-year increase in value received. Total crypto transaction volume in APAC grew from $1.4 trillion to $2.36 trillion, driven by robust engagement across major markets like India, Vietnam, and Pakistan.

Close behind, Latin America’s crypto adoption grew by 63%, reflecting rising adoption across both retail and institutional segments. In comparison, Sub-Saharan Africa’s adoption grew by 52%, indicating the region’s continued reliance on crypto for remittances and everyday payments. These figures underscore a broad shift in crypto momentum toward the Global South, where on-the-ground utility is increasingly fueling adoption.

There is also the way stablecoins are now a growing top 20 holder of US debt, and major financial institutions moving to have infrastructure on crypto networks. Change is happening even if it isn’t immediate or directly visible to everyone.

What does that enable? Could people in states blocked by the main network use it through these?

How can you know the success is zero? Encryption is more widely used and much more resistant to political attack. Open source software is more powerful and accessible. A large portion of people loathe corporate tech platforms at a level they didn’t years ago. Granted a lot of that is just down to how functional or trustworthy the software is, and what guarantees about it can be plausibly provided, and it isn’t all wins. Maybe you can’t exactly get everyone caring about this stuff in the same way or for the same reasons you do. But that doesn’t mean there are no possible avenues to success, or that the tech habits of other groups can be written off as useless here, because it’s probably the most important thing.

Also if wifi mesh is our last hope, oof

Yeah. What I propose is getting more people involved and caring about freedom preserving technologies before it gets to that point. A tiny minority of somewhat more tech literate people are not going to be magically immune to authoritarian checkmate scenarios through technical solutions alone.

Are there now legal means to do longer range communications? I thought the main limitation was you need to be licensed to do anything more than short range home wifi

Thanks. Somehow the network actually seems to be working pretty well for me now, not sure why it wasn’t before.

Unless these companies are hosted in MS, have offices, or sell ads there, there’s nothing legally they can do.

Is that really how it works? Haven’t legal challenges to these sorts of laws already been appealed up to the supreme court and they were upheld?

I’ve tried a few times to check out i2p, it seems to take hours of leaving it running to even get to the point where you can very slowly and inconsistently load even the official pages though.

So far their efforts in various forms of voter suppression have prevented that, and at the same time more people equals more congressional seats.

Except if the topic is wifi meshnets, no amount of tech savvyness will get you around an absence of other nodes nearby. General apathy is actually a huge problem here.

In those cases it seems like the law does prevent state level regulation of those things, because the state is only allowed to regulate commerce happening within its borders, not what its residents do elsewhere (although they can still also regulate the use of fireworks and airguns, but enforcement is more difficult, for instance where I am they sometimes send out notices in the mail warning that it’s against the law for individuals to be setting off fireworks but there’s always a massive decentralized fireworks show every 4th of July anyway).

Somehow with the internet, the location of the server isn’t the thing that matters, it’s whose computer is accessing it and where that person and computer is located, and the liability is on the server not the user. IMO it should not work that way, because then every state with regressive politics has a stranglehold on the whole internet.

But the question is, what would be a reasonable legal principle for preventing such laws generally? Mississippi is going to pass bullshit laws, but it shouldn’t be possible for the jurisdiction of any state to be anything on the entire internet.