People seem to be oblivious to the fact that the internet infrastructure has been government controlled since its inception. No cable laid under the sea between two nations can exist without the government approval and without the governments tapping into the link. IP addresses, MAC addresses, domain names, all managed by "super partes" international organizations swore to neutrality and fairness.
Unless you make your own physical network, it's trust all the way down
People can very practically exchange information without any government knowing the content. This was true from the beginning and is still true today.
The network infrastructure makes it possible to exchange privileged information and tunnel it through insecure channels. That is who we do banking on our phones while using the trains wifi (I would still not recommend to do that). Or generally establish VPN connection. Real data privacy is possible without a physical network.
I disagree with the parent, there is an uncensored net. Most people aren't interested in it for convenience but we should be quite happy it exists.
I don't see anyone outraged? I see someone commenting on how internet "discourse" is just gossip when it used to be fairly rigorous. Which is accurate, especially here on hn where almost every comment just repeats something from another post ("modular is going to change world" as if we all didn't see the modular content marketing piece just above.....)
FYI accusing someone of being outraged to distract from their point is called "appeal to emotion". Whether op is outraged or not has no bearing on whether the observation is accurate.
most people's exposure to philosophical concepts is through narrative abstraction, you may be an exception but if you want to interact with laypeople this is inevitably going to be your experience.
What I dislike about Zotero is that it's a pain in the ass to self host. In my department I could spin up a local Zotero server for our PhD students and give them basically unlimited sync, but it's really finnicky
What difficulties are you having? All you need is WebDAV. I use a nextcloud server for mine and my partner's zotero storage, and its entirely trivial to set up.
I have many issues with Zotero (which has been dumbing down at the expense of power users for some time) – but easy private sync is definitely not one of them.
Looking at my own Zotero account, I can confirm that all metadata storage is free and not counted (I am using none of my 300Mb storage in my account according to zotero.org, despite syncing metadata for several thousand bibliography items). The only storage Zotero seems to count is attachment storage, and that's all synced via my WebDAV.
I thought the discussion was about self-hosting data, such that the provided free storage limits by Zotero remained sufficient? And for that use case, self-hosted WebDAV storage for file attachments is absolutely fine.
(The poster I was replying to was suggesting that their departmental users would go over their storage limits for metadata alone, even if they used WebDAV for attachments -- but that seems to be incorrect from my own experience, and everything I can find online.)
It is not supported natively (you can use a webdav server but it doesn't sync everything) and the third party options don't have the level of stability I'd need
Unless you make your own physical network, it's trust all the way down
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