Three basic questions:
- How censorship resistant is the stasher news platform?
- What telemetry is used - could people be tracked in anyway?
3 . What are the upload limits for video or file size?
Bonus
Could we save movie clips and memes here for posterity?
I'm also very interested in this. Right now this looks like a single website managed by a single set of admins, which puts all the power in their hands (or whoever manages to take it from them). Experience has taught me this isn't always a good or stable solution.
There's supposed to be sourcecode released in the near future, which is good since at least then anybody will be able to spin up a new version of Stasher if this one gets compromised. Of course that also means every instance of Stasher's code will be in competition with each other.
It's a shame monero.town isn't more active, Lemmy being federated over ActivityPub leads a more robust network with multiple instances interoperating with each other. I guess bolting Stasher's XMR updoots to Lemmy for a fork would be rather difficult, though. Shame, because making Stasher a federated service would give it a good amount of censorship resistance on top of being FOSS.
is it actually that bad, if we're talking about small platforms? with all my respect to total anarchism, small places organized by someone look better than those completely disorganized
Perhaps I'm gun-shy, but at this point I've seen at least a couple of good places go down in flames after the ownership changed hands, or started taking VC money, et cetera. The problem being that after it goes down, you have no choice but to start from zero at whatever the new place ends up being, and hope the cycle doesn't repeat.
This is why I'm so big on federated services over ActivityPub (Fediverse), the federation part makes it easier for the ecosystem as a whole to survive one particular site crashing and burning. The users might have to migrate, sure, but account portability is getting better, and there's even some work on totally nomadic identity. Rather than each site being isolated and competing with each other for traffic and users, multiple sites can mesh together and form a more resilient network.
hmmm, i hear you. problem, where the platform gets sold, then accepts VC money, sounds more real than vague consern. would you mind naming the couple of good places?
Some years ago, I used a site called BitBacker. Basically Patreon with Bitcoin. It was a one-man operation, and it outgrew his ability to maintain. Another Libertarian/free speech platform called "Flote" (Boost VC funded) took it over and rolled all the users into its own platform. Some time afterwards, after a fresh round of funding, they started adding new policies that amounted to "we love free speech BUT...". It didn't take much time beyond that for the whole thing to collapse in on itself. I bailed as soon as the new policies were announced.
Similar patterns occurred with Minds.com (VC funding rounds followed by new terms of service, "think of the children" excuses, etc) and Gab-dot-com (free speech absolutists until they picked up a majority boomer-con religious audience, then heel turned into "anonymity/decentralization is for criminals and pedophiles"...almost literal quote from the owner/founder there).
Each time the only option for disaffected users was to pull up roots and start over from zero at the new place. I know people who ment from Gab, to Minds, to Flote, getting socio-politically rugged each time.
Many, like myself, ended up on the Fediverse. I run my own server that interoperates with a dozen others over the shared protocol. Some Fedi servers went full retard, but data portability features meant it was easy to migrate to a new home without losing your entire follow list.. in some cases it was actually seamless and I barely noticed the change.
I've come to feel that a site/service is only trustworthy if its creators build around the assumption that they'll eventually go under or be compromised. If there isn't a plan or an infrastructure to handle the survival of users/content beyond that point, it's not forward thinking enough. This is just a personal opinion, though, based on my own experience and observation, and I accept that some feel it's unreasonable and overly paranoid.
thanks for a detail reply!
it will be interesting to see if it is adopted more than monero town with the con of paying to post balanced against the pro of potentially earning monero using this site.
it will also be interesting to understand if it is free speech or moderated despite people paying to post.
On #2 and #3 the FAQ is clearer than the thread so far.
Tips: when you tip, it is wallet-to-wallet Monero — the platform says it does not take a cut of tips. To receive, they ask for a private view key so the site can watch your address for incoming tips and credit the account; view key cannot spend (their FAQ wording).
Uploads: up to 10 MB free while logged in; bigger files are 0.001 XMR per additional 10 MB. Logged-out uploads are always 0.001 XMR.
Still agree on #1 — centralized moderation, not censorship-resistant in the federation sense — but the telemetry/upload numbers are spelled out there if you are deciding whether to attach a wallet.
Question is, how decentralized is stasher.news?
To answer your questions honestly:
But to add to this, users already act as content moderators. Interating with good content sends it to the frontpage. Downvoting bad content hides it. By default, users have a filter which hides any posts with enough downvotes, and you can tweak this filter in your account settings.
thank you for clarifying mr stasher
unless i missed something (the source link goes to a 404?) it's closed source?
assuming that is just a mistake, the model is not censorship resistant at all. it's a centralized server. I assume the website can prevent you from posting, logging in, or can just take the whole site down if it likes.
but since it is a topic-based forum and not a follow-based social platform like X, Facebook, Insta, or most of nostr, running a centralized server isn't really a big deal.
forums aren't really designed to create a social graph like Twitter, they're just about the topics. So, if you are worried that the website operators will censor you right-click save the stuff that you find interesting and copy the code (when they make it available) so you can spin up your own version when they try to censor you.
#338667
According to this, the repo is currently private but will be made public in the near future.