Pleroma and Streams

Maybe my last post was a little harsh. I modified it slightly afterwards. Anyway, I felt an urge not to be directly on the social network that everyone’s currently talking about. Disroot’s instance runs on Pleroma. (Update: or rather “Soapbox”. Is Soapbox still a front-end for Pleroma or a fork of it? – it isn’t so clear). Anyway, for now, I’m squatting there. Yesterday I also read about Mike McGirvin’s new effort, Streams, about which he says

From day one the question was how to build a federated/decentralised communication stack that provides more control over your privacy, and respects all people and cultures – including those which have a different political bias; while allowing them to all co-exist in the same space (and without killing each other).

and:

The current name of this repository [Streams] implies fluidity. As a brand or product it technically does not exist. This is also intentional.

This implies openness; the openness of the open web, and I like that. Human beings are clannish. That’s always going to be the case. I dislike this quality when we gather around meeting points such as nationhood, religion, party politics, gender… and also social network brands.

The way it plays out is exemplified in the current gathering around Mastodon. Mastodon did not invent the idea of federated social networks. There existed StatusNet and GnuSocial (based on the StatusNet protocol), Friendica and Red Matrix. Then came the ActivityPub protocol and Mastodon (which initially also supported GnuSocial). Since Mastodon had the flavour and the brand identity that people were looking for, it proved to be a greater success. The above narrative leaves out developments such as Diaspora, SSB and other networks that do not easily federate with each other.

Social networking should be something as generic and white-label as email and XMPP. It should be possible to read and participate through various means, such as commercial networks, community websites and phone and desktop applications.

Links

The 1.5C climate target is dead – to prevent total catastrophe, Cop27 must admit it | Bill McGuire | The Guardian

Israel will not cooperate with FBI inquiry into killing of Palestinian American journalist | Israel | The Guardian

Israel is therefore kindly saving the FBI the trouble of conducting an inquiry and confirming what has been obvious from the start. The only question is whether this was an act of an individual soldier or whether he was obeying orders.

Instance blocking; the open web

After so many years in the Fediverse, I thought that I understood it well by now. But looking lately at the landscape, through the portal of Mastodon, I’m not so sure. What I see there is a culture where blocking becomes the solution for whatever you don’t like, particularly instance blocking.

On the conventional social networks, you can block a person. On Mastodon, if you don’t like somebody, you can block the whole instance. While I initially felt some sympathy for blocking instances like Gab, now I’m beginning to see how far this can go. Last week, someone set up an instance to “onboard journalists”, without vetting so well who could join up there. A couple of days later, other instances began blocking that one due to the presence of a few unsavoury members. Today I read that another Mastodon instance decided, in the name of free speech, to allow persons with controversial opinions, so people on other instances are urging to block that instance.

I can imagine that eventually someone will decide that it’s advisable to block all instances that aren’t on some kind of a master-list whose member instances endorse a particular constitution – perhaps one that is similar to that of mastodon.social* (I have only heard about these, but haven’t read them). And why not block instances on the basis of their geographical location while we are at it? Russia? Ukraine? Israel? Palestine? Africa?

Update: What there currently is, is the list maintained at joinmastodon.org that is governed by the criteria of the Mastodon server covenant:

Thus, we are proud to announce the creation of the Mastodon Server Covenant. By highlighting those communities that are high quality and best align with our values, we hope to foster a friendly and better moderated online space. Any server that we link to from joinmastodon.org commits to actively moderating against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia.

In practice, it’s very demanding for volunteer moderators to perform such moderation, but super easy to block an entire instance.

In an environment of hair trigger instance-blocking, we’re arguably better off in one of the mainstream social networks, where we’re chucked out mainly for egregiously bad behaviour – but our own behaviour, not that of our neighbours or due to our affiliation with some group – say, the US Republican Party.

Although it’s very tempting to filter out all the voices that we don’t want to hear, the consequence is that we live in an ever more intolerant society.

I’m not going to change the world, but I’m in favour of a return to the open web, in combination with RSS news feeds and email newsletters. The need to set up a personal site, or to be published to an existing journal sets a high bar, but maybe that’s a good thing. There are many problems yet to solve, such as discovery, comment spam, payment issues, government censorship, etc. but there are also advantages: returning control and responsibility to the individual; independence from any kind of control or banishment by corporations, billionaires, groups, cliques, etc.

What the Indieweb people propose is, as always, a pragmatic and favourable compromise: publish first to our own site, and then to everywhere else: we don’t have to be in love with the networks we use in order to benefit from their reach. So we publish where we can and if we get blocked we get blocked.

Because I happen to be not-so-interested in spreading my germs far and wide, I try to keep my site out of the search engines and don’t publish to Facebook and Twitter, hardly even to the Fediverse. So I probably won’t take that advice.

Earl Grey tea

I was making Earl Grey with the quantity needed for milk tea, so it came out too bitter. Just a flat teaspoon, then three or four minutes brewing time, is enough. I still add half a teaspoon of sugar. But I’m happy to get rid of the milk (anyway it’s always milk substitute in our case).

Mastodon

Is the fediverse about to get Fryed? (Or, “Why every toot is also a potential denial of service attack”) – Aral Balkan

” decentralisation begins at decentring yourself”

A good article, though it doesn’t touch on the fact that concentrating so much of Mastodon in the servers of Masto.host, which hosts Balkan’s (and this) instance, is also a danger to the decentralization of the Fediverse.

It also doesn’t mention the energy that all this distribution must require. This could be an issue with decentralization, as it is with blockchain technology (though to a much lesser extent).

While it is evident that part of the problem is a result of the way the protocols work and interact with servers, it doesn’t suggest a solution.

From the perspective of resource and energy usage, I have no doubt that the old methods of blogging + RSS news feed make more sense, though I tend to be more attentive to my Fediverse timeline than to my newsfeed subscriptions.

Exodus continues at Twitter as Elon Musk hints at possible bankruptcy | Twitter | The Guardian

“Messages seeking comment were left with Twitter, but it is unlikely someone will respond as the communications department has been laid off.”

Energy use of a home server vs paying for a VPS

A person in my time-line had tried to estimate the cost of running a Raspberry server from his home. It came out to something like €1.10 per month. Running a server from an old laptop, as I was doing till recently, must cost quite a bit more; maybe as much as the VPS I now pay for.

Since some hosting companies use renewable energy, maybe it makes greater sense to use one of those. But there too there is a calculation involved. For example, if the VPS server with the green energy is at a location that is geographically distant from oneself or one’s potential audience, is it more energy efficient to use such a server? Does it depend upon whether CDNs are employed by the hosting company?

At a certain level, without lots of research, the way the internet works and its environmental costs are still very opaque for most of us.

Kerala

Indian police investigating film that portrays Kerala as Islamic terrorism hub | India | The Guardian

There’s apparently zero evidence. But it’s not surprising that the film industry would seek to ride the wave of right-wing populism sweeping the country.

Freedom of speech

Was reading about what happened when Stephen Fry offended Poland, and it made me think that there’s an advantage to being a nobody – with few followers you can be yourself and say whatever you want, at least more so than when you are a celebrity figure.

“Telegram has launched the ability to buy and sell short recognizable @ usernames for personal accounts, public groups and channels.” I need to get rid of this centralized service, but a messaging platform, even more than a social networking service, depends upon obtaining a critical mass of people that use it. Some of my contacts don’t even have Telegram or, if they do, use it only in order to send messages. They can’t be depended upon to see mine.

Diary; thoughts of the day

Spent some time reading through my fediverse stream and catching up on various kinds of terminology, gender relationships, human relationships… Sometimes it seems like I’ve been hiding in a cave all these years… words like swerf and terf were new to me, and what’s harder, understanding them often requires going more deeply into what people say about them, and then trying to make an evaluation. Then I learned, also from my stream, about Glenn Greenwald’s mutual embrace with right-wing media, and the acrimony between him and Micah lee and others. Again, hiding in a cave.

But that’s exactly why I make the effort to follow alternative social media, in order to become familiar with ideas, attitudes and happenings that I might not pick up in my normal reading of the news, where I often read just the main stories or those in my special areas of interest.

Meanwhile, even following just 45 people from my Mastodon account, I’m growing weary of all the back-and-forth resulting from the minor exodus from Twitter and the major ripple it’s causing for all the Mastodon people.

Part of my weariness comes from the fact that I don’t relate to Mastodon as a well-loved community. For me, it’s mainly a source of information. On Hubzilla there was a greater sense of community, actually. Maybe I should go back there, because although theoretically it’s all one Fediverse, some of those I knew on Hubzilla don’t interact much with the Mastodon crowd; in fact don’t particularly appreciate Mastodon at all. And since ActivityPub is just one of the protocols that Hubzilla can interact with, there isn’t the conception that ActivityPub itself constitutes the Fediverse. I like that.

Anyway, getting back to those gender words, I think I choose to be liberal… and catholic (in its older definition): two much-maligned terms. I don’t really care how people choose to self-identify. Their gender-identity is their own business; their sexuality, or lack of it, is their own concern too. From one of the articles I read, I liked one of the definitions for “queer”, i.e. we are are all “queer” – in that, to a greater or a lesser extent, our gender-identity and sexual responses are all located at different places on various spectrums, such as kind, quality, degree, taste, quantity, etc. and as such we are all unique: based partly on our genes, partly on our conditioning.

We can ask questions, as some radical feminists apparently do, about why a trans person might mimic and reinforce ingrained feminine or masculine stereotypes. We can wonder, for example, how men often adopt sexual behaviour that demeans women (or vice versa). Maybe we should add a subclause that “our sexuality is our own business – but only as long as doesn’t cause harm“?

But it’s hard to make such categorical statements about an area where we are all hurting each other constantly, either physically, emotionally or psychologically. Who can actually say that they have never hurt another person as a result of a love relationship? All we can do is expand our understanding, tolerance and compassion. Also our vigilance: because pedophiles, rapists and other abusers do still need to be locked up or rehabilitated – that’s for everyone’s safety.

Returning to the question of those ornery journalists; it’s like with other professions. There are ideals, and then there are various forms of pollution like money and ego, pride and prestige. It seems that all you need to do to create poison is to add a billionaire or two to the mixture. That’s sure to wake up all the sleeping demons. The Midas touch.

Carbon Cola

At the office, I saw Avigail was back at her desk.

“You were on vacation – did you have a good time?”

“Sure, how else could it be – Thailand!”

“No idea. I’ve never been; For me it’s either Europe or India.”

“There were lots of Indians there in Thailand – they had some kind of a holiday I think.”

“That would be Diwali; but I didn’t know Thailand was popular with Indians.”

“Well it’s nearby for them after all.”

“That’s true.”

The “Muskopalypse”

Yesterday was the first time I thought that the Fediverse might actually become mainstream. I watched as Greta Thunberg came on board, and saw her follower count go up to around 15,000 within the space of a few hours. On the other hand, she has 5,000,000 followers on Twitter, so I realized that I should calm down. Numbers are hard. Will the sea rise 30 meters by the end of the century or 2 meters over the space of the next 5,000 years? Will the Twitter permafrost really melt and mastodon clones roam the earth? I’ll leave it to the experts. Anyway, in my excitement, I wrote the following.

I think we will all want to thank Elon Musk, whatever we think about him, for what he has accomplished.

Masses of people are finally beginning to turn their back on one of the big commercial social networks while simultaneously joining a non-commercial federated one. I really hope that Mastodon and ActivityPub can hold together through this crush of new users and not piss them off too much, because the world really does need a safe, viable protocol for social media connection, and it also needs social media to be interoperable – regardless of whether we prefer commercial or non-commercial variants.

If a critical mass join Mastodon, and they and are happy with it, three things may eventually happen.

First, it could bring a chain reaction, causing people to discover the other ActivityPub flavours that offer alternatives to Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, etc – and possibly new ones that compete with other commercial social media providers.

Second, when, as we see already beginning to happen, the European Union becomes invested in the Fediverse, it may begin to legislate for interoperability, forcing the commercial social networks to open their walled gardens and allowing, for example, people on Mastodon to follow people on Twitter or Facebook and for people on Twitter to follow people on Facebook or the fediverse, all without leaving their chosen social media provider.

Third, the same rules regarding the limits of “free speech” will be enforced across the Fediverse, requiring Fediverse instance operators to moderate content. This is a huge problem because operators of large instances do not have the means to employ workers to moderate content. As far as I know, the Fediverse lacks even the ability to conduct AI assisted moderation.

Small instances have less of a problem because they are easier to moderate. Governments may not even enforce their laws over small instances with few users. (If so, there’s the question of the break-off point between “small” and “large” – a few hundred users?, a few thousand?, a million? Twitter has over 200 million active users, by comparison with which the whole of Mastodon is tiny.)

In any case, the necessity to moderate and block content could have implications for both large and small instances.

First, moderation is reported to be difficult by the maintainers of Mastodon’s larger instances. As instances grow, and especially if they need to comply with state-imposed moderation rules, they would need to employ workers to moderate content. This cost would need to be covered – probably by user subscriptions, though possibly (cringe) by the introduction of ads.

Second, we could imagine a scenario similar to what has happened with email: large instances could block small instances by default. With email, the big email servers like Gmail routinely discriminate against small and independent email servers in order to prevent the proliferation of spam.

With the Fediverse, it could happen that large instances would eventually block small instances by default, due to the headache and expense of moderation.

The Fediverse is still taking its first baby steps. We have no idea how it will be as a teenager or as an adult.

What is Mastodon, the social network users are leaving Twitter for? Everything you need to know | Twitter | The Guardian

Saturday

On Saturday morning I fixed a few broken items with epoxy glue, but not a pair of shoes, whose sole has become partly detached. From watching a couple of YouTube videos, it looks like it will be better to buy a specialized glue for that – one that’s waterproof and flexible.

In the afternoon I met with a German group, who have been touring NGOs and civil rights groups in the country. They were very interested and asked lots of questions about the village.

In the evening I continued to watch some more video interviews with Gregory David Roberts. Some of them were filmed a few years ago – like the CNN story – he toured around Mumbai with the reporter, visiting some of the places featured in the novel – including the Colaba Slum, where his character – and Roberts – had lived. He says in the interview that this particular slum, near the “World Trade Center” would soon be cleared and the residents relocated. That didn’t happen, however the slum shown in the TV series based Shantaram was not filmed there on location. It was instead filmed near Bangkok, where “Shantaram’s crew rebuilt a shantytown, complete with a river running through the middle.” I guess it’s a lot easier to find money to create a fake slum than to re-house the residents of a real one.

Today’s links

Ethiopian civil war: parties agree on end to hostilities | Ethiopia | The Guardian

Another war you never heard of may be over.

Rishi Sunak scraps plans to move embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem | Foreign policy | The Guardian

US group campaigning against Australia’s reversal of recognition of West Jerusalem as Israeli capital | Australian politics | The Guardian

Simple proposal to foreign governments: offer to move your embassy from Tel Aviv to West Jerusalem but condition that upon building a parallel embassy for Palestine in East Jerusalem.

Big Tech’s Algorithms Are Built With Invisible Labor

“Artificial artificial intelligence.”

UN chief warns ‘we will be doomed’ without historic climate pact | Cop27 | The Guardian

Doomsayer.

Revealed: The Former Israeli Spies Working in Top Jobs at Google, Facebook and Microsoft

Only the best and the brightest.

Gregory David Roberts

I started to watch Shantaram, which I found surprisingly good – it captures the atmosphere and feel of the novel and the casting is brilliant. I read the novel in 2009 and loved it, of course, like everyone I know. But I didn’t read The Mountain Shadow, Roberts‘s second novel, because I read a couple of negative reviews when it came out. I sort of passed him off as a “one book” writer. Someone introduced me to that term when describing Pilgrim at Tinker Creek writer Annie Dillard; though I actually enjoyed a couple of her other books.

Anyway, after watching the first episode of “Shantaram” I had a look to see what Roberts has been doing since. I was delighted to see that he didn’t stop with those two books, but has both continued writing and has been re-inventing himself as a musician. He’s also studied under an Indian guru and become a devotee of Kali. He has an amazing look, with a red tikka down his forehead, goes shirtless, and is adorned with beads, necklaces and rings. He lives in Jamaica, which he says is a great place to produce music. He’s also been writing new novellas and a graphic novel and recording YouTube films and podcasts about philosophy, spirituality, his books and his writing techniques. At age 70 he’s wonderfully lively and creative. An inspiration.

Culpability

There are a couple at climate sites where one can take a quiz to calculate the quantity of CO2 each of us produce. According to the parameters of the test, it turns that I’m pretty much a climate criminal. My wife and I share a free standing house of about 150 square meters and travel everywhere by car or by plane. That’s enough, apparently, to tilt the scale towards 11 – 13 tons of CO2 per person, regardless of diet or other factors.

I can add that all my electricity is produced by fossil fuels and a third of the water is desalinated by means of electricity.

If these crimes were not enough, I live in an apartheid state where the majority of the land was stolen from an indigenous people whose descendents continue to be oppressed today; a state that makes a living by exporting weapons and cyber-weapons and whose principal friends are corrupt dictators and war-criminals.

Being human, according to many parameters, is already to belong to a species that acts like a cancer on the earth; invading the territories of other species, de-foresting habitats, polluting the rivers, poisoning the oceans, wrecking the atmosphere and bringing about the extinction of many other life forms.

Our presence is as harmful to our environment as that of the rabbits introduced to Australia, which quickly overran the entire continent and ate up most of the vegetation. Or the European settlers in the Americas, who supplanted the indigenous population.

If we were to be put on trial for our crimes, we could claim innocence. We could claim that we ourselves are victims. We could claim extenuating circumstances and express contrition. But if we pardon ourselves and then repeat the crimes, what should be our punishment?

In the case of those rabbits, the favored solution was control or eradication:

Various methods in the 20th century have been attempted to control the Australian rabbit population. Conventional methods include shooting rabbits and destroying their warrens, but these had only limited success. From 1901 to 1907, a rabbit-proof fence was built in Western Australia in an unsuccessful attempt to contain the rabbits.[2][3] The myxoma virus, which causes myxomatosis, was introduced into the rabbit population in the 1950s and had the effect of severely reducing the rabbit population. (Wikipedia)

In the case of settlers (White Americans? Israeli Jews?), they could be expelled, like the Indians of Idi Amin’s Uganda. But since humans are anyway problematic, maybe they should simply be exterminated, like the rabbits?

There has to be another solution. Extreme retribution is exacted only at the cost of losing our humanity. Murder, capital punishment, genocide, even suicide are all crimes against humanity.

Does humanity actually count for anything when humans themselves are the problem?

I would argue that what we actually mean when we talk about humanity is divinity. And divinity, rather than being a quirky religious term, means the essential existence-consciousness underlying everything manifest. We call it humanity, because to be human is to be what we are. For a rabbit, it would be his “rabbitness”. And the essential in us, as in the rabbit, is the consciousness that binds us all together. The what-we-are is the divine.

I am the gambling of the cheats and the splendor of the splendid. I am the victory of the victorious, the resolve of the resolute, and the virtue of the virtuous.

-Krishna, in the Bhagavad Gita 10.36

So essentially, even when we are effectively undermining nature by cause of our existence, we are remaining true to our nature. Because we are part of all nature. We are the thing that we are undermining. We “inter-are”, as Thich Nhat Hanh would say. We cannot remove ourselves from the equation.

This is not to say that we cannot mitigate the damage, offset the environmental costs, or possibly give back to the universe something in return for its generous gifts.

Even by being aware of our connectedness, our behaviour can begin to change. It may dawn on us that birdsong and snow on the mountain peaks are as essential to our existence as the shiny new phone that we lust for, or the new car. We can reevaluate our priorities and begin to make different decisions. The question is whether the changes we make – individual and collective – will be sufficient, and in time.

The big social networking platforms and their troubles

Twitter and Meta

Facebook’s Monopoly Is Imploding Before Our Eyes

How to leave dying social media platforms

Interoperable Facebook (video)

Instagram sucks now, sorry

Après WhatsApp, Instagram victime d’un gros bug

Elon Musk dissolves Twitter’s board and makes himself ‘sole director’ | The Independent

What apps to use if you leave Twitter – The Washington Post

Those are a few recent articles. In short, both Twitter and Facebook, and Meta’s other services like WhatsApp and Instagram are in serious trouble right now. People are seeking alternatives such as Mastodon, which some of the mainstream press, like the Washington Post (see above), struggle to understand.

We love to hate these big tech corporations here on the Fediverse. I would describe myself as an avid despiser of Zuckerberg and Musk. On the other hand, if I look back a few years ago, I remember my awe when MySpace, Facebook and Twitter were finally turning people on to the web, in a big way. At the time when those services were beginning, the internet was still a place that many less technical users visited only reluctantly. They certainly didn’t participate or publish anything there themselves. Yet suddenly, when the early social networks gained prominence, people finally “got” it. They began to share personal stories and family pictures in earnest, and even discover old friends. When Facebook came along, it suddenly became possible to find former classmates, reconnect with distant family members and recover old relationships. Its contribution to the social fabric of society was huge. Twitter, at the same time, became a place that you could find journalists and writers, engage with them personally, and get the back story behind the news. Emotions that journalists would carefully hide behind a screen of objectivity in their polished stories, you could learn about from their tweets. And, of course, Twitter was the first place to visit on any developing news story.

These examples are just a fraction of the contribution made by the big social media companies. The amazing thing is that, all the while, their true agenda was figuring out how to make money from their services. In a way, we should be thankful that they did.

And yet, as we know, their solutions were inimical and destructive, first to the web, and then to people and societies. We are now at a place where we are beginning to ask how we could arrange things differently, reap the benefits while minimizing the drawbacks.

Everyone on the Fediverse thinks they have the obvious answer to that; though, if you look more closely, there are problems there too, of how and how much to engage in moderation, on whether to block networks like Gab, about how to relate to new laws and increasing governmental snooping and interference.

Regarding the biggies like Facebook and Twitter, the EFF and Cory Doctorow have the core answer: there needs to be interoperability. Those big tech companies don’t deserve to be abolished, but their monopolies need to be trimmed down through legislation and regulation. They can live on, for those who want them, as honorable but interoperable platforms. If they are creative and clever, with an amazing interface that people appreciate, they will always be popular enough to make money. But they should not be permitted to stifle competition. Ergo interoperability. No more walled gardens: if the user wants to friend people on other networks, or wants people from other networks to be able to friend him, that should be made possible. May the best platforms win, but it should not be a zero-sum winner-take-all situation. Those who prefer to live on a maybe less slick, less plush, but ad-free, non-algorythmic networks should not be penalized for their choice.

And I still look forward to seeing an offline client, like Thunderbird is for email, that can bring together all of our social media posts, from around the Fediverse, from Diaspora, from Twitter and Facebook, and everywhere else.

On daylight-saving time

Twice a year, there are lots of comments in social media about the stupidity of daylight savings time. Israel has DST too, and keeps in step with Europe and North America with regard to the date of the change-over. But many nations, like India and China, don’t bother with DST. Those two huge nations also impose a single time zone from east to west, regardless of the inconvenience it must cause to areas distant from the capital.

In Israel, achieving D.S.T. on those dates was a hard-won battle fought by the secular parties against the religious parties in the Knesset, who made many of the arguments being made today by Europeans and Americans, whereas actually they were interested in making it more convenient for early morning prayer times.

My own opinion is that if DST saves energy and emissions, even by a little, then DST is worthwhile. But research seems to be inconclusive, with most studies pointing to a small saving in lighting in the evening hours, when DST begins in the Spring. Obviously more work needs to be done.

I sometimes think about trying to live my life more in tune with daylight, because really, what’s stopping me? One way to do it would be personally to instate universal time, and break the connection between local clock time and bedtime. If I know that sunrise comes locally at a certain hour, even if it’s non-intuitive like currently 04:00 U.S.T. (06:00 local time, after moving the clock back), then that’s the time to begin my day. In order to get 7 hours sleep, I need to get to bed by 08:00 U.S.T. (22:00 local time). That gives me eight hours, because I usually wake up for an hour in the middle to do some writing or reading. The only thing stopping me is that it’s inconvenient to be on a different time zone from everyone else, or even to go to bed earlier than they do. For example, my kids call me to do baby-sitting once or twice a week – which means staying up till about midnight locally.

The 24 hour clock

Americans are about the only people who still almost universally go according to the 12 hour clock and write “8 pm”. Everywhere else, the 24 hour clock is favored. I noticed that in France, and perhaps in some other countries, people have even got used to saying the time according to the 24 hour clock: They will often say that “dinner will be at 19,” or at “20 hours” for example. Israelis will still say “4 in the afternoon” or “8 in the evening”. It would sound funny to say “at 20” or “at 20 hours” in Hebrew. Perhaps that’s what they say in the army, I don’t know, just as British and American soldiers do?

Date notation

The ISO 8601 extended format date, 2022-10-31 is the only format for me. It avoids the confusion between international and American formats; it’s readable, makes sense, and, as a file-naming convention, helps to keep files in order by name. Unfortunately, Israel is not among the countries that has accepted it.

My phone camera names photos according to the ISO 8601 standard format (without the human-friendly dashes), though it makes a (permitted) custom variation for adding the time “20221028[underscore]105411.jpg”. My other camera uses a sequential naming format (P1234567.JPG). As a result, it’s a struggle, in applications like Darktable, to put the image files in order. Camera file-naming conventions too should be standardized according to the ISO date and time too.