Notices by The Fedilore Otter 🦦 (fedilore@mastodon.social)

Well this is certainly a blog post.

PacketCat just switched instance providers for his already incredibly expensive-to-run instance, because of his own personal porn habits.

It's a Star Trek instance.

https://tenforward.blog/hetzner-considered-hostile-a-psa/

For example, in this one he's asking for money on the #fediblock and #mutualaid tag, in the middle of the long anti-queer harassment thread.

This is an unusual mutual aid request!

I never actually followed up on this thread!

https://mastodon.social/@fedilore/113137999356959204

The general idea is that while PacketCat was attacking a dozen or more instances the other week, he was also asking for money.

But he was asking for an unusually large amount of money, in an arguably tone deaf sort of way.

$100,000 USD per year in a tech job is a very large amount of money.

Some people might still struggle at those levels, but it's really really strange to call incomes approaching that "poor".

In comparison, the US median (middle) income for a (multi-person) household is $80,610.

About this time I remembered the TenForward blog post about mutual aid and had a read over it for some context.

It's a... clumsy quasi-Marxist analysis that contains the following lines.

"[The] upper middle-class I am talking about workers... who make USD$100,000 or above per year."

"As for the poor, since I have already defined the only other class relevant to this essay, can broadly be classified as 'the rest of us'."

https://tenforward.blog/on-mutual-aid-and-class-division-in-the-fediverse/

Or this one.

Usually on the Mutual Aid tag are asking for smaller amounts of money, and generally for some specific need.

There can be larger asks for housing-related stuff, but not $1000 for lattes and margaritas.

That's unusual!

According to the TenForward wiki, the blog TenForward.blog alone costs $52.90 USD per month, (plus the cost of the expensive and redundant .blog domain).

$34.95/month for "Managed WPO Starter service"

$17.00/mo for "Cloudflare Enterprise Tier 1 service"

https://wiki.tenforward.social/doku.php?id=tenforward:financial:costs

Most months this blog is only used to post financial statements.

The majority of my followers think a blog like this should cost "about $5" per month.

https://mastodon.social/@fedilore/113139293862448906

Just checking off a new more boxes.

TenForward.social cost about $185USD to run in September.

A majority of my followers (disproportionately instance admins) consider that to be "unusually expensive".

https://mastodon.social/@fedilore/113137999356959204

As an observation, people tend to define "middle class" in whatever way includes them.

I think it's probably a pretty safe guess that PacketCat got to that $100k number by rounding up from his own income in order to put himself in the marginalized class.

But none of my followers think the $80-100k range could be considered "poor".

https://mastodon.social/@fedilore/113139190040606740

And most of the people that PacketCat, TBS, etc are harassing are actually poor.

Less than half that $80k number, and often much less.

Instances run by people on disability, with effectively no income at all.

People who are dependent on MutualAid for the basics of life, in a way where receiving a bit more will have a meaningful impact.

And the harms of getting cut off from that network can be pretty large.

I do think that it's possible that he's running a needlessly expensive instance as a bit of a homelab so that he can put AWS, Wordpress, Cloudflare, and whatever internal services he's running across the three VPS servers, all on his resume.

Or maybe he just doesn't really know what he's doing, doesn't understand how much money he's spending on this, doesn't really understand the value of a dollar, and kinda just... let the costs get to this point.

If I had to speculate why TenForward costs so much to run, there's definitely a few possibilities.

I do not think PacketCat is just faking the bills and pocketing the money.

One possibility might just be that it's a very old instance, and it's difficult to reduce costs this late in the game.

Why I bring that up is because:

A) Managed hosting is significantly cheaper than what TenForward pays; and

https://fedihost.co/pricing

B) Managed hosting is run by people who know what they're doing, and generally does not include direct database access.

On a VPS, your admin can fairly easily read any of your DMs with a little bit of script.

With managed hosting, your admin generally cannot actually see a DM unless it's been reported to them.

Here's one where most of my followers support PacketCat.

TenForward.social is hosted across 3 different VPSs, and AWS.

This is a quite expensive hosting strategy, but most of my followers do prefer an instance not to be on managed hosting - even if many criticized the choice of AWS as needlessly expensive at that scale.

https://mastodon.social/@fedilore/113139329870807408

Feel free to post mutual aid requests in replies to this thread, for exposure. If you do, I'll try to boost them.

(But also remember the context of this thread and who it's about. Be aware that publicly responding to me might lead to harassment directed at your instances so it might be a bad idea.)

In the later case, I just want to point out Fedihost's plan for medium-sized instances is only $40/month.

At only 241 active monthly users, that's a ton of headroom for growth and a nice security upgrade for your users, all for less than you currently spent to update your blog.

So I've gone through Ro's very long thread about tech.lgbt, and it does not contain any relevant evidence?

https://h-i.social/@are0h/113205968588300536

In September 2023, Ro added a new source to TheBad.Space, which had the effect of adding hundreds of new instances to TBS.

Each of these new instances was automatically tagged as "poor moderation" and "hate speech".

A lot of people criticized Ro for this, because he was in effect doing slander at scale against these 200-300 newly listed instances.

#fediblockmeta

The first "receipt" Ro provides is a tech.lgbt admin trying to de-escalate.

Ro launched a war against hundreds of instances, including tech.lgbt, and tech.lgbt tries to make peace.

Ro focuses exclusively on tech.lgbt, and not the hundreds of other admins he'd attacked with this dumb choice.

This is just not what happened?

A lot of people were calling out Ro, because he had launched a war on 200+ instances at once.

Ro then goes on to spread conspiracy theories about tech.lgbt and a supposed DDOS attack against Ro's former instance ubiqueros.com.

There is no evidence that a DDOS attack ever occurred.

If it did occur, there is no evidence to point to tech.lgbt over any of the HUNDREDS of instances Ro had recently listed.

Ro's decision to assign blame to the biggest queer instance impacted is obviously suspect.