Notices by Kiwix (kiwix@mastodon.social)

"Sometimes it is worthwhile to meet your heroes"

Richard Stallman will be coming to Lausanne on 17 January at 6pm to discuss The Cost of Freedom.

https://kiwix.org/en/richard-stallman-a-lausanne-le-17-janvier-2025/

@Infoseepage We can only agree with you. The massive delay is because of big API change at Wikimedia... and lots of consequences of it. We are still working to be back to normal.

@Infoseepage Yep, we are currently rebuilding Wikimedia Offliner and it is a lot of work (apparently a lot more than we'd expected)

If you think it's time for the Wikimedia Foundation to complete #mastodonmigration, then you can:
* Subscribe to (pretty inactive) @wikimediafoundation
* Challenge clearly the rationals to stay on "the hostile network" at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Social_media #elonmusk #wikipedia

If there is any silver lining to this, it is that we could see a few points of vulnerabilities as well as our ability to turn things around in a reasonably quick manner (here be kudos for the two heroes who manage our infra).

Learning were made, and we will see in the coming weeks/months how we can implement new safegards within our resource constraints.

/END

Luckily we have mirrors and these were not affected. We grabbed a new machine somewhere else (Scaleway ; if we name-and-shame the one we might as well name-and-greet the other) and immediately started re-importing our data to our new Master server.

All in all, it still took about 48 hours to get these 8-ish TB back online.

In the meantime, all servers had been wiped already so no way to retrieve our data.

If you are looking for a bad case of the Mondays, well, that was one.

Turns out that Hetzner has decided to cancel our account and terminate all servers. There was no warning (yes, we checked our spam folder), and nobody could be reached before Monday morning.

When reached, they could not explain the reason for the cancellation:
Them: - We sent you an email.
Us : -We did not receive it, can you please resend?
Them: - We don't have it
Us: ಠ_ಠ

Murphy's law states that if things can go wrong, they will. Ideally in the worst possible way.

For us, that meant having our servers disconnected at 00:00 on a Sunday.

Our main storage backend became entirely unreachable. For the average user that meant not being able to access the library and download files, and for us that meant not being able to connect to it and see what was wrong.

So last week (on Sunday 1 December at 00:00), our server host canceled its service without warning.

TL;DR: we do not recommend using @Hetzner_Online 's service

Everyone else: a short 🧵

Things are now back to normal ✌️
Thank you all for your support. 😊

Happy downloading!

Happy Friday!

If you are a software developer, please do not forget to push everything into production before disconnecting for the week-end.

We will soon reached 3.000 followers, here on #Mastodon! More than we ever had on Twitter! Who will be the 3.000th??? #mastodonmigration

Happy #publicdomainday 2023! To all those dedicated to widening access to humanity's #creativecommons.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/01/something-is-not-right-with-copyright-this-public-domain-day-conan-doyle

@Gargron Yes, but a special form, in comparison to a traditional Foundation or Association. It has more in common with a traditional company than usual in NGO field. It’s not a critic. Seems just challenging to face capital based takeover attempts as long as you have a stock based company. What would happen if key shareholder(s) would die? In a nustshell, maybe the current setup is not the most appropriate anymore to protect Mastodon achievements and secure further developments on longer term.

@Gargron Any plan to place #Mastodon IP, R&D and operarations (mastodon.social) under a formal non-profit ombrella organisation? Something similar to the move made by Jimmy Wales with the Wikimedia Foundation? This would allow to definitly protect our digital common of any capital based raid.

RT @KiwixOffline@twitter.com

Kiwix Desktop 2.3.0 for #Linux and #Windows has been released! Check the changelog https://github.com/kiwix/kiwix-desktop/blob/master/ChangeLog

??: https://twitter.com/KiwixOffline/status/1571526188404817921

RT @techreview@twitter.com

Governments are turning off the internet to silence dissenters at an ‘exponential’ rate—and threatening civil society, says Dan Keyserling, the head of Google’s Jigsaw project. We sat down with him to discuss the phenomenon. https://trib.al/W50SEPI

??: https://twitter.com/techreview/status/1552738752598081536