Notices by ar.al? (aral@mastodon.ar.al)

Free speech may be invaluable but hate speech costs just $7.99 a month.

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

https://ar.al/2022/11/09/is-the-fediverse-about-to-get-fryed-or-why-every-toot-is-also-a-potential-denial-of-service-attack/

CC @stephenfry @gretathunberg

#fediverse #mastodon #stephenFry #gretaThunberg #smallTech #smallWeb

@Ciaraioch Funny ‘cos it’s true :) (Lots of folks are trying to find simple ways to explain the basic concepts but it’s definitely an ongoing challenge.)

Silicon Valley: let’s addict people with free candy so they don’t notice we’re farming them for their data.

Elon Musk: Let’s charge them $8/mo for the candy.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Who has two thumbs and is 46 today?

#birthdayBoy

Here’s an idea: let’s call people “people” on the fediverse instead of “users” whenever we can.

Compare:

“There are 42 users on this instance.”

vs

“There are 42 people on this instance.”

Which acknowledges our humanity more?

Language matters. We don’t need to perpetuate mainstream technology’s othering/colonial framing of “us” – designers/developers/other “clever folks” – and “them” – the users (usually one step removed from “dumb user” and usually the ones who get used).

#peopleNotUsers

Fediverse server admins: have you considered putting a limit on the number of people that can join your instance?

If not, please do.

(This should really be a feature in fediverse servers like Mastodon, etc. “Max occupancy” or something with an auto-shutoff when it’s reached.)

Remember, small is beautiful ;)

If nothing else, I’m sure none of you want to become mini Zuckerbergs or Musks – eww – so let’s make sure we set the right incentives from the start.

#fediverse #scale #smallness

Well, that’s that, then.

#twitter

We should not be optimising Mastodon so it can handle more people per server. We should be optimising Mastodon so it incentivises more serves with fewer people.

(And if you take that line of thinking to its logical conclusion, you arrive at the idea behind the Small Web: https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/)

#decentralisation #federation #fediverse #SmallWeb

Food for thought: The bigger mastodon.social gets, the less successful the #fediverse is.

Sadly, the fundamental design of Mastodon mirrors the design of Big Tech (a server architecture that can support hundreds of thousands of “users”) and thus inherits its success criteria.

I feel it’s time we at least started thinking about what the web would look like if we all had our own place on it and what it would take to get there from here.

#decentralisation #centralisation #fediverse #SmallWeb

Optimising #Mastodon = designing flows that encourage people to leave mastodon.social for other instances, not accepting any more new members on mastodon.social, and making design changes that limit how much a single instance can scale.

A single instance that can scale to host hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people, is not a design success in decentralisation, it’s a design failure. (It’s a design success in #BigTech.)

CC @Gargron

#decentralisation #centralisation #federation

Dear #TwitterMigration folks, an important tip on #privacy on the fediverse:

There is none.

This is a public medium; please treat it as such. Just as you have no privacy on Twitter (Elon Musk can read all your DMs), you have no privacy on the instance you’re on (your administrators can read all your posts).

You can set the visibility of a post but that’s a viewing suggestion, not a privacy guarantee.

Think of your posts as postcards, not sealed letters, and you should be fine.

#fediTips

@feditips And remember that your server admins are volunteers and most are paying out of their own pockets to host you. So remember to be kind and, if you can, donate to support the upkeep of the instance you’re on.

Twitter is a shopping mall, the fediverse is a park. It’s up to all of us to tend it together.

@Gusted @dachary @humanetech “I’m looking for VC money, a few millions” – this, combined with the announcement yesterday, actually has me more worried.

It shows that either Lunny doesn’t understand what VC is or that there’s a desire to make a lot of money with Gitea in a way that isn’t compatible with being a community project.

“Enterprise version” plans are not great either. Just look at GitLab.

CodeBerg might want to consider sustaining their own fork while the codebase is still simple.

It’s lovely to see projects like https://immers.space using Auto Encrypt (@small-tech/auto-encrypt). If you know of any others, do let me know. I’d love to mention them in the readme and in my talks.

https://codeberg.org/small-tech/auto-encrypt

#autoEncrypt #smallWeb #smallTech #tls #https #letsEncrypt #web #dev #nodeJS

@davidoclubb Not sure about alternatives (thoughts, @feditips?) But about the other question, it’s by Google; of course it‘s exploitative :)

@t0k @ArneBab @humanetech There’s a reason I license nearly everything I do under AGPL ;)

Someone wrote to me recently asking if I could relicense it because he didn’t want to share his code. I told him it wasn’t nice to take from the commons without giving back to it and that yes, I could but no, I wouldn’t.

The nerve of some people… ?♂️

The PineBook Pro is rather beautiful on the inside.

(Although I’d rather I was able to make it boot from an sd card without having to open it and unplug wires.) ?

#Pine64 #PineBookPro

Man what a dumpster fire Arch/Manjaro is. Just bricked the PineBook Pro by trying to perform the wildly esoteric task of… upgrading packages using pacman.

?♂️

(Was just playing with it before I install Fedora Silverblue on it so no harm done.)

So in case you’re wondering (like I was) why @gitea is not hosted on Gitea but still at GitHub, it’s apparently because they’re locked in by GitHub who are drip feeding them their data with extremely low rate limits.

This is an outrage.

A trillion-dollar company (Microsoft) is holding a free and open source competitor’s repository hostage on their systems.

Who do we pressure at GitHub to provide Gitea with all their data ASAP?

Thoughts?

#GitHubGate #Gitea #dataPortability #lockIn