On the Fedi and Viral Content
When people praise the lack of #viral content on Mastodon (or the #fediverse in general), it’s seems to be mostly white tech folks, happy for our clever bubbles to be left alone.
But for people who desperately need to be seen and heard, going viral on Twitter is one of the only ways for their stories to get told #BlackLivesMatter, oppression in the middle east, genocides in Rwanda and South Asia, the #metoo movement -- these movements couldn't be ignored because they grew fast and visibly, making it hard for them to be ignored, dismissed, or covered up.
The Fediverse as it exists right now would see these movements isolated, defederated, gated by content warnings, and probably DDOS’d by bad actors running malicious instances. ("Mal-odons"?)
I guess right now I don’t want to see posts and think pieces about how "content can't go viral" on the Fediverse (whether or not it’s true) is only a net-positive. For all its faults Twitter has been a positive force for social change and visibility in millions of people’s lives.
We must learn from it and ask how — if we are going to make a case for the Fediverse as an alternative to Twitter — we can be better while not throwing those of us in the most need back to the wolves.
Help I've over-devops-ed my blog
(SORRY, LOST IMAGE)
Time for bi-yearly web presence maintenance
What with Twitter (aka birdsite, hellsite, muskosite) flailing in the clammy hands of Dr. No, and interest in the federated web re-emerging, I figured it was time to review my own web presence and see what was the situation.
(SORRY, LOST IMAGE)
Dear reader, it was Not Good.
Warning one was hitting this site from my work network and getting a BitDefender screen of doom saying the site was serving a keylogger. NOT GOOD.
Then the site - which was hosted on Linode and runs my own homegrown blog software, Goldfrog - went completely down. After some "where did those ssh keys get to, where is this thing anyway" I got logged in and figured out that my server had been hacked in some way, TLS and letsencrypt removed. I haven't had time to troll the logs for evidence as to how the server was accessed, but I downloaded them and have them set aside to look later.
We Can Rebuild It
Thus entered a week of figuring out once again how the heck Monkinetic is built and deployed, migrating the code from Github to Gitlab (which I'm more familiar with due to $dayjob), and refactoring the Ansible code that builds the server and deploys the blog/content.
Finally today I got it 85% done, which is pretty good for a full migration between hosting providers (I also moved from Linode to Digital Ocean where I already have some other services).
Masto-tootly-don
With the insanity on Twitter, I logged back into my Mastodon account on toot.cafe and enjoyed the huge stream of new folks migrating from Twitter to federated platforms (mostly to mastodon.social since that's the first/largest instance, but folks are making their way from there to smaller instances as they get more comfortable).
Apparently Mastodon 4.0 is out (release candidate) and they've changed the annoying-until-it-was-gone "Toot" to "Publish". I'd have preferred "Post" myself, but 🤷♀️.
Maybe servers should just change it to suit their audience?