tallship

Slackware, OpenBSD, and a bit of a Debiantard. FOSS and Privacy Advocate.

Soft landings usually mean it doesn't hurt very much at first, then perhaps the event becomes more frequent and escalates to something that looks like the attached screenie...

When this happens, you may wish to avail yourself of some of the alternatives below.

Once you get here you're faced with trying options or even becoming disenfranchised. Switching to another browser is a prudent test, some have suggested pasting links into Incognito Mode tabs or logging out, while others have claimed that stock Brave Browser seems to humming along for them; and third party utils from among the list that follows:

Web based:

Android (both are available at F-Droid):

Desktop:

Browser extension (a native, local, cross-platform solution):

  • AdNauseam This last option is a simple browser extension that is apparently quite popular with folks, levying its own ethical pressure upon those who would force-feed you with data mined ad generation. The README file has some great information on the methodology incorporated.

On #Android, I haven't been presented with any of these foreboding pop ups warning me about blockers. I typically use #Brave or #Vivaldi Browser, they're stock, but I use the YouTube app more than I do any one of my browsers on my phones.

I also run the #DuckDuckGo “App Tracking Protection service”. This is NOT #FOSS, so your choices are either installing from the #Aurora or Google Playstore, yet there's no requirement to use the #DDG browser to enable this protection – it's not for your browsers though (even DDG), it is designed to work with pretty much everything on your Android EXCEPT browsers; i.e., almost all of your installed apps, seamlessly, and since most folks stream YouTube videos through the Google YouTube Android app, I surmise that it targets and obliterates ads in the app (I haven't confirmed the veracity of that, it's merely supposition, but it blocks zillions of attempts by installed apps to phone home).

I'm Looking forward to hearing your thoughts, personal observations, and concerns; other toolsets or applications that meet your needs, and why you may have chosen those particular types of tools.

I hope that helps!

I can be reached on Matrix at:

@tallship:matrix.org

via XMPP at:

tallship@jabber.org

and in the Fediverse at: @tallship@public.mitra.social

#tallship #privacy #Adblock

.

With some frogs and snails and puppy dog tails

I just finished this new Cinnamon post: https://cinnamon.video/watch?v=679173664947569768

Wow, what can I say? I certainly wasn't any sort of proponent for the web-monetization schemes of the past, but oddly enough, following the implosion of freenode, one of the former staff members who helped me to move and get my projects migrated with fully registered status to LiberaChat was a big supporter of Coil.

Coil? What's that? Web monetization? He doesn't seem like the type to embrace some flippant... hm...

I bit down hard, why? Why would he be so head first into yet another plan to disrespect privacy when he was all about the opposite?

So I signed up for Coil – it was kinda weird, with all this convoluted GlobalID thing that you had to navigate and all, which I'm still not convinced of its use case, and there didn't seem to be a way to avoid setting it up without a phone, but it was necessary to bridge the gap to Interledger protocol and I also wanted a kewl Uphold.com account/debit card, and convenient way to spend/receive/send crypto in the process (via XRP).

I found a rag tag website equivalent of those old roomatefinders services, complete with late 90's UX like something out of a 3 day HTML course, and low and behold, a desktop way to do that GlobalID thing and verify with an email address instead of a phone number – Finally!

The Uphold KYC was simple, straight-forward, and predictably modern, and a few minutes later I had what still might end up being a useless GlobalID and a really kewl Debit card from Uphold on its way to me in the mail.

I've used Uphold semi-regularly, and not because I need to, but more of a fun thing, or quick way to move a little crypto onto a card to use at a retail store.

Oh, yeah, and this Coil thing that following a bit of research appeared to have like, maybe ten websites with no market, and that was sad because after reading up quite thoroughly, it really did appear to be a great model in this era of walled gardens in your face every time you click on a newsworthy item in your search results – a phenomenon so offensive that the EFF actually released a plugin to block all walled garden websites from your searches – You go girl! FSF and EFF FTW w00t.

I did the Coil thing on a couple of my sites. Easy enough, add a meta tag and poof! done. Nothing. Sad. A few months go by and same same. Sad.

And so, like so many other novel initiatives that aren't actually predicated upon stealing from you (like Faceplant, Twatter, InstaSPAM, etc.), I forgot about the krufty lines of code in those couple of sites. Someday I'll stumble upon them, rummage through my documentation and go, “Oh yeah, I remember that Coil thing! Too bad it didn't amount to anything.”

And I'll remove the code and forget all about it. Like you've forgotten about the purple gorilla that you couldn't get off of your Windows 98 desktop no matter what you tried to do about it, except for when it didn't want to be there, or Klippy, the dancing paperclip that offered little in the way of actual help – but it was something you could watch when your box labored for more than a seconds trying to open that PowerPoint presentation.

After a while I got into a regular usage cycle just to exercise my Uphold card. Send 10 bucks worth of XRP to it, convert it to cash, and buy a six pack of beer and a candy bar, or fund it with $10 from a credit card real quick so I can send a little XRP to some DEX for a funky trash token that is absurd, and then send those to my friends as goofy gifts to clutter their Tronlink wallets. Nothing especially of real utility, although you could Hodl custodial BTC and a myriad of others and swap 'em into cash really quickly whenever you wanted to go out on a dinner date.

If nothing else, the Uphold card is a good way to siphon off your crypto income from transactions where you sold stuffs to people, put it into an intermediary custodial account and let it sit while you waited for a time to use it as walking around money – without the fuss that some exchanges entail.

I started noticing these tiny, incremental transactions after a while and couldn't glean what was going on though. After a while, they became more frequent. I mean, like a penny or three cents, and pretty soon the pattern emerged to coincide with some articles I had written that had a lot of readership – What? could it be that mainspring thing I deployed months back? What was that called.... Coil! That's it! Coil.com!

It was indeed.

I decided to burrow into a kdbx file and find that interledger stuff that was so irrelevant and grab that meta-tag and begin a little copypasta cuisine. Whoa... Now I've got a pretty steady stream of pennies, nickels dimes, and even quarters coming in all the time....

Hey this is pretty kewl :)

And it actually hasn't been that long. Sometimes a good idea is just a good idea and it has to propagate and age a bit – like a good Kentucky straight bourbon.

Now, I like to write, spread the poison of my warped ethics all around the playground, and edjumacate, and inform, and clarify why I believe a certain way, or prevent someone from making the stupid mistakes I did by explaining how I should have done it.

I didn't write most of those items to cha ching, but there's seriously enough there to buy a sandwich for lunch here and there. I mean, I've written articles and nada, for a long time, and then something happens and it starts getting readership. I dunno why half the time, but here's the deal I'm a big FOSSie, a proponent of the open source model in general, and when I do something I like to doc it, like a good sysadmin, and I also like to clean that up a bit and share that – sometimes even release scripts for other lazy fuckers like me.

I've made part of a career by eradicating Windows and proprietary software in favor of FOSS. Early adopter of Linux, even working with it back in 1992. Whenever I deploy for a business, I make sure the principal knows how much the license would have been had I used Microsoft and other proprietary closed source software, My labor being about the same regardless, they're running free software that is actually better than the encumbered alternative, so I require the customer to donate to the developers or project each year. I never tell the customer how much, I just make it clear the money they would have paid.

I think that's a good ethical approach. So now there's all these people out there unbeknownst to any of us who they actually are, paying five bucks a month just on the off chance they'll land on a web page where someone who writes an article has this FOSS spirit, and now, it's starting to show...

So then everything sat for a while and then, I get a notification that Coil Blogs is being EOLed, and I had to move my existing blogs to Write.as or lose them. I didn't even know I would get a year of free pro service until a few minutes ago.

I also stumbled upon Cinnamon – That's right here where we are now! And of course there's much more.

Pretty much everything I publish is licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0 and so my interledger address I got from Coil and Uphold is used for my HackerNoon and Dev.To writings as well....

Okay stop. How many is that so far? Cinnamon, Write.as, Dev.To, and HackerNoon – all monetized at 36 cents an hour of reading time. That may not sound like a lot, but I've also monetized other infra that I self-host – websites, etc., too numerous to mention at this juncture.

It has all become a way to “Passively monetize my efforts for things I publish that are otherwise free anyway – so people who that money comes from are full on, opt-in, paying 5 bucks a month (never any more than that) to support hundreds of thousands of Coil web monetized sites.

Relatica – the new desktop and mobile Fediverse client

Relatica is a new, refreshing, and promising cross platform #Friendica client in beta now.

#Relatica runs on #Android, #Linux, #Mac, and #Windows. It also has some welcome and ambitious goals on the roadmap:

Testers, packagers, and early adopters are wanted for the official beta program.

Relatica's developer is friendly, accessible, and responsive. The project enjoys an aggressive development cycle and has its own dedicated #Matrix support channel.

It's good to see a novel and dedicated effort to deliver a capable #desktop and mobile client that allows for #social engagement without a browser:

https://gitlab.com/mysocialportal/relatica/-/blob/main/README.md

For those here that aren't aware already, Friendica is one of the earliest and yet most modern and feature rich #Fediverse platforms, #internetworking with other protocols that enables you to do things like directly interface with #Diaspora and even the deprecated legacy silo networks too.

#Friendica has a pluggable addon system and provides direct support for multiple text formats and even direct linking of images in posts.

There's really just too much to list. If you're wanting a feature complete platform for #publishing, #microblogging, #news, #RSS, social engagement and more then Relatica is definitely worth trying out!

If you're interested in trying out Relatica's ease of use and features then you'll need to have a user account on a Friendica server.

You can self-host or get yourself a free Friendica account here:

https://Friendi.ca

I hope that helps!

I can be reached on Matrix at:

@tallship:matrix.org

via XMPP at:

tallship@jabber.org

and in the Fediverse at: @tallship@public.mitra.social

#tallship #FOSS #Relatica #ActivityPub You can haz #Cheezburgerz! 🍔

.

hmtl/ or public_html/, DNS, what is IP or name based virtual hosting, and what's this SNI stuff? Why does it say, “It Works!”?

Self-hosting was always easy. You simply harness the awesome power of a UNIX machine with BIND and an Apache server, and dump all those AngelFire files into the default directory. Then you register a domain name from Internic for $35/yr and give them the names and IP addresses for the glue records to point at your AUTH nameservers.

Easy Peasy!

And then you realize that for all the work you just did, you could be hosting a couple of hundred websites. After all, you've got an AMD K6-2/350 with a whopping 16MBytes of RAM and that /24 they handed you gratis a few years back!

Most websites just sit there, waiting very quickly to have their files served, and the money just keeps rolling in at $15/mo for each website, but you're beginning to run out of IP addresses to alias and bind to your 3Com 3c905 NICs.

But with HTTP 1.1 there's a new potential, it might be a little tricky at first though...

Yes, back when SNI first enabled us to move away from IP based VirtualHost containers in Apache to the Name Based VirtualHost where many websites shared a single IP address, there were some interesting issues, such as the default VirtualHost container being served if you didn't also specify non RFC compliant hostnames as aliases.

For example, there was a trend at the time to ignore proper usage of hostnames, with “www” generally being used as the traditional defacto, default hostname for a host delivering HTTP. i.e.,(http://www.SLD.TLD).

Similarly, you would usually name your first FTP server “ftp”, and the protocol was specified as “ftp”, yielding ftp://ftp.SLD.TLD, and gopher would be gopher://hostname.SLD.TLD in the address bar of your browser. Other protocols followed that same “protocol://hostname.4LD.3LD.SLD.TLD format, these child zones being a very common practice in universities in the .EDU and .MIL TLDs, as well as the .UK, .FR, .AU, .US, and some other ccTLD's (Australia has recently dropped that whole requirement for .com.au and .net.au finally lol).

So, although it was merely convention to name your hosts after the services they were delivering, like “www, www2, www3, Etc.”, or ftp, gopher, Etc., Those were only conventions and you could name them whatever you wanted.

But you weren't supposed to use the canonical domain name as the hostname!

Nevertheless, as the “web” became more ubiquitous and average users, oblivious to other protocols, began to ask the question, “why do I need to type in all those extra characters for www.ibm.com (like http://www3.ibm.com) instead of just ibm.com?“, in conjunction with the popular trend of browsers defaulting to “http://” protocol (unless you manually specified another protocol), many providers started to accommodate those hosting customers by breaking with the RFCs and pointing DNS A RRs to “@” or “SLD.TLD” – the canonical domain name, akong with another A record for “hostname.SLD.TLD” (usually still using www for the first website).

Now, when you query a DNS server for a hostname, it returns an IP address, no problem so far. And with IP based hosting it really doesn't matter what you call your website in your Apache server's VirtualHost container – it's just going to return a web page for the server at that IP address, coz that's all it's being asked: “Do you have HTML to send me for the IP address on this HTTP server?”, And then it sends the page – coz there's only one website per IP address!

But with HTTP 1.1 and SNI it's a compound question:

“Do you have HTML to send me for the IP address with the hostname of 'www.SLD.TLD' on this HTTP server?”

If yes, then serve the page. If not however, it gets a little weird. The default VirtualHost container is usually the first one defined in httpd.conf, so on many web servers that's the page that says – “It Works!” lolz.

So, in DNS you had to have two A Resource Records (RRs) one for say, 'www', and one for '@', or you could use a CNAME RR if you're one of those lame-o boneheads (bad form – don't use CNAME's!), AND... You also either need to specify two <Named VirtualHost> containers pointing to the same directory, or just one with an Alias directive.

NOTE: you 'could' point to two different directories, but in 99% of all cases, why the heck would you do that?

I dunno why, but maybe coz many hosting providers didn't understand how to write a DNS zonefile in BIND or maybe coz they didn't grasp that the browser was actually now asking for an actual hostname with it's request to the IP address that httpd was listening on, but this resulted in a lot of “no joy” when people neglected to type in the “www”, resulting in delivery of either someone else's website or the comical “It Works!” page (ROFLMAOPMP).

Adding insult to injury, the opposite could be the case when leaving out the hostname and just typing in the domain into the address bar, depending on how httpd.conf was configured – many knowledgeable sysadmins resisted this the because it wasn't RFC compliant, but eventually (the customer's money is always right), most default websites today just serve the canonical domain name as the main (or maybe even the only) hostname in a VirtualHost container in Apache with an alias to the 'www' hostname (or server block on Nginx.

As a little epilog, that came back to bite hosting providers, and moreso, their customers, in the last decade or so when the evil Cloudflare and ever popular WordPress came into prominence – To enforce their predatory vendor lock-in practices, Cloudflare offered free CDN services to people with websites... But only for one hostname per domain, AND, that hostname HAD TO BE “www”, lolz...

Well, after a couple of decades of dumbing down the user and people setting the main name of their WordPress sites to, “SLD.TLD”, this would cause, in the best scenario, to have their websites served to most people without the (so-called) benefit of Cloudflare's CDN... Unless you could retrain every user on the entire planet to type in the actual hostname (www), OR... pay Cloudflare lolz.... 🤘🤡🤘

Well my friends, That's all I've got right now, I hope you found that a bit amusing in a sort of nostalgic kinda way.

I can be reached on Matrix at:

@tallship:matrix.org

via XMPP at:

tallship@jabber.org

and in the Fediverse at: @tallship@social.sdf.org

#tallship #ramblings #lamentations #humor #geek_pr0n #BOFH #comedy

.

takahē – A new Fediverse paradigm

Fresh out of the oven is #Takahē, introducing a very interesting basic functional motive for development and delivering a beautiful #UX. It also derives inspiration in the form of its #mascott from a species once thought extinct for about a century.

That is, until a single man obsessed with the saga of this large, flightness bird since his early childhood, endlessly sought out and eventually rediscovered it was actually extant 75 years ago through his tireless efforts.

In recent years, and not without some particularly problematic attempts in the management of this #endangered_species, the population of these magnificent birds has more or less stabilized at around 100 members living in the wild, thanks to the committed efforts of a government sponsored #refoliation, hatching, and rearing program; in conjunction with a comprehensive scientific tagging, tracking, and monitoring effort of those members released into the wild alongside the wild-born members of the #population.

The software project itself has struck me as rather special too, and not just for its two functionally unique characteristics amongst other #Fediverse platforms – first, and similar to name based #SSL hosting on #HTTP servers with #SNI, Takahē provides multi-domain virtual hosting capabilities to #ActivityPubthis is huge, and opens the door for for even the casusl home self-hoster to provide #turnkey #SaaS offerings to their friends and family members in the form of small and #single_user “virtual Fediverse server instances”, in consumer based home #LAN environments – let alone the potential for commercial hosting endeavors.

To my knowledge, *this is the very first time* this novel approach to Fediverse networking over ActivityPub has been broached.

https://jointakahe.org/

If you hurry, you might still be able to secure for yourself an account in their limited beta program.

Go ahead, you can do that now, I'll still be here when you get back 😎

And as if that alone were not enough to revolutionize the paradigm and dynamic of the Fediverse, Takahē also introduces multiple account (alt) identities for each user user account on the server. This can only be described as freaking groundbreaking!

A single user account for a person might be the base for say, both @userone@SLD01.TLD01 AND @userone@SLD02 .TLD02 AND @usertwo@SLD02 .TLD02 – that, at least to me, can only be described as, “The Bees Knees”.

I'm sure that many will cite, and of course it is not only possible but quite likely, that this will lower the bar for abusive actors to engage in shenanigans. However true as that may be, such potential (and existing practice) exists already within the Fediverse so the ease with which bad actors will avail themselves of such toolings only is only trivially simplified, not introduced; besides, complaining about such a thing is irrelevant – the cat is already out of the bag.

Indeed, there are already other Fediverse server platforms (such as the Hubzilla (ZOT) and Misskey families of forks and variants that already support the creation and management of multiple identities under a single account anyway – but Bringing the SNI shared hosting experience into production with a single Fediverse server instance is truly unprecedented in Fediverse space.

There's a lot more. Did I mention the beautiful, and exceedingly intuitive UI? Of course I did!

There's another corollary that I alluded to. Did you miss it? It was right there, before your eyes.

Yes, there's a metaphor, craftily scripted between the lines of everything you just read (that is, if you didn't tl;dr).

The impetus for much of #decentralization (DeSoc) and the #Genesis of the Fediverse is arguably the notion of what was indeed a #decentralized #WorldWideWeb over the fully decentralized #Internet, having falling victim to capture by special interests – the #deprecated, #proprietary, #privacydisrespecting and #legacy #monolithicsilos – owned, spawned, and managed by mega surveillance-capitalism #data_mining corporations.... IOW, the so-called, Sunnyvale Syndrome.

This effectively killed of much of the notion that there even still existed an independant, #distributednetwork of services and sites truly belonging to the #individualparticipants, i.e., average #schmoes like you and me.

For sometime now, many have even claimed and argued that the kinder, friendlier #web of days gone by, where small #communities of #people and #websites belonging to #individuals and small businesses were actually #extinct in reality – with only those well heeled analytically correct, SEO optimized, #subjugated websites and #chattel in the form of people that had sworn #fealty to their lords and masters remaining. #Apple, #Amazon, the #Google and #Faceplant having long since taken #possession of their souls and #identities.

It's dark, so incredibly dark. And you have awakened to find yourself at the bottom of a well that you apparently have fallen into. There's plenty of water, you're knee deep in it, and a voice from above booms aloud that food will be delivered so long as, “It puts the lotion on its skin!”

And in a manner of speaking, following an “Internet century” (think, 'dog years') of a #dystopian #feudal Institution where Homo sapien drones existing in #LordsandVassals lockstep, told what to think, how to believe, where to shit, and when to wake up and punch the time clock, had completely replaced the actually extinct human race... Well?...

Fast forwarding to the scene where...

Some awkward little child in a dimly candlelit bedroom, many children, truth be told, consumed with the dreams of, and empowered with an obsessive belief that, a world where real, unique and independently diverse human beings actually existed, grew up and many years later rediscovered that they really did still walk the earth.

Kinda like the true story of the Takahē. And we too, are beautiful.

I'm leaving the rest for you to discover for yourselves, and look forward to many discussions on this invigorating topic. In the meantime, you can follow:

@takahe@jointakahe.takahe.social

I can be reached on Matrix at:

@tallship:matrix.org

via XMPP at:

tallship@jabber.org

and in the Fediverse at: @tallship@public.mitra.social

I hope that helps! Enjoy!

#tallship #FOSS #virtualhosting #multipleidentity #DeSoc #SunnyvaleSyndrome #AOLEffect

.

Two Dixie Cups and a piece of string

Oh my goodness!

Okay first of all, I use #Matrix and #Jabber#XMPP w/ #OMEMO, primarily.

I typically don't even regularly give out my email address nowadays, and more and more over the past four years or so, find myself publishing a #Fediverse address for myself too as a contact point.

Most often, if you ask me for my #email address I'll give you my Matrix address.

If someone wants to email me then I figure they can get that from my #PGP fingerprint or #Keyoxide.

If they don't know what a #keyserver is or where any of them are located then I just figure they're to dumb to use email.

Yes. As a technologist, I'm at times, rather arrogant, opinionated, discriminatory, and condescending... But only sometimes. The rest of the time I'm patient, attentive, empathetic, and accommodating.

Basically, if i know you don't know shit I'm a nice guy, yet if you pretend to be an all that jazz hipster know it all, then it's quite likely you'll find that I'm pretty much a full on dikhed. Spelled just like that too.

Beginning in the later eighties I think, and then the nineties they called us #BOFH. That's an acronym for someone who might already have forgotten more than you will ever know. I knew a few old Mainframe engineers with Honeywell and IBM when I was a young programmer – those guys were Gods and could tell you how many wraps of copper to make around a toroid if you had an emergency and needed to make an in the field replacement of your memory – Gods. #SuperFreakyGeeks, having already, back then, forgotten more than you or I will ever know.

They called me #Whizkid, coz I was learning shit that they were never gonna bother with – they're gonna retire soon in Mexico with boats, babes, and beers.

But I digress. I do that.

Back to secure communications...

When it comes to Signal, I know a lot of you really like it. I have little use for it. It bleeds my DID and farms everyone's contact databases – “bing! Ex stalker bitch girlfriend just joined signal. Say hello!” What the fuck?

Well I guess she's still got me in her contacts lolz. Fuckin' bitch.

Ummm... Yeah I'll pass.

I actually only use Signal with people who already have my #DID (phone number) anyway.

Recently, a colleague flew a cray cray route to Thailand, via #LAX to #NYC, then #Qatar. Signal works on jetliner's #WiFi too, and isn't dependant on cellular services.

Good choice, but I'm still wondering why his “safety number” changed after he departed #New_York and before arriving in #Thailand – he neither reinstalled nor switched to a new device. But that's another matter.

Sounds a little cloak & dagger fishy to me.

Anyway, I hadn't actually used #Signal in a while, and left it muted for a few months.

To my surprise... #Stories! Yay! Stories!

Wait, what are Stories? You mean like #YouTube or #InstaSPAM? And I'm assuming like they have in #Whaaaasup (never used it, never will)?

Ummm... I just tucked that little nugget of, I guess, good news away, not really knowing even how to process news of the introduction of such a useless fucking feature.

Until now.

Without further adieu, I defer to @how@ps.s10y.eu , one of our more prominently distinguished members in the Fediverse community, for his novel, clever, and appropriate recommendation:

https://ps.s10y.eu/@how/109308591992363124

#tallship #FOSS #communications #privacy #shenanigans

.

Polls and the democratic process

A community business, if and when it is.

Recently, Twitter CEO and owner Elon_Musk started takin' out the trash, firing miscreants on the spot for betraying the public trust, abuses of privilege, and accepting resignations from those who conceded that they just weren't up to snuff for the responsibilities and duties of their position in the company.

He also jettisoned several thousand tons of human dunnage (with generous severance packages). But those were merely the first broad strokes of the artists brush across the canvas in the transformative process that is not only reshaping and redefining the once disgraced and roundly rebuked platform that since his takeover has one again acceled to sometimes daily all-time highs in usage and popularity amongst its users.

And then, suddenly, shit got real – in Los Angeles, when an unhinged stalker assaulted one of Elon's children, even jumping onto the hood of the vehicle carrying the innocent passengers.

Not unlike many parents faced with startling threats, there were knee-jerk reactions, and some of them quite unpopular given that the measures taken weren't born out of the thoughtful mind of a calculative and analytical CEO of a billion dollar company, but rather, a shocked and unsettled parent who has just faced potential trauma in his life.

“Mama Said Knock You Out” – LL Cool J

Before I go on, I need to ask a question:

Have you ever found yourself playing with a couple of cute little grizzly bear cubs, upwind of their mama?

Of course you haven't. You wouldn't be reading this right now if you had.

But if you had, with the most playful and benevolent intent, do you think that mama bear would take that into account in her reasoning? Well, that right there seems to be where all if the controversy stems from over the past few days – Mama Elon lashing out, instinctively, as you would too if you happen to have a parental bone in your body.

I'm not defending a flurry of erratically delivered, spontaneous edicts coming down from on high, I'm merely offering that it's rational to expect such wreckless abandon from a mama 🐻 bear who feels her cubs have been threatened.

Now that things have calmed down a bit, with the (perhaps temporary) expulsion of some particularly sycophantic socalled journalists, there's been a series of polls published on the platform, followed up with posts by Elon saying things like, “The people have spoken.”, Etc.

Seemingly, for some, all had been forgiven. Sweeny the plane doxer and some of the journalists have had their accounts restored, haters are still hating, and lovers are still loving. People are speaking, but there's this notion that perhaps on many hotly contested policy issues, there may be a vehicle for voices to be heard – polls.

One of the basic tenants of a free society, after guaranteeing the citizenry respect for their inalienable rights to defend themselves, and the protection of unpopular speech, press, assembly, and the self sovereignty of their personal space, dominion, and posesdions, is the right to self-determination, historically honored through the process of polling.

But democracy is messy... Like BBQ sauce.

It sounds great. Ask a question, collect the responses, count them up and enact policy based upon the results.

But the problem is, how to you come up with the actual questions?

  • Who determines what those specific questions are?
  • How is it decided whether those questions are to be asked?
  • Where is it announced that these policy decisions are about to be decided?
  • What advanced notification is to be provided?
  • When is it appropriate to query the “public town square” for input on such matters?

🤔

Going off on a quick tangent.

I have my own thoughts on these four”W's” & “H”, as I'm sure that most people do, once they consider that we've all seen polls asking questions that we were unable to address ourselves due to myriad reasons, not the least of which being due to poorly constructed options.

Have you ever seen a question resembling, “When I feel like crashing my car into a tree....”?

What the fuck?

News flash! Most people have never felt like that. So the question goes unanswered, or marked as irrelevant, and yet, the party responsible for evaluating such a survey will derive a conclusion anyway (sneaky psych majors). Yah, an ex-girlfriend (clinical psychologist) actually revealed to me how they create tests on purpose by loading the questions in such ways so one possible conclusion is that the person taking the test was “evasive”, in their responses.

Let's get back on the subject though...

Back on track again. Moving along now...

Here's some of my own basic thoughts on the process.

There will always be s gatekeeper. Always. The decision is made somehow. If it's one person it's arbitrary, if it's a committee then it's generally via consensus, and if it's up to the governed themselves it's usually a tiered and vetted process – which, in the latter case might look something like the following:

  1. ) A proposal to hold a poll for a specified reason, with specific, unambiguous questions should be posted “somewhere” – perhaps a curated forum of sorts where only such proposals are published.
  2. ) Discussion is to ensue, related to the questions themselves – wording, phrasing, general verbiage, etc.
  3. ) A standard time limit is imposed to allow for such discussion, at the end of which the proposal is adopted as a poll to be published and announced (we haven't determined how that announcement should be broadcasted to the millions of eligible voters), or dismissed and archived as not having been moved forward to an actual election poll.
  4. ) A thumbs up 👍 / thumbs down 👎 type counter, will tabulate whether the membership reasons that such a poll is reasonable and worthy of such consideration and undertaking. At the end of the afore-mentioned deterministic time frame to consider the proposal, those recommendations will be weighed and considered. Each user can express their opinion once and only once, but can change their choice at anytime time up until expiry of the alloted time allowed for consideration of the proposed measure.

🤘😎🤘

Snap decisions are, done in a snap, at the discretion of administrative privilege. i.e., It may be prudent for mama grizzly bear to first observe whether the human tickling her kiddos is benign or malevolent in nature, but get real, only a moron would expect that from her – she's definitely going to rend you limb 🤳 from 🦵 limb.

Obviously, executive decisions will overrule any such measures, as is the prerogative of the corporations executive officer, who is of course free to intercede however they choose at anytime, but the process above is but one method for decision-makers to ascertain and consider which way the wind blows, with respect to the membership of the “town square”.

I'm interested in hearing your thoughts and suggestions. Let me know okay?

I can be reached at: #tallship:matrix.org and: @tallship@public.mitra.social

I hope that helps! Enjoy!

#tallship #polling #elections #policy #governance

.

Making Better Use of Space

Moving that old white elephant in the room.

There's been a lot of talk lately, and speculation, about the #Fediverse. Yet for the most part, only with respect to a single brand of server platform.

What I find particularly odd about that, is it's a rather lackluster server platform (especially considering the hefty system requirements) with an extremely limited feature list. Mastodon servers have a hard coded default character count limit per post of only 500 characters – more than Twitter, but not often enough to get a complete thought out with a link to somewhere else, or engage in a conversational thread, and certainly nowhere near what you need to post a news article, holiday recipe, tutorial, HowTo, or movie review.

As if a paltry 500 character limit isn't bad enough for this resource hog, virtually every other Fediverse platform provides for sensible , and configurable message lengths with common defaults of 2000, 5000, or more; most support #Markdown, and other ubiquitous text formats like #LaTex or #HTML, and some even have built in #WYSIWYG editors – like #WordPress, #Hubzilla, and #Drupal, with big players like #Imgur and #Tumblr already looking forward to their official Fediverse launches soon.

When those latter two giants arrive on the scene, the world of social networking will truly be interconnected, having achieved critical mass. It will be a revolution, a juggernaut toppling the deprecated, legacy monolithic silos that have so insidiously subverted and subjugated the masses like chattel. But I digress.

Other Fediverse platforms have offered the ability for people to edit their own posts for a long time, some for years, yet mastodon enabled this capability less than a month ago. It lags behind most other Fediverse platforms in several other ways too – groups, marketplaces, federated chat, and several other often requested functions are all but ignored by that platforms' developer while other Fediverse servers enjoy active and ambitious development cycles with new feature releases.

So considering it is so lacking in basic functionality compared to the other more prominent contemporaries, I've assembled a curated list below where you can evaluate and testdrive others for yourself. I've included links to some of the most darling up and coming projects like #Foundkey and #Quanta, that scale to thousands of users, and if you truly want an even smaller, minimalist Fediverse platform I've included #MicroBlogPub too. There's a couple of web tools including databases so you can search for even more platforms, instances, and compare statistics.

Choosing from the list below, you can join existing instances, self-host your own, or even have a professional #hosting_provider do it for you – simply pick a #turnkey provider where in just a couple of clicks your new fully managed Fediverse server will be online in only a minute or two!

There are literally free and privacy respecting Fediverse platforms to replace everything from #Faceplant, #Twatter, #Reddit, #YouTube, #twitch, #InstaSPAM, #Spotify, #Quora and so very much more!

And most are so light on system resources that you can run then on an old laptop or #Raspberry_Pi in your home.

Without further adieu, here's a list of [some of] the most prominent Fediverse server platforms in operation.

https://JoinTheFedi.com

https://Soapbox.Pub

https://Btrf.ly

https://JoinPeerTube.org

https://Mitra.Social

https://Epicyon.net

https://join.misskey.page/en-US/instances

https://akkoma.dev/FoundKeyGang/FoundKey

https://Pixelfed.org

https://Friendi.ca

https://Quanta.Wiki

https://FediDB.org/software

https://WriteFreely.org

https://funkwhale.audio/en_US/apps

https://microblog.pub

https://socialhome.network

https://hubzilla.org

https://owncast.online

https://join-lemmy.org

#tallship #FOSS #Soapbox #Rebased #PeerTube #Mitra #Quanta #Pixelfed #Epicyon #Friendica #WriteFreely #Plume #FunkWhale #MicroBlogPub #Socialhome #GotoSocial #Owncast #LoTide #Lemmy #ActivityPub #Privacy #DeSoc #Federating #Decentralize

I hope that helps! Enjoy!

.

After lying in wait until now as yet another, self-defederated, #deprecated, #legacy #monolithic silo based on mastodon – an identical model to #GAB and #TruthSocial... #CounterSocial has finally stepped from the shadows to challenge #Twatter on it's own turf – to what end? Another big #silo?

Joining big #Fediverse servers does little to alleviate the #twittermigration and #twitugee problems.

Here's what does:

https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/Linboard/status/1603598950593744897

#tallship #FOSS #ActivityPub #smallweb #self_host

.

08 Dec – 12 Dec 2022

rPi sets the snot nosed kiddies straight

A lesson in reality for little Marxist children

Was it the enticing aroma from pigs in a blanket?

Okay so PR folks do that thing where their reach exceeds their grasp. Maybe this is one of those times, and maybe not. It does however, illustrate the pent-up teenage angst and folly of adults subjugated by adolescent mob psychology.

It's factual enough to say that rPi was dogpiled by miscreants triggered by virtue of not having validated demands of idiots who think that pictures of 🍗🐔 🍖🥓🥩🐄🐖 should have a content warning (please block and/or defederate yourself, or your Fediverse instance – no one likes you anyway, nobody cares what you think, and no one will miss you when you've vanished into the ether).

Hiring an innovative maker is s good thing.

So rPi hired an ex-cop. So fricken' what? Big deal.

This is how you can tell they're miscreants. A company hires someone with expertise in a field where the product does exceedingly well in sales and deployment applications and a bunch of spoiled children either begin to dogpile because of the wise company decision, or because they're not finished attacking the company out of sport stemming from their bloodlust to agitate. It's a common past time – one that people who enjoy mostly peaceful riots and arson can all agree upon: “It's fun to burn other people's stuff down and bludgeon them!”

Defending your integrity is not cool, bruh! I'mma cancel you.

Yeah. This is where the rubber meets the road actually, and where the irony of it all is exposed – naked. As in, Look mommy! The Emporer has no clothes!

  1. ) The first irony
  • Not all, but certainly a hefty amount of people new to the #Fediverse aren't here because they were going to something better, but rather, because they were running away from something they were told was bad.
  • The irony here is the notion that they were trying to escape a deprecated, monolithic silo platform that had long since become historically characteristic of evil dystopian despotism. And just as it was beginning to be cleaned up in the middle of taking out the trash that made it such a shithole in the first place (I hear Marlon Brando whispering, “Oh... The horror.”). And they migrated as refugees to a place antithetical to the evils of censorship and manipulation, from that terrible dystopian place they came from.
  • Now they want that censorship back – you can't have it. The Fediverse doesn't work that way at all, bitches. In fact it's the opposite, it's censorship resistant.

If you don't like someone, you've always had ordinary controls over what you're going to permit in your inbox (feed/stream/wall). You can simply mute, block, or otherwise choose to let your machine disappear them “infernal undesirable types” on your own behalf for your personal account.

Problem resolved.

Not quite, you say? Well now here's where the insidious nature of these bolshevik social justice warriors start to flex their evil ulterior motives – if they don't like somebody, it's not enough that they make that other person disappear, they want you to make them disappear too.

What's even more despicable than that? I'm glad you asked!

They also want to take away your ability to make those decisions for yourself. They want the powers that be (instance admins) to defederate themselves from the entire other Fediverse instance where that person they don't like has their account.

Now that's ridiculous – but it's how a filthy Communist thinks. Bolsheviks rule by fear and terror (they murdered the mensheviks) – that's why wherever you see something like this it almost always includes doxing and death threats from the community by people that say they're so against that in their terms of service in the first place.

I know. It makes no sense. Oh, the irony.

Okay, I guess they're just guidelines, not rules for them, only rules for others.

  1. ) The second irony
  • In the words of Red Foreman, “Hey dumbass! You're not de-federating them, you're #defederating yourself you idiot!”

It's called, “Painting yourself into a corner”, and these children, with their knee-jerk reactions to edit their MRF settings are only doing a couple of things.

  • Removing the choice of your users to engage with the people of the site you just blocked them from. You've got 300 active user accounts and most of them like and purchase Raspberry Pi products and accessories. They also engage with the users on that Fediverse server for tips, tricks, and advice in their rPi adventures.
  • You've got an immoral minority, a very loud, and vitriolic vocal component of about 11 rabid bolshevik SJWs that first reported the rPi server for posting pictures of meat without a CW, and again because when they trolled a user over there they find themselves unceremoniously blocked by that user – as it should be.

Nothing pisses off a hater more than to be summarily dismissed, knowing that their bigotry and enmity will never again cloud the skies of those they have fixated their projections for their own self-loathing.

So next they begin to bully their own instance admins. A few outcomes are likely...

  • Admin says screw these diks. I'mma ban them.
  • Admin says STFU or find another server to join where you are free to hate other people.
  • Admin says, “I'm a spineless sissy wimp, the people of my instance have spoken, and I will defederate my Fediverse server instance from that other one that those 11 in the angry mob don't like, for not putting CWs on pictures of meat and daring to hire ex law enforcement officers.
  • Admin says, “Fuck the patriarchy! Prepare for defederation!” (This gizmo is a true chump).

The smart money is on the second scenario. A modicum of civility is in order here. Trolling, hate, doxing, and ad hominem are certainly against the AUP/ToS/CoC/Rules – whatever you call yours, and these self-loathing haters have absolutely broken the tenants of their social contact with you.

Sure, those types of behaviors do warrant a ban, but you're a seasoned Admin, having managed a lot of public forums over the years, and you know it's probably best to give them a warning in lieu of a ban for this first offense and avoid them engaging in the same type of fruitless campaign against the good users of your community Fediverse instance... Coz these kinds of entitled subversives live for that, and again, you know this from experience – there is nothing new here.

But there first option works too. You just don't know where those cockroaches will next come at you from. But just like what started this whole thing? You know you can just filter their voices out and be done with them.

The third option is probably the most disturbing, because that admin is an enabler and wants to be liked – at the expense of her own users. She will continue to appease these evil people until almost all of her users have moved their accounts to Fediverse instances that are vibrant, happy communities, and she will wonder whatever it was she could have done that was so wrong.

Now I like the sort of server administrator that is so immature and reactionary that he is just looking for a reason to pull the trigger – these are often, but not always, overwhelmingly of the teenage demographic. It really means very little to them when they disregard their userbases and pull the lever. They are in congruence with the haters hammering the report button and demanding that this instance defederates from the object of their bloodlust; they also relish their growing #fediblock list as a collection of trophies – for them, the Fediverse is sport, s blood sport, yet they don't comprehend that “In space, no one can hear you scream”

Eventually, they actually do find themselves in the vacuum of space, having completely defederated themselves from the Fediverse, save for a few instances of ascerbic, hateful bigots; all of the nice, upstanding citizenry of their userbase has long since migrated away.

These pathetic sort of sdmin types discover their personal echo chambers are nothing more than a few whispers here and there, with the memory of the ghosts that once made it a vibrant and engaging community – people from all walks of life, engaged in civil discourse....

So they close down the server, and get a job bagging groceries at the local market because their parents want them to finally move out.

The aftermath

But what about our naive little hater admin?

Eventually, the paint in her bedroom dried, and she was able to get out from the corner of self-imposed exile in her bedroom, get that job bagging groceries, growing into a fine adult, and contributing member of society.

She went for her MS in electrical engineering, got a job as a C-Level suit, married, and is now raising three children with her wife. Her future is bright. She grew up – that's what most kids eventually do. And she now commands a healthy modicum of decorum.

She's also her own patriarchy, but she takes turns filling the responsibility of that role with her wife, sometimes delegating that responsibility to their oldest child while they're working long hours, and he just got his driver's license so he can take his siblings to games and practices...

But he's still a little bit immature – kinda like she used to be. 🙂

whatever became of Raspberry Pi?

Why, what do you mean whatever happened? After all the evil haters removed themselves from federation, life simply went on as before. Sure. There were issues, mostly related to supply chain issues, but that only increased demand, and the good folks that brought us computers for under fifty bucks did their very best to keep prices down during those precarious times too.

And everybody still loves them. The good people on those Fediverse instances administered by stupid people? Well they all found other servers that weren't being run by assholes, or got really enlightened and deployed smallweb single user Fediverse instances with no regrets.

And that ex-cop they hired? Well that guy introduced a brand new line of FOSS based rPi packages and kits for residential customers, empowering homeowners and ranchers to setup easy turnkey surveillance networks to protect their own property, safeguard their families, all without having to be afraid of how evil deprecated legacy silos (like Google and Amazon) were themselves engaging in government sponsored surveillance of their own customers!

Everyone was happy, and we ate from bowls of porridge that weren't too hot, weren't too cold, but were just right.

And we all lived happily ever after...

Except for the bolsheviks – they're still hating themselves and projecting that hatred towards everyone else. But fuck 'em. They've painted themselves into a corner.

Epilog

Nope. That's it. Nothing else really to add to any of that. It's all just common sense.

Wait! I did forget something.

  • If you're wondering why you're seeing traces of pretty formatting, but instead it's not at all pretty, with paragraphs scrunched together and such – that probably means you're in s Mastodon server.

I might be tempted to say it sucks to be you, but that would be mean spirited, and if you're a #newcomer, you probably didn't know any better anyway. So you can just deal with it like all other Mastodon users have to when people format their articles in #Markdown, or try one of the other solutions below:

  • Create an account for yourself on pretty much any other kind of Fediverse server. Most all of them offer support for rendering in Markdown.
  • Feel free to unfollow me – that's what started this whole calamity and it started to exacerbate in the first place... When @Raspberry_Pi@raspberrypi.social kindly suggested that a known Internet troll “just chill” out a bit. Of course they blocked that twit – he was being a dik to other human beings (in violation of his own servers policies), and most folks can appreciate that they just don't have time for that nonsense from high schoolers, or “YouTube Personalities”, lolz.

brief list of Markdown enabled Fediverse servers

https://Btrf.ly

https://join.misskey.page/en-US/instances

https://JoinTheFedi.com

https://Soapbox.Pub

https://Mitra.Social

https://Friendi.ca

https://Quanta.Wiki

https://FediDB.org/software

https://WriteFreely.org

And much more!

impetus

I was compelled to publish this article in the Fediverse after reading the following article (because it got pretty much everything wrong), and also the buzzfeed interview article it linked to:

https://eiara.nz/posts/2022/Dec/09/a-case-study-on-raspberry-pis-incident-on-the-fediverse/

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/chrisstokelwalker/raspberry-pi-hired-ex-cop-mastodon-controversy