cstine @ cstine @lemmy.uncomfortable.business

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2 yr. ago

Yeah in that case I'd agree; if you're on a giant public server that anyone can sign up to, I'm not sure there's any particular value to be found in defederating anyone, other than places with uh, questionable content.

I think that defederation is the middle ground.

One extreme is The Algorithm tells you who you're going to talk to, and shoves junk at you nonstop, and the other is that you have to just accept and filter through whatever gets posted with no filtering at all.

Defederation puts the control back in the hands of, if not the users, then at least the administrators and mods of a community; if you can control who can see your content, and what posts you see then and only then do you own the platform instead of being a faceless number that's only there to be shoved into a dashboard to calculate your revenue value.

A lot of it is people wanting to avoid another Eternal September .

If you have a community you've built, and like, a flood of people who don't understand the culture and behavioral expectations swarming in can be viewed as, frankly, an unwanted invasion.

I also think if this was some new startup (say, Bluesky) instead of Meta, there'd be a different tune, but that's because a good portion of the people who run the communities and invest their time and money into building the community they want were burned by the aggressive enshittification that Meta is basically synonymous with at this point.

TLDR: this has happened before, and it's absolutely destroyed communities just due to the sheer volume of people who don't understand how to behave swarming in and drowning out everyone who the community originally belonged to.

That's not really the right approach on OCI, unfortunately: if you just flush the rules you also break a lot of their management plane.

You'd want to modify the /etc/iptables/rules.v4 and rules.v6 files to add any rules you want to load on boot (and, of course, if you just flush the rules without saving them, then it won't persist and a reboot will break things, again).

It's an arguable benefit: I'm a fan of having the security policies AND iptables sitting between me and doing something stupid, but I also spent most of the last decade dealing with literally thousands and thousands of compromised hosts that just whoopsie oopsed redis/jenkins/their database/a ftp service in a publicly accessible state, got hacked, then had the customer come crying to us asking why we didn't keep them from blowing their foot off - which, basically, is what the OCI defaults do.

As a product of American eduation, I can say resolutely that no, that was absolutely not taught.

Of course, this is partially because American education sucks and partially because we never HAD common land here: everything was privately owned, after it was stolen from the people who already lived here, and then most of it had people who had no say in the matter enslaved to work on it for the people who stole the land.

Of course, this is ALSO not really taught, because it'd make people feel sad and make the US look kinda bad, so it's always talked about but you get like, a week of coverage on both subjects, at most.

I'm paying Google for their enterprise gSuite which is still "unlimited", and using rclone's encrypted drive target to back up everything. Have a couple of scripts that make tarballs of each service's files, and do a full backup daily.

It's probably excessive, but nobody was ever mad about the fact they had too many backups if they needed them, so whatever.

For anyone who doesn't know what 'registering for DMCA notification' means, you're after https://www.copyright.gov/dmca-directory/

That said, there's no particular requirement that a DMCA notice be sent to you even if you have a registered agent and some reporters will send it to the abuse contact for the IP netblock you're hosted on regardless of registration, so you may want to make sure you understand what steps your provider may or may not take when they get a DMCA notice before you actually get a notice.

One other option is the "Always Free" tier on Oracle Cloud. You get some potato EPYC instances and some Altera ARM ones that are quite nice.

There are people who have issues with their accounts getting banned with no recourse, but I've used OCI free for over a year with no issues (and run a Mastodon instance on some of the ARM stuff), and know a good number of people who have various services running on it with no issue long-term, so YMMV.

The price is right, though, and you should keep current backups regardless.

Funny, I was just having that discussion with someone.

I think the problem is all these platforms think the platform is the value and not the content made by the users.

And of course, since they have the best platform, it'd be inconceivable that anyone would ever leave because they're the best.

Twitter, Reddit, Youtube, and Twitch are all doing exactly the 'value is the platform' while taking a massive shit on the creators and users that made the platform have any value in the first place, then acting confused why people are angry about how they're behaving.

No actual human gives a crap about the platform: nobody goes to these sites to go to the site, they go there for the content from someone they like.