anecdote (in agreement) about keeping out fascists
Sensitive content
A couple of years ago, I was brought in as a moderator to help de-fascist a community that had practically turned into 4chan, in one of the most fundamentally-abuse-attracting and difficult-to-moderate categories of community (privacy/security-related).
The policy was set as "no fascists, no alt-right, nothing that looks like it" and people would either get banned immediately (if clearly intentionally abusive) or get a warning otherwise that they were expected to take seriously (doubling down would be grounds for a ban). Every ban was permanent but revocable if someone showed genuine reflection and commitment to do better - this sometimes took minutes, sometimes months or even longer, sometimes never.
Randos complained for months. "You just call everyone a nazi", "how do you define fascist then", "you're being unreasonable", "the alt right aren't fascists", and so on, and so forth. Without exception, the ones complaining about it the most were the ones who already had a track prior record of being an asshole in different ways. A lot of the bans were the result of brigading attempts from, well, fascists who objected to being pushed out, pretending to be 'new users' and mysteriously immediately knowing about previous bans that happened before they joined.
It took a while, but they eventually gave up. The result was a pleasant community to be in, unusually pleasant for a privacy/security community. I haven't been around there for quite a while now, but my understanding is that it's still a nice place to this day.
"No fascists allowed" works, even under the worst conditions, and the "no, seriously, this is not up for debate, the moderator decides" is a critical component of making it work.
Gestern ein bisschen spontan den Umzug von Gmail zu @Tutanota vollzogen. Abgesehen von den Herzschlagmomenten beim Umzug der Domain samt DNS-Einstellungen, war das initial ganz erfolgreich. Nicht ganz so geschmeidig ist der Workflow - Tuta reagiert an allen Ecken und Enden behäbiger, der Spam-Filter sortiert gerne echte Mails aus, aber belässt massig Spam im Posteingang. Und auch die Farbgebung ist nicht ganz meine…
Aber vielleicht gewöhnt man sich aneinander und alles wird gut 🌈☀️
I had a cheeky comment prepared for today, saying that you shouldn't rely on Cloudflare if you can afford it, and that you don't truly self-host when you use it, but I could not post it because one of the services I don't self-host —my Mastodon instance— depends on #Cloudflare, too. 😅
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každou návštevou školy mám pocit že som bližšie k cieľu.. sj/l za 2, 2, 3 a docielil som obrovský progres v rámci praxe... aj tak mám iba preto dobré známky lebo ma má slovenčinárka rada
@fireborn all services do something wrong or something right. Some are more accessible than others. But that's what makes for compitition to some degree. Just depends on the poison you decide to pick, I guess.
@fireborn Leaving to where? I ditched Spotify for Tidal, but Tidal is so much worse; I'm sorry, I went back. Spotify's GUI, especially on the phone, also with my vision rest, is the nicest, imo. I don't have an Apple device; otherwise, I'd probably be using Apple Music, but I can't get it to run on my Windows PC either and won't have a half mess just to figure out how I eventually could (MS Store version doesn't work). Nothing much left. Qobuz is basically Tidal, maybe a bit more stable, but they all have no features, too. I didn't care about crossfade when I was at Tidal, but now I'm back on Spotify, I wouldn't want it off; it's just nice.
And don't get me wrong, I totally get the problem here, but I'm sick of taking drawbacks and weird flaws, in terms of accessibility or elsewhere, just to enjoy my music. Call me egoistic, but then I don't care that much apparently.
@fireborn Lol, I can't even find it in the MS Store. When I clicked install back then, it basically said something like it couldn't run on my device for whatever reason I can't remember. I know several people using it on Windows; I'd actually try it if I could. Maybe the UI blows me away, who knows.
I went to the Store app and it didn't show it, I found it on the website though used the isntaller and: The version of Windows on your PC doesn't meet the minimum requirements for this product. grouping Yeah no you won't get me to 11 that fast.
@fireborn Sad, don't really have any other comment about this. Frustrating that apps already begin requiring Win 11. But ok, it's a totally other discussion, then it's sadly even more out of scope for me.
@fireborn Unless it won't run on your computer and you're one of the people who actually use Android. Yes yes there is also an Apple Music app for Android, I have it, and you'll say this is a generic reason but I simply dislike its design. Also there is no Pixel Watch app, kinda shooting myself with it. But yes, if you're an iPhone user, heck go for it. I'm all for paying the artists more and I've heard the UI is actually nice so...
@fireborn I can say, though, that I personally dislike what Spotify does recently too, though. Mainly adding stupid features like DMs no one wants and throwing AI-generated garbage around. I'd also not pay the full price; I use a subscription split service to split the subscription, that's not worth it. I wouldn't defend Spotify at this point, but I feel like bashing it generally isn't always valid either.
@FreakyFwoof Missing that Mastodon outage was deliberate: as I am on the TweeseCake instance, I avoided Mastodon for a while, until I decided to test it with Mona just now.
On occasion, I feel some trepidation about no longer putting Cloudflare in front of most of my services for protection. Then today happens and it all just goes away.
I guess the internet needs another Cloudflare so Cloudflare has somewhere to host its status page.
Re Last Boost: from @miki: Its good to hear perspective from the other side of the coin. We all ingest, and a lot of us do (myself included) the complaining, but perspective also should include all angles of a situation, and he covered the less exposed and talked about side quite well. While I am not a CF user myself, unfortunately for the reasons of downtime being magnified, and my not wishing to be swept up in that, it does no less validate the points he made and touched on. The DDOS problem is so very very real, and my 40Gbps DDOS protection on a relatively low-traffic server I operate has actually not been enough on ocasion.
I am thrilled to share the news that I joined @Mastodon's leadership team as Community Director alongside @mellifluousbox, our new Executive Director, and @renchap, our Technical Director.
Cloudflare seems to be having some kind of oopsie (it's probably DNS. It's always DNS) right now.
When you click on the link on their error page, it takes you to a page that says “Do you have a website? Anybody that runs a website should be on the Cloudflare network.”
Uh, read the room, #cloudflare. When people are trying to find out why your product has shit the bed, that's not really the time to make with the marketing copy about how they really really should be using it.
Adwaita apps are calm, focused, consistent. Tasks can often be done offline. Even badges for unread notifications are tinted blue and not red.
Non core apps are maintained by indie developers scratching their own itch. With GNOME Circle, a community of more experienced people help review and polish them.
GNOME is the village of Gauls peacefully resisting the Big Tech Empire with its sole existence.
I went to check if cloudflare was down so I went to downdetector.com, but that site uses a clooudflare-based CAPTCHA that wouldn't load, answering my question
I can't believe I have to say this once again, but not using AWS or Cloudflare doesn't mean your service won't go down as often.
It's just that nobody cares if the website of some little shoe manufacturer in Wyoming goes down, but everybody cares if all the websites go down *at once*. This is true even if, statistically speaking, CF / AWS go down less often than some little server located in a basement.
The old internet wasn't more resilient, your downtime on the old internet was just less corelated with everybody else's downtime, which made it less visible, and hence psychologically less of a problem.
Without CF (or somebody like them), there's no freedom of speech on the internet. If you say the wrong thing, your critics can just DeDoS you until you go away, and there's very little you can do about it. If you aren't rich enough to afford DeDoS protection, you have to be very careful when working against people who have more money than you do. This was a somewhat common occurrence back in the day, and the emergence of big social on one hand and CF on the other eliminated that problem entirely.
We should be really thankful for everything CF has done for the internet. Not every private company is as evil as people want you to think.
true and not true. CF will often allow websites to refuse access if they detect you're on a VPN, as its uniquely aware of many VPN commercial endpoints. So ironically if you're trying to escape sensorship through the use of a VPN CLoudflare may prevent access for that same reason. Its not as clear cut as you make it out to be
90+% of people who need their traffic to be anonymous are... exactly who you eexpect them to be. It's a shame that this affects everybody else in the way it does, but there's not much we can do about it.
Unless we want the internet to drown in ransom demands and Viagra ads (remember those?), that is.
well I'm in a jurisdiction where the web is getting more restricted and geoblocked, at the moment due to online safety act. so frankly no, bring back the early 2000s at this point.
Thank you. There are some people right now who clearly cannot see this from any other angle but, "oh yeah using Cloudflare is the issue," "using AWS is the issue," "using it sucks," etc.
Besides that, CF gives our server a certain level of protection. Sure, if someone is really determined, a free Cloudflare plan won’t stop them, but it will stop plenty of script kiddies — and in most cases that’s honestly enough. In my monthly CF report I see information about more than half a thousand attacks they managed to block. Combined with regular backups, it makes me much less worried that I’ll suddenly have to bring a broken server back to life, especially since server administration isn’t my day-to-day job. Setting everything up on your own teaches you a lot and can be fun, but only if you actually have the time for it.
@midzi Which is honestly why most people are much better off with a SaaS, even if they're technically competent and perfectly capable of managing their own server.
I know why this isn't the right approach for you (storage space, a different point on the time vs. money tradeoff than most commercial organizations), but that's an exception that proves the rule.
When I read downdetector and Cloudflare's own status page went down due to the CF outage my mind immediately went to this youtube.com/watch?v=1KEHSOPSvh…
@matt For now, Nearly Free Speech, because at least they allow NSFW writing, so I can eventually put my Disability erotica on there, but am fully open to suggestions. Their dashboard is simple enough and even though I do everything via SFTP and Github actions, still, I am always on the hunt for other suggestions. I use Eleventy as a static site generator.
Parts of the Réseau express métropolitain (REM) network are down on Tuesday morning after a truck struck a viaduct near the Bois-Franc station in Montreal.
Sven Slootweg 🔜 eth0 ("still kinky and horny anyway")
in reply to Piper Thunstrom • • •Sensitive content
A couple of years ago, I was brought in as a moderator to help de-fascist a community that had practically turned into 4chan, in one of the most fundamentally-abuse-attracting and difficult-to-moderate categories of community (privacy/security-related).
The policy was set as "no fascists, no alt-right, nothing that looks like it" and people would either get banned immediately (if clearly intentionally abusive) or get a warning otherwise that they were expected to take seriously (doubling down would be grounds for a ban). Every ban was permanent but revocable if someone showed genuine reflection and commitment to do better - this sometimes took minutes, sometimes months or even longer, sometimes never.
Randos complained for months. "You just call everyone a nazi", "how do you define fascist then", "you're being unreasonable", "the alt right aren't fascists", and so on, and so forth. Without exception, the ones complaining about it the most were the ones who already had a track prior record of being an asshole in different ways. A lot of the bans were the result of brigading attempts from, well, fascists who objected to being pushed out, pretending to be 'new users' and mysteriously immediately knowing about previous bans that happened before they joined.
It took a while, but they eventually gave up. The result was a pleasant community to be in, unusually pleasant for a privacy/security community. I haven't been around there for quite a while now, but my understanding is that it's still a nice place to this day.
"No fascists allowed" works, even under the worst conditions, and the "no, seriously, this is not up for debate, the moderator decides" is a critical component of making it work.