Sean "Diggity" O'Brien @diggity@mastodon.social

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To put into perspective what is happening, here is 6 month of history of the processing required to run mastodon.social:

It is both its strength and weakness that the protocol designers *did not* imbue any of the vocabulary with any predefined meaning. There's an Accept activity. What does it mean? What can it be applied to? Up to you, depending on your use case.

Some people hate that because there's not enough guidance. I appreciate it because Mastodon, PeerTube, Pixelfed, Plume and what not can emerge from it with consensus on common uses, but also a superset of unique features.

So, my #BGP #tutorial went pretty well! The students were _super_ excited about it, and got to do a lot of things.

They established peering with each other, announced networks, did some route hijacks, some filtering, and used some communities.

Here's a screenshot of the interactive part of the tutorial, from one of the attendees.

#teaching #networking

"The plunge in Facebook’s share price puts the social network on track to rack up the biggest ever one-day drop in a company’s market value.... the Silicon Valley company revealed that 3 million users in Europe have abandoned the social network since the Observer revealed the Cambridge Analytica breach"

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/26/facebook-market-cap-falls-109bn-dollars-after-growth-shock

“If Internet is meant for everyone, so is Tor.”
— “Tor is for everyone”, an article by the non-profit Nos Oignons.
https://nos-oignons.net/Actualit%C3%A9s/20180716_tor_est_pour_tout_le_monde/index.en.html

our Sean O'Brien on Facebook and privacy-respecting replacement @Mastodon, with an interview with @Gargron:
https://boingboing.net/2018/07/18/platform-independence.html

our @diggity on GDPR: "Warning screens and verbose agreements often become software malpractice: they not only mask the poison coursing through the system, they sedate the user into a click-through coma." #privacy #gdpr https://boingboing.net/2018/05/25/gdpr-dont-forget-to-bring-a.html

@guizzy @lain I'm really pretty tired of this "Pleroma/GNU Social/SomethingElse is Nazi software/space" bullshit.

I had a StatusNet account until Evan killed identi.ca years ago; a shit-ton of great people I talk with here every day have accounts on Pleroma or GNU Social. Some are their developers.

#Mastodon benefited handsomely from there being a large community of dedicated people in Fediverse before Mastodon was a thing. Let's acknowledge that and stop being so condescending.

That's not a hit on Diaspora, which moved forward with their protocol because a lot of work had gone into it, but there's a lot of FUD that's gone around that "well Diaspora couldn't use ActivityPub because it's not Facebook-like". I have yet to see anything in Diaspora or anything else facebook-like that couldn't be handled by the AP protocol.

Nothing about ActivityPub is specifically "twitter-like". In fact the protocol itself, if anything, is way more facebook-like than twitter-like (and largely derives from the facebook-like pump.io). It just so happens that the largest implementors are Twitter-like. But that's not reflective of any protocol restriction. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16836027

We also designed the thing *so Diaspora could adopt it*, even though that didn't happen.

Boingboing and Wired both featured the What is Mastodon video today.

https://boingboing.net/2018/04/13/geert-lovink.html

I am now selfhosting @nextcloud at home. Have to say it feels good being in control of my data.

Shout out to ubos.net and duckdns.org for making it easy to securely deploy with letsencrypt.

#nextcloud

Confession: I always read FLOSS in my head as "Free and lossless open source software"

Thank you mastodon for being open source. For not having annoying tracking, or advertising. Thank you Ostatus and GNUsocial for providing an open protocol and bootstrapping a network around it. Thank you other software in the federation for doing what you do. And the people behind it all: thank you for being you.

I realize it's almost 1AM already.
I realize I have to work tomorrow.
I realize my bosses anger still awaits me.
I realize I still have to make my #DailySketchChallenge