JMCE @jmce@maly.io

"Will Mastodon make any money?" scream the journalists, who have forgotten the joy of building sandcastles on the beach

Instagram: My life is a party.

Snapchat: My life is a quirky TV show.

Facebook: My life turned out great!

Twitter: We're all going to die.

Mastodon: Don't worry, while we are on a quirky, meandering path towards an inevitable apocalypse, we might as well enjoy the ride and show eachother some love in an unorthodox, yet irresistible manner, not in any way hindered by considerations of style, identity or consistency.

I just went around and did some basic nmap-ing on the most popular Mastodon instances, and there's some seriously sketchy stuff in there. Publicly reachable Postgres servers, tons of open internal HTTP ports, SSH with password login, multiple Mastodon instances that seem to be running on mail server VMs, …

I guess if you're just running a single-user instance for yourself, sure, but those are all 2000+ user instances.

Okay, now that a few friends-of have been notified, please help boost so folks who weren't able to get on maly.io and other free speech Masto instances before they hit capacity know that the awesome https://freehold.earth is now open. :D

Vague CoCs are a problem. For instance, freedesktop's:

"Other conduct which could reasonably be considered inappropriate"

Could mean literally anything. It's like the obsession with the term "reasonable" in English law. It gives very wide latitude for interpretation by an authoritarian figure.

Brilliant <thing on other network we don't talk about> by @Mudge:

https://twitter.com/dotmudge/status/850385568148140033

"This is a brilliant tactic. There are so many others like this because the AV community keeps thinking this is a one-move game... Kudos!"

That definition of the strategy of the AV community is absolutely perfect. Depth: zero.

> People often don't realize how important it was to OSS that it was preceded by decades of easy access to programming tools and resources meant for absolute beginners.

> OSS needs FPGAs, and FPGAs need what programming had back in the 1980s: an on-ramp.

Man this looks really cool. Am excite. https://www.blinklight.io/blog/2017-03-31/

You know instance admins can read your direct messages in the fediverse? Twitter and Facebook also can - and sometimes do - read your private messages, and they have infrastructure to comply with law enforcement requests. I'd love to see some end-to-end encryption built into Mastodon clients.

@sonya @bob If you make unprofessional writing "ok" when its an opinion piece, all you're going to do is make all journalism turn into opinion pieces.

If you own a Tizen powered hardware (Samsung), consider removing it from the Internet and your network. It’s incredibly insecure: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/samsung-tizen-operating-system-bugs-vulnerabilities #security #infosec

Hey, all, now that maly.io is closed to new accounts for the time being, I need a similarly free-speech-oriented Mastodon instance to recommend to friends and colleagues.

Doesn't need to be particularly Anglophone-centric, but should have an English-speaking admin in case of issues.

I'm pretty pissed off. I just read up on the software that goes with my blood glucose monitor, and it turns out the company (and their partners) will have access to all my data. That's pretty damn intimate. When I eat and how much, when I sleep, how often I inject or check my blood sugar levels. And there's no way around that. And I get the feeling I also have to switch back to windows. :-(

@maiyannah I immediately left mastodon.social when I became aware of their censorship/defederation practice.

However, their ability to do so protects the network and protocol from pressure to silence users/groups for the protection of those who desperately want to live in that kind of bubble. We got Twitter/FB censorship because these people had to globally censor in order to have an environment they felt safe in.

Freedom to associate works both ways.

I am originating a new usage of the ✅. I hope it catches on, because in a sense it's mostly used this way now.

As portability is currently quite limited, the checkmark now indicates that I am actively using that instance, and that my other nonchecked instance identities are hibernating.