There's currently an incident involving some kind of Japanese skids who call themselves the "Kuroneko" organization.
They seem to be attempting to commit DDoS attacks on Misskey servers, constantly creating new accounts on compromised instances and spamming advertisements for their hacking services.
Admins who are federating with these compromised servers, while they might not get compromised themselves, may be affected by the sheer amount of traffic volume from their spam.
Admins are advised to #fediblock or temporarily stop sending requests to affected servers for now, if they don't want to get secondhand DoS'd
IMO I never expected them to be Japanese out of all things, kinda funny. They also host VOICEROID and VOICEVOX TTS bots on their Discord apparently. Kinda a weird flex I guess.
Reflections on v4.2.0 & its Mastodon's trajectory.
v4.2.0 offers a notable improvement & enticing features for users, there's another facet that warrants discussion.
Operating large federated instances carries its own set of distinct challenges. There remain pressing concerns for #Mastoadmins & server administrators alike that seem to be lingering without clear solutions on the horizon.
The oversight of these issues by #mastodon will inevitably influence decisions I need to make.
🚀 The Mastodon Auto-installer script has just been UPDATED! 🚀
Gone are the days of modifying code in the script. It's now fully interactive! 🎊 Just follow the server prompts during script execution, & you're all set.
PLUS, for an even smoother experience, we now have ONE-COMMAND installs! 🎉
But there's more... A GUI installation wizard might be on the horizon! Stay tuned. 🔮
I understand that people have the right to curate what they want to see, but in my opinion, that's why individual users can ban users and even whole instances as they wish.
🤷🏻♂️doesn't seem very "open" to me, if YOU choose who other users can interact with. That's just #Twitter, except Dan, the weird guy down the street, owns the site and not a billionaire.
Sure, don't let all the rich fucks tell you what you can and can't say. Don't let them tell you who you can and cannot interact with. But don't let Dan do it either. It makes no sense.
@BeAware any kind of social media suffers of 3 basic forms or rubbish hitting our timeline: (1) the abuse of the unsolicited direct message, (2) the abuse of the # hashtags, and (3) unsolicited adds (which in a way is platform centrally controlled version of the first form).
Hate and harassment come also in one of the same forms described above.
Without any moderation, your timeline could be polluted to the point of rendering it unusable and unbearable.
#Moderation (regardless of the mechanism) is a way of 'suppressing' some content, which immediately triggers different views about what should be moderated and what not.
There are very different approaches to moderation in the #Fediverse, from none or very little to very extreme and preemptive.
The fact that the apps are #OpenSource and run by individuals gives these individuals the power to define those policies, I don't think we can do much about that, and I don't think is wrong either as it creates some space for flexibility and diversity.
Of all the #MastoAdmin and moderators, the most important to us are the ones on the instance in which we 'live', because those are the ones who filter what we can see and the ones that would try to 'moderate us' and eventually suspend our account... all the others, are lesser relevant as if they don't want to read us, it is their loss... up to them.
There are a lot of sensible #MastoAdmins out there, so there is a bit of searching and asking around... or even better, go with someone who is an actual offline friend of us... that will improve a lot our experience.
I know both of us have taken the most extreme position, which is to run our own instances so we don't need to deal with this matter, but that may not be for everyone, so that is why I made the long-winded recommendation.
🐻 @bearcam: videos from Katmai National Park in Alaska, frequently featuring bears
🐠 @TropicalReefAquarium: a view from inside of a tropical reef aquarium in Long Beach, California
#Facebook#Meta isn't planning to open up #ActivityPub federation for #threads anytime soon, IMHO. It was just a marketing bluff to get that sweet ad money from advertisers who need a new place to spend their money now that #Twitter goes down the drain. That's why they created shadow accounts for Instagram users, so they can claim 100M users in just a few days. And you can only delete your threads account by deleting your complete Insta profile. Weirdest opt-out ever :)
So far we have no evidence of Meta doing or even planning to ever implement #ActivityPub, it is all hear say even when it comes from their own mouths, as no clear business case for it exists.
Even if they did it, they will be an instance with 1.5 ~ 2 billion users... how long would you guess it would take for some extremists from #Meta to start annoying the folks in the #Fediverse and these in turn filing complains with their #MastoAdmins?... there will be thousands of complains within minutes... so the admins would feel compelled to defederate Meta...
And that will be the end of the drama.
The only people who will remain federated with Meta will be people like you and I, who run their own instances and may not have a problem with dealing with some potential anti-social folks annoying us... an occasional add or a few crypto bros... but even us will defederate from Meta if our timelines become unbearable.
Done!
Was delayed by 20min by an unexpected guest bringing gifts! It took me a few minutes to find the recommended settings that needed to be added to nginx to harden the proxy service there. Otherwise, was easy as always. Updated apt packages at the same time. My PG database backup is now 330MB as opposed to 100MB when I started back in March. Increasing by about 2MB per day. The REDIS backup is only 16MB.
My upgrade procedure is in the attached image. #selfhost#MastoAdmins#upgrade#v4.1.4
@cosmality#MastoAdmins can mass search and block #thegx#spam accounts all at once to all of their server users easily by going to Preferences> Moderations> Accounts, and doing a search.
They pop up so often, I have the direct link to search bookmarked on my browser's favorite bar.
I wonder if some internet sleuths could find where the bot's source code is at; that way, the bot and it's owner can be reported to the company hosting the source code.
Yesterday, there was news that the kid that was responsible for this huge wave of spam had been arrested and that the spam should stop because of that.
Not sure if that's the case or not, or if this is some other wave of spam that's happening. I've already reported and/or blocked 100+ accounts as of a few minutes ago and I've only been awake since 5am EST.