Earl Grey tea

I was making Earl Grey with the quantity needed for milk tea, so it came out too bitter. Just a flat teaspoon, then three or four minutes brewing time, is enough. I still add half a teaspoon of sugar. But I’m happy to get rid of the milk (anyway it’s always milk substitute in our case).

Mastodon

Is the fediverse about to get Fryed? (Or, “Why every toot is also a potential denial of service attack”) – Aral Balkan

” decentralisation begins at decentring yourself”

A good article, though it doesn’t touch on the fact that concentrating so much of Mastodon in the servers of Masto.host, which hosts Balkan’s (and this) instance, is also a danger to the decentralization of the Fediverse.

It also doesn’t mention the energy that all this distribution must require. This could be an issue with decentralization, as it is with blockchain technology (though to a much lesser extent).

While it is evident that part of the problem is a result of the way the protocols work and interact with servers, it doesn’t suggest a solution.

From the perspective of resource and energy usage, I have no doubt that the old methods of blogging + RSS news feed make more sense, though I tend to be more attentive to my Fediverse timeline than to my newsfeed subscriptions.

Exodus continues at Twitter as Elon Musk hints at possible bankruptcy | Twitter | The Guardian

“Messages seeking comment were left with Twitter, but it is unlikely someone will respond as the communications department has been laid off.”

Energy use of a home server vs paying for a VPS

A person in my time-line had tried to estimate the cost of running a Raspberry server from his home. It came out to something like €1.10 per month. Running a server from an old laptop, as I was doing till recently, must cost quite a bit more; maybe as much as the VPS I now pay for.

Since some hosting companies use renewable energy, maybe it makes greater sense to use one of those. But there too there is a calculation involved. For example, if the VPS server with the green energy is at a location that is geographically distant from oneself or one’s potential audience, is it more energy efficient to use such a server? Does it depend upon whether CDNs are employed by the hosting company?

At a certain level, without lots of research, the way the internet works and its environmental costs are still very opaque for most of us.

Kerala

Indian police investigating film that portrays Kerala as Islamic terrorism hub | India | The Guardian

There’s apparently zero evidence. But it’s not surprising that the film industry would seek to ride the wave of right-wing populism sweeping the country.

Freedom of speech

Was reading about what happened when Stephen Fry offended Poland, and it made me think that there’s an advantage to being a nobody – with few followers you can be yourself and say whatever you want, at least more so than when you are a celebrity figure.

“Telegram has launched the ability to buy and sell short recognizable @ usernames for personal accounts, public groups and channels.” I need to get rid of this centralized service, but a messaging platform, even more than a social networking service, depends upon obtaining a critical mass of people that use it. Some of my contacts don’t even have Telegram or, if they do, use it only in order to send messages. They can’t be depended upon to see mine.

Carbon Cola

At the office, I saw Avigail was back at her desk.

“You were on vacation – did you have a good time?”

“Sure, how else could it be – Thailand!”

“No idea. I’ve never been; For me it’s either Europe or India.”

“There were lots of Indians there in Thailand – they had some kind of a holiday I think.”

“That would be Diwali; but I didn’t know Thailand was popular with Indians.”

“Well it’s nearby for them after all.”

“That’s true.”

The “Muskopalypse”

Yesterday was the first time I thought that the Fediverse might actually become mainstream. I watched as Greta Thunberg came on board, and saw her follower count go up to around 15,000 within the space of a few hours. On the other hand, she has 5,000,000 followers on Twitter, so I realized that I should calm down. Numbers are hard. Will the sea rise 30 meters by the end of the century or 2 meters over the space of the next 5,000 years? Will the Twitter permafrost really melt and mastodon clones roam the earth? I’ll leave it to the experts. Anyway, in my excitement, I wrote the following.

I think we will all want to thank Elon Musk, whatever we think about him, for what he has accomplished.

Masses of people are finally beginning to turn their back on one of the big commercial social networks while simultaneously joining a non-commercial federated one. I really hope that Mastodon and ActivityPub can hold together through this crush of new users and not piss them off too much, because the world really does need a safe, viable protocol for social media connection, and it also needs social media to be interoperable – regardless of whether we prefer commercial or non-commercial variants.

If a critical mass join Mastodon, and they and are happy with it, three things may eventually happen.

First, it could bring a chain reaction, causing people to discover the other ActivityPub flavours that offer alternatives to Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, etc – and possibly new ones that compete with other commercial social media providers.

Second, when, as we see already beginning to happen, the European Union becomes invested in the Fediverse, it may begin to legislate for interoperability, forcing the commercial social networks to open their walled gardens and allowing, for example, people on Mastodon to follow people on Twitter or Facebook and for people on Twitter to follow people on Facebook or the fediverse, all without leaving their chosen social media provider.

Third, the same rules regarding the limits of “free speech” will be enforced across the Fediverse, requiring Fediverse instance operators to moderate content. This is a huge problem because operators of large instances do not have the means to employ workers to moderate content. As far as I know, the Fediverse lacks even the ability to conduct AI assisted moderation.

Small instances have less of a problem because they are easier to moderate. Governments may not even enforce their laws over small instances with few users. (If so, there’s the question of the break-off point between “small” and “large” – a few hundred users?, a few thousand?, a million? Twitter has over 200 million active users, by comparison with which the whole of Mastodon is tiny.)

In any case, the necessity to moderate and block content could have implications for both large and small instances.

First, moderation is reported to be difficult by the maintainers of Mastodon’s larger instances. As instances grow, and especially if they need to comply with state-imposed moderation rules, they would need to employ workers to moderate content. This cost would need to be covered – probably by user subscriptions, though possibly (cringe) by the introduction of ads.

Second, we could imagine a scenario similar to what has happened with email: large instances could block small instances by default. With email, the big email servers like Gmail routinely discriminate against small and independent email servers in order to prevent the proliferation of spam.

With the Fediverse, it could happen that large instances would eventually block small instances by default, due to the headache and expense of moderation.

The Fediverse is still taking its first baby steps. We have no idea how it will be as a teenager or as an adult.

What is Mastodon, the social network users are leaving Twitter for? Everything you need to know | Twitter | The Guardian

Fediverse

I am gradually picking up many of the connections I previously had, just because someone ends up boosting posts by one of them, here and there. As a result, my timeline is growing more interesting by the day.

My strategy of interacting very little, posting only sparingly, keeping my follows off-record and, in my bio, discouraging people from following, seems to be working quite well 🙂

I get that Mastohost (which is hosting my new instance) is a poor model for the Fediverse: too much concentration of instances on a single server. Personal instances, such as on Mastohost, is still much better than for everyone to join a few big instances, which then eventually go down, just as the mastodon.technology instance is about to do. The owner/developer of Mastohost has committed not to hosting more than 25% of all Mastodon instances. I think a better plan would be consider not the the total number of instances, but the total number of users. A quarter of all instances already sounds like a large amount, but if those instances are large, it could translate to the majority of users on the Fediverse. It’s also true that lowering the bar (of technical know-how and expense) is what will get more people to run their own instances, which is what the Fediverse needs. Whereas the administrators of large instances can be expected to have greater technical know-how.

The first preference should be to get individuals to run personal instances from home. But the second preference should be to encourage the creation of many small instances. A way to achieve that could be the model of small co-ops renting space on green VPSs. There would be sharing of ownership, administration, costs and maintenance, together with restriction to a handful of users. That way, there is not too great a concentration of instances on one server, and if an administrator quits, the instance can still continue.

Video

We download and stream a lot of video content, but personally I can never watch more than a couple of movies or TV shows per week. Beyond than that just feels like overload. Even if I’m bored I won’t watch more any more. I read, surf the web, listen to podcasts or listen to music. So I haven’t watched anything new in the last few days. I tried watching “The Worst Person in the World”, but it didn’t hold my interest. I watched the latest episode in “The House of Dragon”. But without great enthusiasm.

Music

I am still really enjoying SoundCloud. In Israel/Palestine it isn’t possible to pay for a SoundCloud subscription, which means that much of the mainstream content isn’t available, but, on the other hand, I noticed while in Portugal and Spain that it wasn’t possible to listen to my usual content without taking out a paid subsciption. So this works very well for me, because I practically never listen to mainstream western music, and I’m amazed by the almost infinite supply of free content. I would never be able to discover so much wonderful music without a service like SoundCloud. It’s like entering a secret world with musicians that few people have ever heard of.

Currently listening to the station of Kinan Azmeh, a Syrian musician. Beautiful tracks from musicians from the Middle East and around the world.

Books

I’m reading Ville Triste by Patrick Modiano. I’m reading in French on the Kobo. It’s helpful to be able to click on an unknown word and get the translation. Modiano’s books are fairly short, which also suits me, as I’m a slow reader (even in English). I love Modiano’s prose and the atmosphere that he is able to establish. This book departs a little from the kind of story that he usually tells, but the familiar elements are there. Did he deserve his Nobel? Sure, why not.

Links of the day

The stories that most interested me were:

The revelation of Liz Truss’s influences though I haven’t been able to verify the facts of that story.

Greenwashing a police state: the truth behind Egypt’s Cop27 masquerade

Although the venue is much less important than the success of the meeting.

Pesticide use around world almost doubles since 1990, report finds

It isn’t a pretty picture. Not getting better. The EU is not living up to its commitments to limit dangerous pesticides either.

Saudi Arabia sentences US citizen to 16 years over tweets critical of regime

When you take an average modern nation-state, which is already embarassed and touchy about the exposure of its dirty laundry (see under Assange) and you add to that an autocratic leader who, either for political expediency or due to severe psychological issues, is wary of the least opposition, you get a mixture that guarantees that virtually every citizen lives in fear of criticizing the regime, or maybe even thinking bad thoughts about it.

New fediverse instance

I decided to take the plunge and launch a new fediverse instance, using the services of mastohost.com. The new instance is at social.vikshepa.com/@hosh.

A few weeks/months ago and again now, I looked at practically all of the available fediverse flavours and tried to set up two or three of them. Each time I either failed or had to give up in the middle, whereas previously I had managed on my home server or shared hosting. Perhaps I’m getting old.

Among those that I looked at were Friendica – Hubzilla – Zap family; Mastodon and Pleroma, Epicyon and GnuSocial version 3 (which includes an Activity Pub protocol extension).

Some of those failures may have been caused by unfulfilled dependences in Kamatera’s server packages (such as missing PHP modules), or due to choosing the wrong web-server software (NGINX or Apache), or because the recommended installation involved something like Docker, which I didn’t want to use. Docker appears to be more resource hungry, which means renting a more expensive VPS.

With Pleroma, which is said to be easier to install than Mastodon, the instructions for OTP install currently fail for me at the point of downloading the Pleroma software package. Earlier this year there were problems in the team of developers, out of which a new fork appeared called Akkoma (see details). I considered trying to install that, but who knows whether it will last? Even its developer isn’t sure.

With Epicyon, the setup goes perfectly, but when trying to access the site, I got a 502 Bad Gateway error. This happened after two installation attempts.

So, despite my preference to go-it-alone, I eventually decided to try an easier way, and signed up with Mastohost.com, which automates the installation and setup in a very cool way and promises to maintain the instance afterwards. Which, at this stage, sounds wonderful to me. I bought their cheapest plan, which is currently $6/mo., so it’s only good for one instance, or maybe would suit a family or a small team. That package is smaller than the other managed Mastodon hosting that I was able to find. Joinmastodon.org lists a few options for managed mastodon hosting. Of those, there is a German web host that offers a €5 plan, but their website is German-only.

For now, this is an experiment. My social media use is likely to be light, which is another reason to choose Mastodon (or perhaps Pleroma). I want to be able to follow a few people and for the news stream to look like a microblog (whereas Friendica or Hubzilla’s posts are larger and do not flow as quickly). And I am not interested, this time, to put up long posts or media; these will be posted on my website. The one time that I might be interested in sending such posts directly on Mastodon is when I’m away from my computer and have access only to my phone, such as while traveling.

Although it has become the most popular alternative social media platform, I’m aware that there are many things to dislike about Mastodon, in comparison to other platforms. I’m told that its implementation of the Activity Pub protocol is quirky or individualistic, and it won’t talk to any other protocol. Its privacy settings are undeveloped in comparison to Zot. It lacks the nomadic and clonable features of Zot, and so forth. So adopting Mastodon is a bit of a compromise for the sake of convenience.

There are a few reasons for opting for a personal instance over using a public server. First, the whole meaning of the Fediverse is that it should be a conglomeration of separate instances talking to each other. Popular fediverse sites, with a large number of instances become silos in the same way as Twitter and Facebook, though they are non-commercial in nature.

Second, Fediverse sites last as long as their owners and administrators have the motivation or resources to continue them. In fact, most of the Fediverse sites on which I have been active, have eventually gone down, beginning with Laconi.ca / Identi.ca. When they do work, they don’t always work well. Disroot.org’s former hubzilla server seemed to be down as often as it was up. Its current Pleroma instance is not letting me follow more than my current two people. Having a personal instance promises greater control.

Third, I’m unhappy with public timelines. On Twitter or Facebook, there is no such thing as a public timeline, whereas every fediverse site has these. Most people would regard them as a feature: they are, after-all, a good discovery engine. However, a couple of times I’ve run afoul of public timelines through accidental posts. Once, when I was on Fosstodon, I had set up WordPress to automatically send updates to Mastodon. Then, when importing a bunch of old posts into WordPress, it sent a dozen old posts at once. As a result, I got accused of spamming, and taking undue advantage of the instance’s resources. In the absence of a public timeline, that sort of thing is less likely to happen. If it did, the posts would usually be seen first by followers, who could choose to block you or send a warning. Depending on the settings of remote instances, posts seen by followers may still end up federating to public timelines. Unfortunately, Mastodon is less privacy-aware than the Zot platforms, where privacy settings can be more finely tuned, though I do find, under “posting privacy”, an option that prevents distribution of posts to public timelines. I’ve also elected to opt-out of search engine indexing (though not all search-engine crawlers honor that).

I’m not a very social person, either digitally or in person; I suppose I lack the social graces, and sometimes feel embarrassed by my interactions. Embarrassment is not a quality of those who are “good” at social media. Many of these are prone to outbreaks of objectionable behavior, which oddly enough, seems to increase their popularity. Probably they are appreciated for their supposed authenticity.

By the way, regarding Mastohost, I was pleasantly surprised to see that its developer-owner and the data center it uses are European.