Technology

Principles. That the whole internet and all of the freedom and diversity it can harbour was being monopolised by big giant corporations that had no interest in embracing an open web. Instead, they were convincing the world, especially those growing up in that/this era that the internet had to be constrained to the few walled gardens of big platforms.

These principles were as obvious and relevant then as they are now. Unfortunately convenience is a helluva drug. And, in the "Google" era of the internet (~2005-2020 ?), there was a certain naive optimism about big-tech and the internet, which no doubt lulled us in by its being "free".

In reality, we all really thought that good and useful world-changing stuff was just going to be made for us for free. That the internet was going to inexorably make the world a better place. It was dumb and naive IMO and marks very well the failings of the Millennial generation (to which I belong FWIW). Unfortunately, it's a lesson we had to learn the hardway. There were probably only a handful of people in the world that understood what the new industry was actually doing and was actually about and that had the philosophical will and ability to think it through and communicate to the masses what the choices we were actually making.

I don't think the fediverse necessarily needs to be replaced. We still have, afterall, Twitter going hard and strong after nearly 20 years! THe fediverse may very well go strong for many years to come, and that'd be a good thing ... it's nice!!

In an ideal world ... what would replace this? IMO, technology that basically gives every person a secure home on the internet in the same way that (most of us) can have a secure home in real life. Control, ownership and privacy over what you consume and publish and how. That technology would need to involve a number of things on a number of levels, but I'd bet it's quite viable today, it just needs buy-in and people to have the time and resources to build it.

Up and down votes are federated with your username, along with posts and comments (obviously).

Clicking on links, favourites, email address (if you put one in when signing up), password and IP address are all only on your local instance.

Basically, unless another server needs to know about it for federation to work, it's going to be local to the instance you're using.

Yes, but the title makes it sound like it was because he was running an anarchist Mastodon instance. That's not why, he just happened to be doing a backup when he was raided, the backup was unencrypted, and they seized it. Has nothing to do with him running an anarchist instance from what I can tell.

tldr: yes

The raid was part of an investigation into a local protest.

Protests are illegal? Since when?

https://wisevoter.com/country-rankings/non-extradition-countries/

plenty of places w/ no extradition 🤷‍♀️

The only instance that knows your IP and has your hashed password is the one you signed up on

Yeah, what the fuck are you supposed to do? Ask the FBI to please come back later?

It's a good reminder for folks with concerns to not say anything on a platform that isn't end-to-end encrypted that you don't want folks finding out about, to not use an email you don't want associated with yourself, and to use some sort.of VPN or Tor if you need to hide your IP address.

And if course use unique passwords but I would really hope people do that already.

Not really? If you're trying to debug something, or if you're gearing up for an upgrade (like the Mastodon upgrade this week that's giving a lot of admins grief) it's plausible to have one of your backups locally to mess around with. As an example of this principle, I run Part-DB-server to manage my workshop inventory. For various reasons I migrated from a hosted MySQL database to a local SQLite database, and I'm in the process of moving back to the MySQL database. To facilitate this I have a copy of the SQLite database that, as needed, I run SELECTs on to backfill details on entries. I have a local copy of that database on my laptop, in other words.

It's also plausible that the kolektiva.social admin was mocking up a clone of the service on their laptop to test something.

Without more data (gentlebeings, start your FOIA requests) I'm not sure that it's a good idea to speculate. We might learn something that we can use later.

Unfortunately, at the time of the raid, our admin was troubleshooting an issue and working with a backup copy of the Kolektiva.social database. This backup, dated from the first week of May 2023, was in an unencrypted state when the raid occurred and it was seized, along with everything else.

Oh the FBI just happened to visit when they unencrypted the database? How convenient!

They stopped teaching about computers. I tutored high schoolers about 10 years ago and they didn't know how to use computers fluently. It moved to the realm of expecting parents to teach to their kids along with taxes and career planning.

Speaking of which, I grew up in the 90s pre Internet, and started using the Internet in middle school. Definitely never got any official Internet safety lessons. Maybe I was a little too early? Idk. But by the time I was 30 schools were not teaching this at least from what I saw

Yeah pretty much. As soon as facebook broke the ice on "never use your real name on the internet" it was over. Now we have entire generations that were introduced to the internet as one that was ruled by social media sites. They were never even taught the same online safety stuff that we grew up with.

For real. The goal is to not say anything online that you'd regret coming out to public in a worst case scenario. Also, account switching every few months is a good habit as well.