RE: https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/117473714865795844

Track #4 on the upcoming album. Support by pre-ordering:
🎵👉 https://neon.lukhash.com

The same way you know the rest of the data hasn’t been tampered with - you don’t. And when you find untrustworthy instances, you defederate from them.

I’m a fan of the second one. My thought is, of you trust a server enough to accept messages from it, then you should also trust it enough to let it scrape the page title, article image, etc. for you, too.

Without fail, if someone uses the phrase “violent protests,” they are lying. They don’t exist. Period.

Sometimes, when people are attacked by agents of the state, protesters defend themselves. They might throw stones, or kick tear gas canisters back at the cops, or shoot fireworks. They might even cobble together incendiaries like Molotov cocktails.

The violence belongs to the state and its suppression of protests, not the actual protest.

@aphyr Christmas is going to be amazing. Looking forward to it!

I can’t open that post since I’m not on Fosstodon, it redirects to the OP when not logged in. How did you get the post to Fosstodon?

I have my blog address (which goes to my home server) in my Mastodon profile, and every time I post on Masto, my server gets a request from every Mastodon site that federates with my instance - i.e. hundreds of requests. It’s no problem for my server, because my blog is a static site, but for anything that dynamically generates every single page impression (like worpress or joomla), it could be a problem. Caching settings might help, I suppose.

Truth is, though, I get far more traffic from vulnerability scanners and AI crawlers that don’t honour robots.txt (or aren’t yet listed).

#Spotted While Roaming in Aotearoa New Zealand:

A man wearing a full wetsuit, a bum bag*, a life vest and trainers, carrying a big bunch of parsley with a six pack of beer under his arm, is cheerfully striding down a sunny street.
Chatting animatedly to a bubbly friend wearing a death metal T-shirt, an orange skirt and pink Crocs.

A woman (80s?) is sitting on some steps in front of a veterinarian's.
Hugging and softly singing to an elderly brindle staffy.
This is love.

Two young humans (7 & 8?) are strutting down a shady street with two GIANT plastic swords slung over their shoulders.
Checking here and there for bad guys to defend the universe from.
Settling on smiting a light pole instead.
(Light pole looks suitably repentant.)

A woman (50s?) cycles up to a farm gate on a country walking track only for a big burly man jogging from the other direction (40s?) to open it for her.
Offering a charming bow when she thanks him.
She cycles off grinning.

A VERY enthusiastic small terrier (Jack Russell cross Energiser Bunny?) RACES AWAY from his human and into a field.
Then BACK TO HIS HUMAN.
Then away.
THEN BACK.
Then away.
He can go forever!

Any typos spotted in this post are proud to announce that their second Tiny Moments book: More Tiny Moments of Joy: Spotted While Roaming in Aotearoa New Zealand is available for pre-order today. If typos spotted, they'll be drinking a celebratory glass of wine out of their favourite writing mug.

(Continued Below)

“Violent protests” no they’re not. This is a lie. Every single fucking time, it’s a lie. Period, without exception. This is a heuristic I rely on.

The state has all the power. It has police with guns and armies with tanks. It has money and surveillance and legitimacy. When people turn out to protest with their bare bodies against the power of the state, they are exquisitely vulnerable. Agents of the state might beat them, handcuff them and kidnap them, spray them with high powered hoses, deploy chemical weapons like tear gas to torture them, or use increasingly exotic weapons involving sound or microwaves.

Or the state might just shoot them, or burn them, or drive over them with tanks.

There is nothing protesters can do that even remotely compares.

BONG, BONG, BONG, BONG, BONG, BONG, BONG

IMPORTANT: https://pyconf.org/ is a fake event, a scam.

Notes:

- Domain registered after CFP closed.

- Venue doesn't admit its existence: https://fortmason.org/events/

- AI gen headshots, and speakers who aren't, in 100% of the the companies my network can see into, employees at those companies and never have been. Those people don't exist.

A couple of the listed "sponsors'" corporate legal teams have already been advised and word is they're furious.

Avoid. But please share.

I shared a link from NPR Tiny Desk but there was no image preview or video embed. After investigating this I learned that when you do that, each instance picks up the link and individually retrieves the link preview nearly simultaneously. For gargantuan sites like YT or Reddit, this is a trivial amount of traffic and not a problem, but for smaller sites like NPR this results in a sort of botnet DDOS attack on the site’s servers. More here. Another example here . For that reason, NPR has blocked Fediverse servers like Mastodon.

I have experienced this on my personal server as well (DDOS), but at the time didn’t know why, exactly.

This isn’t the end of the world, but certainly is not great and hurts engagement with the content. Is there a solution for this? Perhaps using some sort of webtorrent service like PeerTube where they just fetch the information from another fediverse server instead of the source server? Maybe fetching embeds client-side? At least that would stagger the requests.