Admin and moderator of a small Mastodon instance. For anything related to that or the operations of the instance, please contact @theadmin instead of this account.
Don't mind if my own posts are searchable on https://tootfinder.ch, but my views are not representative of others.
Unfortunately the only people that can close abandoned instances are the owners who abandoned them.
All anyone else can do is block and/or defederate them. Newer Mastodon versions will automatically close sign ups if there is no moderator activity for more than a few days, but that won’t stop instances which haven’t been updated to the newer version.
In many ways it’s kind of limiting, it’s an option which cuts everything (defederate them) or do nothing except block individual accounts which is something you’ll never win when the spammers can make more that easily.
Just thought about it and you can silence those instances, but there’s likely to be other moderation problems when they are abandoned so it’s simpler to just defederate them
@Drspawndisaster @stux I think you can probably add Amazon to that list. With how big they have gotten now, a lot of other online stores have failed as a business before they were started.
And then there is AWS, but that is technically ran separately even though the owners are basically the same
As someone who has experience firsthand with having their own Mastodon instance, the reason why most smaller servers do not have open sign up is because it brings a lot of extra moderation problems because you get spammers try to sign up.
There are some small servers which *do* have open sign up, and I personally kind of wish they didn't because a lot of them have become targets for the spammers to sign up.
An example of one of these still runs a Mastodon version from October 2023 and is basically abandoned at this point, which is kind of ridiculous because someone somewhere either is/eventually will have to pay for the hosting of those abandoned instances, because it turns out servers are not free to run after all.
If anyone wants suggestions for encrypted messaging, there is always stuff like Signal, Matrix or XMPP.
Just leaving some options here on the off-chance people have been sending private messages on the Fediverse
Admittedly I used to run the Mastodon instance sending this message through Cloudflare, but then I one day thought that they have far too much internet traffic about everyone already and switched to bunny.net to reduce that ever so slightly.
All this has done is convince me that I was right to do that.
It still isn't perfect because how I configured it basically means bunny.net effectively MitM nearly everything instead, but I would rather give a company in Slovenia my data than a US company which has something approaching some sort of weird monopoly at this point.
So, Cloudflare analyzed passwords people are using to log in to sites they protect and discovered lots of re-use.
Let me put the important words in uppercase.
So, CLOUDFLARE ANALYZED PASSWORDS PEOPLE ARE USING to LOG IN to sites THEY PROTECT and DISCOVERED lots of re-use.
[Edit with H/T: https://benjojo.co.uk/u/benjojo/h/cR4dJWj3KZltPv3rqX]
https://blog.cloudflare.com/password-reuse-rampant-half-user-logins-compromised/
@SwiftOnSecurity This post has *not* been sponsored by NordVPN.
Just calling them out because they are one of the worst for sponsoring people on YouTube and encouraging them to do anything for affiliate revenue
Great, just what I needed. Apparently even Amazon now have a web crawler which collects data to do what they describe as "improve our services, such as enabling Alexa to more accurately answer questions for customers".
It also looks like they use crawled data for training LLM too. So now, any data you have on your website could be used to train the next LLM AI model too.
Wonder if it has anything to do with this #AlexaPlus thing?
Information on the Amazon website at https://developer.amazon.com/amazonbot
I haven't recieved any of the spam myself but based on some data I have from my instance, I strongly suspect somebody on the Fediverse is involved, most likely as the victim.
Just thought to add that it appears they may have had their account suspended, so there is evidently something which has been going on
So I decided to change the max length of posts on this Mastodon instance to 1,500 characters.
I didn't actually have to do as much as most guides for this suggest, it seems since Mastodon v4.3.0 you no longer need to edit compose_form.jsx for the web UI to work
📣 Announcing Altbot 2.0: The Privacy & Green Update 🔒💚
Exciting news! After months of development, Altbot 2.0 is officially launching with major improvements to privacy, efficiency, and description quality.
What's new in Altbot 2.0:
The only data Altbot 2.0 records:
No images, no content, no personal data saved - ever.
For those who don't know, Altbot has been helping make the Fediverse more accessible by automatically generating alt-text descriptions for images. The project has grown beyond anything I imagined, now serving thousands of users across the network.
Support Altbot's Future 💝
To bring these privacy and efficiency improvements to life, I had to invest in a more powerful server than initially planned. The server costs exceeded my budget by around $900, which I've covered out of pocket. Who woulda thought that competing with a $1.98 trillion dystopian mega corporation would be expensive? Shocking, I know.
I've set up a Ko-fi fundraising goal to help recover these costs and support ongoing development: Ko-fi.com/micr0byte
Your contributions will help ensure Altbot remains:
Even small donations make a huge difference and motivate me to keep enhancing accessibility across the Fediverse!
This milestone represents a commitment to ensuring accessibility doesn't come at the cost of privacy or environmental impact. I'm incredibly proud of what we've built together.
As Altbot continues to grow, I'm open to sharing more about this journey with anyone interested in accessibility, ethical AI, or Fediverse projects.
For press inquiries: inquiries@micr0.dev
Feel free to boost or reach out!
#Accessibility #Fediverse #AltText #EthicalAI #OpenSource #Privacy #Altbot
Well that should give me some time to look the Online Safety Act.
I basically configured my CDN provider to block any UK IP addresses, although I did make a few exceptions to try and limit how much federation is broken while still completely preventing any "user content" from being shown.
None of this should be necessary, but here we are.
@memes.spawn Speaking from here in the fediverse, I don’t think any of us particularly want commercial ads or data collection. Just saying in case they get any ideas
Looks like I didn't break anything, there actually is an outage of some sort at OVH relating to authentication
Something is going on with my object storage at #OVH, my server is timing out connections to it so I checked the OVH website and apparently I "have not created an Object Storage service yet"
@stux I guess you won't be in a hurry to beat this record then? https://www.1news.co.nz/2025/01/16/christchurch-mum-runs-100-metre-sprint-on-lego-barefoot/
@malwaretech If he believes that then I'm going to wait for the day a UDP-based DDoS attack with IP address spoofing happens. Then the DDoS could have IP addresses anywhere
It would be best if people chose the first.
In reality, a lot of people use the second and won't make that choice, simply because most people would rather have convenience, which is what Jeff Bezos originally based his business on.
