#tallship — Public Fediverse posts

@mattblaze

Decentralization is what keeps the fediverse free and weird.

Some folks, you just caen't reach...

So you get what we had here just last week, this week, and it's exactly why I denegrate those who would be so obtuse as to suggest an interview over Zoom or a weekly business meeting when we've got really great #FOSS solutions far superior to those proprietary offerings that mine your #privacy.

I personally recommend Self-hosting BBB, but Pikapods suggests Jitsi, yet both are pretty awesome and won't be caught data mining your medical records and selling them later.

What we have here is failure, to communicate...

#tallship #Big_Blue_Button #Jitsi #BBB

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@Pikapods

RE: https://mastodon.social/users/Pikapods/statuses/117263205624883428

Some folks, you just caen't reach...

So you get what we had here just last week, this week, and it's exactly why I denegrate those who would be so obtuse as to suggest an interview over Zoom or a weekly business meeting when we've got really great #FOSS solutions far superior to those proprietary offerings that mine your #privacy.

I personally recommend Self-hosting BBB, but Pikapods suggests Jitsi, yet both are pretty awesome and won't be caught data mining your medical records and selling them later.

What we have here is failure, to communicate...

#tallship #Big_Blue_Button #Jitsi #BBB

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@Pikapods

RE: https://mastodon.social/users/Pikapods/statuses/117263205624883428

Some folks, you just caen't reach...

So you get what we had here just last week, this week, and it's exactly why I denegrate those who would be so obtuse as to suggest an interview over Zoom or a weekly business meeting when we've got really great #FOSS solutions far superior to those proprietary offerings that mine your #privacy.

I personally recommend Self-hosting BBB, but Pikapods suggests Jitsi, yet both are pretty awesome and won't be caught data mining your medical records and selling them later.

What we have here is failure, to communicate...

#tallship #Big_Blue_Button #Jitsi #BBB

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@Pikapods

RE: https://mastodon.social/users/Pikapods/statuses/117263205624883428

@karlauerbach @tychotithonus

Cavebear wrote:

I have trouble accepting anything rooted in a country code top level domain (ccTLD), such as .me or .it, as being secure for use identifying people in the US.

Notwithstanding contemporary community constructs such as KeyOxide, there is an air of (perhaps misplaced) stability with some popular ccTLDs, like, .CA or .CO and even with some that aren't (arguably) quite so deserving, like .TV which has itself had a few turbulent hiccups for registrants in the past. The .CA ccTLD has seen it's fair share of Californian's attempting to capitalize on the mnemonics of that ccTLD, when clearly, this isn't something Canada is happy about, and indeed, one might argue that it dilutes the national branding that is beneficial to Canadian companies.

.CO is right up there near the top of the warning bells, since many believe that governments have both total authority over their ISO-3166 assets and the wisdom to manage them - they do not.

In an even earlier article penned by Kieren McCarthy, he states:

>The first thing .CO Internet did was to ignore accepted wisdom. Even now, many of those comfortable with the status quo claim that new extensions are “not needed”. They include well-known Internet figures such as Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. According to this logic, the Internet’s naming infrastructure is no more interesting than the phone system or the road network.

For my part, even back when offered tidy little sums to provide "professional valuations" for various domain names, I typically accepted the contract and disappointed the client by providing my expert assessments of $35.00 - NSI was charging $70.00 for two year registrations at the time.

Easy Peasy. The value of a domain registration is, within reason, that which the registry operator sets as the registration fee.

So with respect to Mr. McCarthy's observation, I concur with the belief that these machinations we rolled out in the 1980's as vehicles to assist humans in mapping out and arriving at particular IP addresses are certainly, nothing more than what could be arbitrary strings in a database, assigned (i.e., registered) by request to someone who will leverage it for utilitarian purposes. I know that's really dry. It's how any engineer would look at such a construct functionally.

Where things got weird was when people with marketing minds started to claim a piece of the pie, when it wasn't even sliced into pieces:

- You cannot own a domain name. It's a registration, congruent with the nature of a phone number - pay the renewal fee or that string of characters will return to the pool of available names.
- You can't assign value beyond that of the registration fees established by the registry
- If you built a brand of value tied to your (phone number or) domain registration's string, and that registration expires, the value of that brand reverts to $0.00 - once again, you cannot own a domain name, or a phone number!
- If you build a brand and register that service or trademark with the USPTO, know that it by definition exists separately from a domain registration that you do not, and cannot yourself, own.
- If you trust your brand on the two letter ccTLDs of nations, know that your brand's name recognition is subject to the whims of that nation and maybe even that nation's ever shifting political sand beneath it.

That last one is interesting when you consider that even the United States' management of the .US Top-Level Domain came under public scrutiny for the resulting calamity when the rug was pulled out from long time regional registry providers and their registrants when the geographic nature of 3LD registrations and below under the .US ccTLD were sunsetted under the management of the NTIA.

To be fair, this wasn't nearly as catastrophic as the zillions of registrants whose domain registrations were amputated following Brexit.

The .TV ccTLD has been in the news as well, scrutinized as a Top-Level domain that will potentially cease to exist, eventually. and historically, management of .TV's registry operations (and marketing) has been a never ending marathon of musical chairs. GoDaddy is actually the operator, while the Tuvalu Telecommunications Corporation handles all the sales and marketing for the brand.

Montenegro has had a tumultuous life cycle, and the reservations expressed by Karl aren't just valid, but IMO, should be taken as a literal precautionary note. Nevertheless, pigeonholed schemata persist when the marketing types slick back their hair with Brylcreem and their mouths start moving, with promises of great fortune billowing from their lips. the .ME TLD was born, if you will, from the ashes of a succession of ISO-3166 ccTLDs going back originally to Yugoslavia's .YU ccTLD.

Although I've been focusing on the ccTLDs that have attempted to brand with varying degrees of success and reliability, the smell of money attracts the same carpetbaggers to gTLDs like .mobi and .tel have had varying degrees of success as registries - with some, like the .GOO TLD outright imploding. Let's cover a few...

- .TEL - A lot of money was poured into this new age virtual business card that was supposedly only available as captive portal with pre-populated fields to fill out for your contact information. I guess that didn't work out too well, following the initial interest by curios folks, since they've officially done away with that hard requirement. Truth be told, it was always possible to simply register your own DNS servers as AUTH and completely bypass their captive portal system, and many gearheads did just to make light of what many considered redundant, ridiculous, and unnecessarily retro.
- .WORK - As if it could be the rubber banding of a wagon wheel, instead of the original steel girding that .jobs (and yes, there was a .job application too) never really delivered on, this might go down as a better 'marketed' mousetrap, but I don't get the impression that this TLD is really making many waves, and the utility is rather questionable too for anything other than very specialized cases that might be better served under one of the classic gTLDs.
- .JOBS - I was personally brought in as an expert consultant in to help get this (and .JOB, which didn't make it) accepted in a round 2 application in 2004, for acceptance into the DNS Root with ICANN, which was successful. But that's only half the battle, when job seekers actively flock to Dice, Indeed, XING, Linkedin, and one considers that the average human will at first likely guess that a site called jobs.com might be a first stop on their career search (retail.jobs forwards to usa.jobs), I don't know if the past 21 years have really bore out any fruit for this particular TLD. I was never enthusiastic about the potential, I mean, consider dog_groomer.jobs, yet I was highly optimistic that I could get them across the finish line of the acceptance process - which I did.
- .WOLTERSKLUWER - Yes that's called an Easter Egg. I've never heard of a single .wolterskluwer domain, or the TLD itself, but all I can come up with "Egads! What were you thinking?" Oh, yeah, the Easter Egg... .BOO is indeed for real. As you can see below, I checked the availability for Yogi_and_Boo.Boo, at the time of writing at least. No I did not follow through on registering but I'm sure that someone will. I still check however, occasionally, to see if Chicken.Coop is available.

The DNS Name Space is full of failed TLDS.

Getting back to having enough confidence in a TLD to base your business product (and as it follows, your "brand"), I'm going to finish this article up with a bit of a horrible potential outcome when you register a domain name in the ccTLD namespace when the government is either politically unstable, inept, or both.

This is the case of the .BZ ccTLD. the original delegation by Jon (Let's just call him IANA, because that was his pseudonym for many years until his passing) was placed in what one would surmise to be a relatively stable environment - a university.

This delegation of Authority to the TLD Manager was effected on 03 September 1991 to the University of Belize, in according with the rollout of ISO-3166-1 alpha 2 codes for each country. Nothing to see here folks, so we move along to...

The phenomenon known as the .com bubble and its contemporary, affectionately or infamously referred to as the Domain Wars, close on the heels of the Browser Wars.

Whereas the registry for the ccTLD for Belize was from 1991 primarily manually, yet competently administered (i.e., by hand), the Government of Belize saw dollar signs after Jon passed away in October of 1998 and subsequently decided to contract out marketing and registry operations to a firm by the name of Economic Solutions Inc. (ESI) in 1999. That's where I come in.

History has recorded, out of convenience sake, I suppose, that the contract between the Government of Belize and ESI was for marketing only, but that's not what the contract that ESI provided me said. They were to take over registry operations and do the marketing to compete with the new .BIZ gTLD that the nascent ICANN was going to place in the DNS root.

Since I was already operating several types of registry operations ESI wanted to contract my firm to merely expand registry operations to include the .BZ ccTLD. This was not a problem, and within a few hours had a standalone registry system operational as a prototype. Since this wasn't going to be a part of any existing registry operations I had at the time, I required money to complete a build out for production commercial operations in my data center.

This is where things began to get a little sticky, as those jokers at didn't seem to understand that I don't really care about their lofty goals, and neither myself nor my CEO at the time were going to do anything without up front compensation. we provided them with the IP addresses, etc., of the new name servers, but made it clear that this zone was not going live until we were fully funded.

It devolved into a back and forth between the Government of Belize along with ESI on one side, demanding that ICANN.... um.... IANA, rather, change the delegation in the root, and the University of Belize folks on the other, who were quite nice, amicable people.

I guess this battle between the government of Belize and "IANA" went on for a couple more years, long after I severed the relationship with ESI for not performing, and eventually, that same claim of non-performance was the basis for Belize to cancel their contract too.

Anyway, in 2001 the university spawned a new entity, University Management Limited (UML), to manage everything - including the marketing, and it's remained that way ever since. All's well that ends well. But the point is, this isn't what the government wanted, and IANA made it eventually clear that they weren't going to change the delegation for the zone to any other entity. - and this is a good thing, because governments are stupid. The university staff were more than willing to work through a coordinated smooth transition, but ultimately it was ICANN - not the government of Belize, who put their foot down when it came to operational integrity.

In closing, I'd like to point out the likely damage caused to the approximately 80,000 SLD registrants under the .EU who had their registrations revoked (of the total of more than 300,000 that were threatened), as a result of Brexit, is a good example of what could have happened, had the Government of Belize had their way, on a smaller scale, yes, but with even less regard for their existing registrants.

And that's how incompetent governments do things when you don't have technical guardrails in place to prevent them from shooting themselves in the foot.

#tallship #DNS #Registry #Registrar #Domain_Names #IANA #ccTLD

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RE: https://sfba.social/users/karlauerbach/statuses/116953628070701544

The ill-fated replica of HMS Bounty during Tall Ships 2009 in Halifax. Built in Lunenburg for the 1962 film “Mutiny on the Bounty”, she sank off North Carolina during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. #photography #blackandwhite #ship #tallship #sailing #hmsbounty #nautical #novascotia #eastcoastkin

@jupiter_rowland @danie10 @thenexusofprivacy @mikedev

Okay first I should state that I've never actually said that masto isn't a solid and capable platform. It is, but at a severe cost - the design of masto, notwithstanding the insistence on maintaining a historically lackluster feature set when compared with almost any other Fediverse software, is such that it really isn't built for #DeSoc - it really strives to be some sort of unachievable ideal for the monolithic silo model.

No one but me seems to site this nowadays, but masto doesn't even really shine with respect to cost in terms of system resources and stability until you approach the 20,000 user account mark. What? Why would you do that? Back when these stats were being bandied about, Pleroma was showcasing its new #Gopher protocol (browsing) support, and reminding people that it felt perfectly at home on an #rPi. No such claim was ever made for masto, lolz. That doesn't mean that the other platforms aren't just as capable of scaling vertically... but... why? Who's going to foot the bill? Who's going to manage all of those un-vetted people creating accounts on your machines? Why would someone bother with that in the first place?

Community? Nope - there's no sense of community on masto servers, and I'll get to that later. Because you want to create your own private Idaho? Probably. mastodon.social is one of, if not the, largest deprecated monolithic silos existing in the Fediverse today. Why? What possible benefit could be derived by driving a million people into a single funnel under the auspices of telling them that they're escaping that very same model? It's ludicrous.

No matter what happens in the short term, Eugen is assured of his parachute and comfortable retirement fund, except for the part where he forgot to have his new significant other sign a pre-nup - that might dash his net worth later, but that's another consideration entirely. I hope his marriage is actually a long and fruitful one that lasts forever, he's not a bad guy, he's just been courted and corrupted by the "Ooh shiney" phenomenon of financial entrapments that come with relative success in the media and pop culture.

The reason masto needs to be hard forked (several times, IMO) is not to create a better masto that will lend itself to DeSoc, #smolweb, and self-hosting on people's home networks, but rather, to further dilute the trademark, and especially the brand, effectively killing it if possible, supplanting it with Fediverse instead. People like to bounce around that term inclusivity, well, this accomplishes that.

Forks of masto aren't going to create a better masto. No way. Sure, some improvements on this one, other features on that one, but dilution of the brand until it is only as significant as any other deserving Fediverse platform is and should be the ultimate goal. It's not well suited, architecturally for horizontal scaling anyway, unless you don't mind throwing all those system resources at it that could better serve you elsewhere with something like #GoToSocial or one of the #Misskey and #Pleroma family fork members.

True leaders in the Fediverse will initially be those platforms that have planned ahead and accommodate other DeSoc protocols, arguably Fediverse protocols, at this time, #Diaspora, #OStatus, #Nomad, #Zot, and even others that some #Fedizens turn their noses up at, like #nostr and #Bluesky's #ATP. #ActivityPub is NOT the end-all, be-all for the future. It is the golden calf of today, and just as others that have come before, it will morph and evolve or be obviated by others that will be plugged into the platforms currently running it - #Friendica, #Hubzilla, and Streams are prime examples of this, and Friendica especially, considering it's the only extant original member of the Fediverse for all intents and purposes. One could say that Friendica is the #Slackware of the Fediverse, lolz.

With respect to Friendica in particular, but also Hubzilla and others that have arrived at this obvious conclusion, ActivityPub is merely the major vehicle by which it communicates with other decentralized social communications systems on the Internet. I don't think it has ever lost sight of that, like another of its contemporaries, #GNU_Social did.

Hemming large masses of people onto a single (and at this time appearing to be) and open walled garden has the immediate effect of control over large swaths of population - you can say this, but not that. You can think this, but not that. You can be this, but not that. You can believe this, but not that - under penalty of excommunication.

In reality, we don't have strong friendships with our neighbors - that's why we have fences. We wave to them and say hi, call the cops when they're on vacation and see someone suspicious lurking about their property. That's about the extent of being a neighbor. We invite our friends and coworkers over for BBQ's and to swim in our pools, not so much our neighbors.

The current masto social architecture is the antithesis of that, and so is it's physical architecture - put all the lobsters in the same pot of boiling water. Turn on and off their ability to speak all at once. Force them en masse to endure advertising blitzes (Oh, mark my word that's coming) decided upon by the server admin. It's like Baba O'Reilly by The Who - "Meet the new boss, Same as the old boss".

That's not the promise of Fediverse. it's the antonym.

masto also hinders innovation, attempting to define, dictate even, what should and should not be available - Nomadic identity is but one emerging facet of what is fracturing the masto monopolistic initiative - and that's a good thing, because with the help of FEPs, already, others are adopting various cooperative models for this as well, but discussing that now, and here, at this time, is more of a tangent so I'll get back to the point.

Jupiter:
> That's why people still fork Mastodon to add features that are available just about everywhere else.

Indeed it is, and why it has managed to enjoy a reasonable level of notoriety. There's also the wholly undeserved notion of community that actually, in direct opposition to, masto has continually sought to break and in a very big way, break.

There are certainly platforms (mostly forumware) that curate a sense of community, but those days are largely past. Whether it was #gplus, #Myspace, #Faceplant, #InstaSPAM, or #Twitter; because just as it is in real life, #COMMUNITY is that which you define for yourself through your connections - your follows and those who choose to follow your account. The biggest failures in the Fediverse that I've personally observed are those that seek to localize, geographically or by shared interest, a monolithic ivory tower of sameness and similarity amongst people.

I felt so awful for one guy who, so enthusiastically upon discovering the Fediverse, started registering domain names corresponding to several states, thinking that he would be successful in launching a geographically oriented family of masto based servers tending to the shared interests of people by offering them a place to congregate. He quickly discovered the fatal flaw in his model, but was stuck with hefty data center bills to maintain all these masto servers that were largely uninhabited.

Trying to get rid of your masto subscribers when you figure out that you need to egress from it is not an easy task without disenfranchising your user base. I know, because a few years back, not long after @Gled archived his #mastodo fork and urged everyone to adopt Pleroma instead, I face the daunting task of trying to convince my user base to migrate elsewhere - it took more than a year to accomplish!

Danie:
> thing is though there are also many existing alternatives to Mastodon already on the Fediverse, so why fork it?

In a nutshell, because it serves to, at the very least, dilute the masto brand, and more likely kill it. It has served its purpose and now that it has been exposed as a vehicle antithetical to #DeSoc, it's time to deprecate it.

My introduction to the #Fediverse occurred when I stumbled upon an earlier incarnation of #Friendica, started looking at #Red_Matrix, and discovered that the monolithic model, if not having been shown the door, had at least been handed its hat.

The problem at that time, was the effect of Prettiness, and of course, UX. Friendica wasn't too bad in that latter sense, when compared to that of Faceplant, but it sure didn't even come close to being as pretty as Faceplant - or even Myspace, which had only recently fallen into the abyss. That's changed A LOT, even in just the past year, with respect to Friendica and Hubzilla - they're much more intuitive for a layperson parachuting to the ground after jumping from the cesspit over at Faceplant.

I think that more than anything, not being pretty enough for the subjugated chattel coming from Twitter and Faceplant, was the most difficult thing for onboarders to embrace. Mike placed all of his focus on functionality and forward thinking vision with respect to what these and later efforts could provide the masses, but the "prettification" was left to others who didn't step up for the challenge for many years. I'm all for features six-ways to Sunday, but I also feel that many things need to be hidden from the landing page a new user sees upon account creation - the very basics they expect should be there, akin to those available in the deprecated monolithic space; users expect this, but they don't yet know they not only want, but really need all of these other feature sets too, yet some things should left, IMO, to be discovered later by the user.

And in my conversations years ago with Mike, I gleaned as much from him [paraphrased, of course]: "Here's this really bitchen gift for the masses, it does all this kewl stuff, now I leave it up to others to make it pretty" (and with a sense of coherency that these former subjugated chattel can initially get their heads around). Putting all that stuff right in their face was awe inspiring, but foreboding at the same time for many.

Well, finally, people are making it pretty :) And they're also moving much of the overwhelming busy-ness elsewhere in the UI. As a result, there's been an explosion of adoption - not even primarily from former masto folks either.

I'd like to touch on the notion of community one more time in closing. It might be convenient for n00bie onboarders to glean a bit about how a particular platform functions, but just like in your own neighborhood where you live, you make friends elsewhere mostly - at work, at functions of the hobbies you engage in, with friends you meet at the grocery store or libraries, and the beaches or on hiking or 4x4 weekend excursions. It's the same way in the Fediverse, you make your friends through connections here and there through people you discover along the way, and 99% of them ARE NOT on your particular server instance.

They don't need to be either, because this is the Fediverse :)

#tallship #FOSS

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@benkramer

#Fedilab has been the very best #Fediverse app for three or four years now.

I'm glad you have warmed up to it 🙂

Fedilab supports most all of the popular Fediverse server platforms at this time:

#Friendica #Soapbox #PeerTube #Akkoma #GNU_Social #Pleroma #Pixelfed #Hometown #Glitch_Social and upcoming native support coming for #Calckey, #Mitra, and #Misskey soon!

https://Fedilab.App

Available at F-Droid and #Aurora_Store!

* Instant translation - #LibreTranslate

* Two press cross account boosting

* Unlimited accounts

* True bookmarking

* Automagic link sanitation for YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, and other deprecated legacy silos to prevent tracking and protect privacy

* Unparalleled filtering and search

* 100% FOSS

* And many, many, many more features simply too numerous to list, but works as expected right out if the box so it's familiar to everyone.

Enjoy!

#tallship

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