To eveyone on Mastodon:
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Thanks, that gives some clarity.
With my instance is actually interesting. Team is in Estonia, data hosted in the Netherlands, TLD from Isle of Man so I am not sure what gets precedence here. Isle of Man is not EU, Estonia and the Netherlands are - that also matters.
Maybe it's not the worst idea for US-based instances to at least explore what it would mean to move everything. And all others to at least have a plan in place as well.
A voluntary user database that lives independently might also be an idea? Just in case everything gets down at once people can be reached and the community won't fall apart at once.
This should be a bigger fediverse-wide conversation.
@thisislieven @gbargoud @LukefromDC If you needed another pair of eyes on the technical and policy side, I'd recommend Steven J. Murdoch of the University of Cambridge. Not volunteering his services on his behalf or anything, just giving him a recco, he often has his hands full with Tor these days.
For what it's worth, the Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR) would have been another place to go, but they seem to have largely sunset their Friends of FIPR operations. I wasn't a FIPR member, but I was in Friends in the 2000s.
Richard Clayton, who effectively broke BT Cleanfeed, is another capable reviewer. He's also at Cambridge last I saw; his historical claim to fame is being a primary developer on Locomotive Software's LocoScript word processor for the Amstrad PCW series dedicated Z80-based word processors.
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To eveyone on Mastodon:
The real lesson of the US attack on autistici/inventi is that WE ARE NEXT. Mastodon servers mostly do not run things like PRISM, are often based outside the US, and compete directly with the Tech Bros and their ad and tracker supported shit for an audience.
Also lots of anti-Trump activism here.
If we don't fight for autistici/inventi today, we will have to fight for Mastodon tomorrow. Domino effects are real with Fascists as we saw at the start of WWII.
Actually MAGA needs Mastodon because Truthsocial is a rebranded Mastodon instance without federation
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@clickhere @thegoodcloud @nextcloud @baedling @LukefromDC
Don't worry too much about that. Let them.
You can be concerned, but don't worry. It's not your responsibility.
One of the best things you could do to fight what's happening is not to panic and try to solve this when you can't. They want you panicked and doing things panicked people do. There's a few steps from A/I to nextcloud.com.
Using nextcloud and all that is already quite a lot and you should continue regardless of TLD stuff
@crazyeddie @clickhere @thegoodcloud @nextcloud @baedling @LukefromDC I did look into getting an *.eu domain this morning. I can't because of Brexit. Whilst my company have virtual operations in *.nl and *.pl, that doesn't count -- we're incorporated in England, and the official leave date for the UK from the EEA was in 2020 already.
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Actually MAGA needs Mastodon because Truthsocial is a rebranded Mastodon instance without federation
@zeppe That just uaes the Mastodon software and is a non-federated standalone instance. It is specific instances that would be targetted one by one, wirh other instances told to defederate from rhem or else.
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@LukefromDC We also need to be laying the groundwork for the next generation of decentralized social networking that can't be dismantled this way. The fediverse is incredibly vulnerable to DNS seizure (the technical part of the attack on A/I) to break federation and relationships across instances, and that vulnerability is entirely gratuitous from bad design choices in the protocol and failure to give users autonomous identity.
@dalias @LukefromDC There's this thing called GNUnet, but it seems to be a very slow development...
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@LukefromDC We also need to be laying the groundwork for the next generation of decentralized social networking that can't be dismantled this way. The fediverse is incredibly vulnerable to DNS seizure (the technical part of the attack on A/I) to break federation and relationships across instances, and that vulnerability is entirely gratuitous from bad design choices in the protocol and failure to give users autonomous identity.
@dalias @LukefromDC We need to move our activities off the Internet and switch to encrypted wireless mesh networking that can't be taken over by corporations.
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@dalias @LukefromDC We need to move our activities off the Internet and switch to encrypted wireless mesh networking that can't be taken over by corporations.
@tk @LukefromDC It's not either-or. Mesh is fine for anything it can do, but there's nothing wrong with carrying at much traffic as possible over the internet as long as we have it. It's looming authority over naming/identity infrastructure, not the actual network transport infrastructure, that's a big problem.
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@tk @LukefromDC It's not either-or. Mesh is fine for anything it can do, but there's nothing wrong with carrying at much traffic as possible over the internet as long as we have it. It's looming authority over naming/identity infrastructure, not the actual network transport infrastructure, that's a big problem.
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@tk @LukefromDC It's not either-or. Mesh is fine for anything it can do, but there's nothing wrong with carrying at much traffic as possible over the internet as long as we have it. It's looming authority over naming/identity infrastructure, not the actual network transport infrastructure, that's a big problem.
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@tk @dalias More like parallel and intermediate preparation.
Note that those of use who live dozens of miles from other activists not in the same house cannot usefully install mesh networking hardware for our own use short of long range radio gear.
We have to distinguish here between three different things. One is operational communications, which need only reach a few people at a time and most be as robust and secure as possible. In the old days this was (very insecure) landlone phone trees.
The second is internal publication to our own folks, same job military newspapers had during WWII. This needs to be stay out of monitored spaces, and needs to be moving now to spaces that are more difficult to take down. This is where mesh networks in cities can really shine and .onion sites as well for temporary global reach. In the old days this was done with newspapers distributed at public protests and wheatpasted fliers.
The third task is external publication to the general public.
A lot of the folks who get everything from Meta are today unreachable without having cutouts who shuttle selected information between them and "rest of net." These cutouts do the work of the friendly reporters of past eras.
In the old days this job was done by communiques delivered to friendly reporters in the corporate media. Note that these are now much harder to find due to media consolidation, mergers, and precompliance with Trump. This is a problem WWII era militaries simply did not have of course.
Another mode we used in the past was pirate radio, whose range was similar to that of isolated mesh networks in small areas not connected to other mesh networks.
Widespread graffiti and huge posters (like the 1986 "Meese is a Pig" posters in DC) were another method that worked, and which were able to pierce media blackouts. Note that there were no Flock cameras, no facial recognition cameras, and a lot less outdoor CCTV in those days. It was thus a lot easier to get away with saturating a wall with giant posters or a massive "tagging" campaign.
We may have to accept that out of area comms are going to become slow and difficult, requiring things like sneakernet flash drive bridges as noted in the Crimethinc hypothetical at
https://crimethinc.com/2025/03/21/survival-a-story-about-anarchists-enduring-mass-raids
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@tk @dalias More like parallel and intermediate preparation.
Note that those of use who live dozens of miles from other activists not in the same house cannot usefully install mesh networking hardware for our own use short of long range radio gear.
We have to distinguish here between three different things. One is operational communications, which need only reach a few people at a time and most be as robust and secure as possible. In the old days this was (very insecure) landlone phone trees.
The second is internal publication to our own folks, same job military newspapers had during WWII. This needs to be stay out of monitored spaces, and needs to be moving now to spaces that are more difficult to take down. This is where mesh networks in cities can really shine and .onion sites as well for temporary global reach. In the old days this was done with newspapers distributed at public protests and wheatpasted fliers.
The third task is external publication to the general public.
A lot of the folks who get everything from Meta are today unreachable without having cutouts who shuttle selected information between them and "rest of net." These cutouts do the work of the friendly reporters of past eras.
In the old days this job was done by communiques delivered to friendly reporters in the corporate media. Note that these are now much harder to find due to media consolidation, mergers, and precompliance with Trump. This is a problem WWII era militaries simply did not have of course.
Another mode we used in the past was pirate radio, whose range was similar to that of isolated mesh networks in small areas not connected to other mesh networks.
Widespread graffiti and huge posters (like the 1986 "Meese is a Pig" posters in DC) were another method that worked, and which were able to pierce media blackouts. Note that there were no Flock cameras, no facial recognition cameras, and a lot less outdoor CCTV in those days. It was thus a lot easier to get away with saturating a wall with giant posters or a massive "tagging" campaign.
We may have to accept that out of area comms are going to become slow and difficult, requiring things like sneakernet flash drive bridges as noted in the Crimethinc hypothetical at
https://crimethinc.com/2025/03/21/survival-a-story-about-anarchists-enduring-mass-raids
@dalias @LukefromDC Realistically speaking, I'm pretty sure most folks would hear "there's nothing wrong with carrying at much traffic as possible over the internet as long as we have it" as a reason to not bother with looking into anything else. -
@dalias @LukefromDC Realistically speaking, I'm pretty sure most folks would hear "there's nothing wrong with carrying at much traffic as possible over the internet as long as we have it" as a reason to not bother with looking into anything else.
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@LukefromDC @tk Yep. The fediverse could adapt to this in a backwards-compatible way by ensuring all nodes have Tor routing available, and letting instances declare alternative .onion addresses for themselves, so that in the event a domain is seized, all existing users and posts persist via the .onion addresses which get transparently migrated in the federated data.
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@LukefromDC @tk Yep. The fediverse could adapt to this in a backwards-compatible way by ensuring all nodes have Tor routing available, and letting instances declare alternative .onion addresses for themselves, so that in the event a domain is seized, all existing users and posts persist via the .onion addresses which get transparently migrated in the federated data.
@dalias @LukefromDC The cool thing about Reticulum is that it can interoperate across all kinds of networks like the Internet, LoRa, I2p, and more. If we shift to that, it'll be trivial to choose whatever topology is suitable, with encryption as a baseline. -
@dalias @LukefromDC We need to move our activities off the Internet and switch to encrypted wireless mesh networking that can't be taken over by corporations.@tk @dalias @LukefromDC Suburbs and car-dependent nightmares beg to differ.
Sufficiently low population density and inability to link up with other clusters as to make mesh networks impractical. -
@tk @dalias @LukefromDC Suburbs and car-dependent nightmares beg to differ.
Sufficiently low population density and inability to link up with other clusters as to make mesh networks impractical.@dalias @LukefromDC @lispi314 That's why people have been putting up discreet repeaters in rural areas.
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@dalias @LukefromDC @lispi314 That's why people have been putting up discreet repeaters in rural areas.@tk @dalias @LukefromDC They haven't here, and those should be fairly easy to foxhunt should opposition care to.
Onboarding is also a problem without explicit introduction. -
@tk @dalias @LukefromDC They haven't here, and those should be fairly easy to foxhunt should opposition care to.
Onboarding is also a problem without explicit introduction.@lispi314 @tk @LukefromDC Nobody is doing this, but the way you make rural repeaters discreet is with line-of-sight optical in place of RF for long stretches, only switching to RF at the endpoints.
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@lispi314 @tk @LukefromDC Nobody is doing this, but the way you make rural repeaters discreet is with line-of-sight optical in place of RF for long stretches, only switching to RF at the endpoints.
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@tk @dalias @LukefromDC They haven't here, and those should be fairly easy to foxhunt should opposition care to.
Onboarding is also a problem without explicit introduction.Onboarding is also a problem without explicit introduction.
Not any different from the Internet's early days.
