• Russia: We’re so mighty that all must tremble before us, our economy is stronger from sanctions, NATO is on the verge of collapse

    Also Russia: Ma make em stop they’re being mean to me on Mastodon

    Real gangsters don’t sweat the jibber-jabber.

  •  dan   ( @dan@upvote.au ) 
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    fedilink
    2710 days ago

    If you’re hosting anything even remotely controversial, Hetzner isn’t a good choice. They’ve been known to disable servers without warning after receiving reports like this.

      • All service providers in the EU have to follow a similar abuse report handling procedure.

        They usually require a response to abuse tickets within 24h, so better have someone capable of responding at least twice a day. Unless the abuse goes against the provider’s ToS (don’t do that), simply responding to it should make it go away… as in, the provider washes their hands and lets the reporting party and you sort it among yourselves, be it in court or whatever. Russian government agencies are not very likely to win a case in the EU these days, though.

        If you don’t want to deal with hosting providers, you can self-host and deal with your ISP.

        This varies a lot from one ISP to another, some will cut you off at the first sign of abuse, others will ignore abuse reports like nothing happened, while others will port-filter you so you can’t even host stuff yourself. You will also find that most residential IP ranges are on blacklists used by mail providers.

        To increase the likelihood of staying online, use redundancy. For a while, I used to manage a system with two hosting providers, acting as reverse proxies and fallback for a local dual server setup with dual PSUs, dual UPSs, with dual connections to two ISPs via two routers. We used to get close to “six 9s” uptime.

  • Ideally, the fediverse will help people in censorious countries access information their governments don’t want them to see, but I am not too optimistic, I used to think that about the entire Internet and look where we are now, governments around the world are very much managing to control the spread of information on it.

    • I still think that fedi will help, and in fact I am pretty sure it is helping already, simply because it is quite decentralized. Blocking 20k+ instances is not trivial. And each of these instances is an entrypoint, so to speak, into the broader fedi. Missing even one is thus a big deal. If my instance is blocked, I can set up an account on a different one, follow the same people, and I am back in business.

      At the same time all these instances are run independently. One can’t simply threaten the whole fedi to force it to do a thing (say, take down an account), this just does not make sense.

      Compare and contrast with centralized services like Facebook, gatekeepers like Cloudflare, and so on. Threatening one big entity with problems might be enough to “convince it” to take a thing down.

      The reason governments and other powerful entities are able to control the information flow is because there are these hugely important single points of failure. Fedi is not perfect (mastodon.social is way too big for its own good…), but it is a step in the right direction.