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Any federating instance would view any other as an inevitable threat, and thus destroy any nascent life that makes its presence known.

As a result, the fediverse would be relatively silent, without evidence of any intelligent alien life, as in a "dark forest" filled with "armed hunter(s) stalking through the trees like a ghost" 🧵​(3/3)

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Consider the following axioms:
- All instances desire to stay alive.
- There is no way to know if other instances can or will destroy you if given a chance.
- Lacking assurances, the safest option for any instance is to annihilate others before they have a chance to do the same. 🧵​(2/3)

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Suppose a vast number of instances distributed throughout the internet, on the order of the number of observable domains. Lots and lots of them. Those instances make up the body of a federated society. Federated Sociology is the study of the nature of this super-society🧵​(1/3)

maybe i should split that big toot up into a (1/3) thread, as a bit

uni 

this course, and the assignment focus on improving diversity/inclusivity is great, but the more general lectures about design methods are abysmally boring and very superfluous

@maloki yeah, maybe it also helps with staying/spreading awareness without getting totally hopeless

@ghost_bird right, I think NL and the EU have that too, at least they're forced to shortly bring it up during some meeting

@maloki maybe? personally i wouldn't be inclined to give a petition more reach than general info about the topic, and I feel like petitions can lay the trap of "i signed, so i helped, so i don't have to do anything else"

has a petition ever changed anything? all the examples i see just coincide with wider attention to the issue, signed or not

uni 

there's some irony in a course that partly focuses on neurodiverse inclusivity having boring lectures at 8:45am...

We gave our docs pages a lick of paint (and a material theme). What do you think?

https://docs.gotosocial.org

ORANGE :go_to_social: 🍊 :gtspat:

anyone with cashmoney wanna fund gotosocial enough to hire me fulltime? 👀

community project funding, :boost_requested:​ 

I want to briefly talk about a problem that I've been seeing pop up a lot over the past couple of years.

It goes something like this: someone sets up a community thing (own project, Mastodon instance, whatever), follows 'DevOps principles', pays for it out of pocket, and then something happens to their income and suddenly there's a massive bill that cannot be paid.

The problem here is that a community is not a company, the budget is extremely finite, and that's something you should be accounting for from the start.

Yes, you might be okay with paying the costs out of pocket, but at some point something *will* go wrong, and you won't be able to afford it, and now your community needs to cough up the costs - and they often won't be able to.

Many of the "modern DevOps" practices exist not because they make things so much better, but because they are extremely profitable on the provider side. Companies can afford this tax; your community cannot.

A brief and non-exhaustive list of such things, some of which are additionally also fragile:
- Nickle-and-dime cloudycloud services (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc.)
- Microservices (including 'serverless')
- Zero-downtime deployments
- Extensive performance monitoring or tracing infrastructure
- Kubernetes and the like

These are all things that you should *avoid* by default. They can very easily inflate your hosting bill by 10x (or more) compared to a bog standard "rent a cheap Linux server/VPS" approach; and none of them are really going to matter for your community project, even those that might have legitimate benefits in other situations.

Your project will almost certain fit on a standard Linux server. It'll cost you <$50 per month instead of $500 per month. Low enough that even if disaster strikes, it's easy to cushion the blow collectively. The availability and performance will be completely fine for a community project.

(Background: I have a decade+ experience in running non-commercial things on a shoestring budget, including high-traffic ones, also advising others on it. I promise you that it is entirely possible if you're careful about where you spend your money.)

uni 

so many people teaching at uni seem to have a special talent to demotivate people, fucking hell

guess that goes for large parts of the education system in general

poison, reading papers 

> Several of the household food purchasers mentioned that they
did not want to poison themselves

oh, how surprising

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