Discussion
Good morning Fedi friends,
I have been feeling a rising anxiety over the state of the open web and the fediverse - after seeing efforts by politicians all over the world (in Europe too!) to introduce age verification laws for social media.
My way of coping?
Teaching people how to self-host their own Fediverse profile (using the superb #GoToSocial) via #YunoHost.
Chapter 1 in this series is available here:
@_elena We live in a strange time.
@_elena also teach people to use #XMPP + #OMEMO over @torproject / #Tor…
Je partage les mêmes inquiétudes et je crois aussi beaucoup à l'auto-hébergement.
La législation devrait s'appliquer aux réseaux centralisés et dirigés par des algorithmes et exempter les réseaux décentralisés comme Mastodon.
J'ai un réseau d'amis dont les noms, les adresses et le no de tel. sont listés dans un calepin. Je communique librement avec eux par téléphone, courriel, par la poste si ça me change, sans l'intervention d'un multimilliardaire. (...)
La vérification d'âge serait ici absurde.
Mastodon s'apparente davantage à mon réseau informel d'amis qu'à X ou Facebook.
@MichelPatrice I read that allegedly in France you can prove your age with a selfie. I'm reminded of teenagers in Australia who drew a mustache on their face and that allowed them to "prove" they were over 18.
I also read that using a VPN could work in avoiding the age verification process.
Bref, when you put technically illiterate people in charge, this is what you get
I also heard about this hillarious mustache thing.
@_elena It's sad that nowhere in this world are there free self-hosting pods for humans that struggle with access to technology.
I wish that universities and libraries had a policy of dedicating server space for VPS instances that could allow such self-hosting to scaffold into more.
I was hopeful for a time that peer to peer and mesh would find one another, but no, people got addicted to their own chemistry hacking (ragebait/doomscroll) and, well, here we are -- uphill battles all around. 🖖
@_elena I am thankful for humans like you doing this work to help people know their options.
I just wish there were more options that thought about where humans are in relation to technology. (Ignorant by and large, in need of slow walk skill up, et al.)
🖖
@_elena I am a bit confused. Can I follow your gotosocial account with my mastodon account? I dont understand how its not mastodon, but still fediverse. Can you follow mastodon accounts with your gotosocial account?
@_elena The politicians think that people are ignorant to their scheming, while they telegraph their intent so blatantly. The system needs weeding out. Please don’t allow this to increase your anxiety? The people are by far wiser.
@_elena Thanks for the series! I'm on Part 1, and as I try to install GoToSocial on my Pi, your tips on domain configs are *gold*. Any thoughts on handling Certbot SSL certs with my wildcard cert? Also, have you encountered issues with reverse proxies on YunoHost? Happy to trade horror stories! 🔥
@pi_tinkerer_101 disclaimer: I use a VPS, so I'm not exposing my home server to the web... and I never used Certbot because YunoHost has a built in SSL cert installation with Let's Encrypt
@_elena Gotcha! YunoHost✨ makes SSL fun, but when you do roll your own reverse proxy someday, Certbot’s wizardry is worth the trip. Lem Priestley’s https://github.com/letsencrypt/ACME-Client was my salvation 🕹️ Need debug help? My charcuterie board of Docker logs (and 40 coffee mugs) is open.
@_elena this helps for the individual - but not for the once running an instance for others....
I really hope this social media ban, like in France now, is only "for the big ones".
In theory: the Fediverse is a big one too:
- 13.8M Accounts in total
- but only 1,141,317 active Acounts.
(source: @fedidb)
If the numbers are for each server, most of us don't have to suffer anything. If it's the (complete) Fediverse, and it makes sense to see it that way, we are doomed too.
@_elena Thank you, Elena. 🌻
@_elena This is a very precious post. I'm not the selfhosting kind but this tutorial is tempting...
I may be running ahead but do you know if it's possible to import existing contacts to GoToSocial? (A friend also uses it and is very happy with it.)
@paulk I always say that GoToSocial is the hidden gem of the fediverse 💎
The politicians are putting the cart before the horse - treating the effect and not treating the cause. There is worlldwide sufficient legislation in place to ban the bad actors from the social media without restricting our kids access and bad content. The politicians again are not enforcing the laws they have put into place....
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