Rolandt

I set up a family server on Mastodon today. It wasn’t too hard; Digital Ocean has a one-click Mastodon install. I tried messing around with Docker Compose but it wasn’t happening for me. If you’re using the network, please say hello!

I have not been this excited about federated social networks since we published ActivityPub. The shift has started.

Get a Mastodon account as soon as you can. Set up servers for your companies, your clubs, your families, your friends.

We’re doing this. Don’t be on the wrong side of history.

Mitigation Measures

This article reports that a poll found that 69% of Canadians would either support or “somewhat support” a mask mandate for indoor public spaces if there are rising case counts. In BC, 72% said they supported or “somewhat supported” such a mandate.

Long COVID

This paper from Germany lays at least part of the blame for brain fog at the feet of microglia (which are kind of the brain’s janitorial service). They also found elevated levels of CCL11 in people with brain fog, which could be useful as a biomarker.

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This big study from the USA Department of Veteran’s Affairs (which, alas, means mostly men) found a 26% decrease in Long COVID among people who had been given Paxlovid.

there was no difference given vaccination status, prior infection, unvaccinated status, co-morbidities, or gender (though it was heavily skewed male).

Something that I find really interesting is that Paxlovid drops all-causes mortality even after the acute phase is over. This is another reminder that COVID-19 can kill you even after you have “recovered”.

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Finally! There’s going to be a big random clinical trial of Paxlovid for Long COVID patients.

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This big study from Germany says that, surprise, surprise, kids can get Long COVID too.

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This paper from the USA says that people who had had major life stressors (like loss of job, loss of spouse) were significantly more likely to get Long COVID. Life is unfair.

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This preprint from the USA found that, in a pilot, 8 of 12 Long COVID patients got better after getting non-invasive electrical stimulation of their vagus nerve.

Testing

This paper found that more COVID-19 testing at two university campuses led to riskier behaviour. Interestingly, they said that women seemed to drive the behaviour because they take the risks more seriously (in general).

I know that I was skeptical of frequent testing as a way to mitigate spread in BC because tests were everywhere in the UK relatively early on in the pandemic, and it didn’t seem to help them.

Mitigation Measures

This study from the USA looked at schools which did and did not lift mask mandates. Schools which did lift mask mandates had an additional 44.9 more COVID-19 cases per 1000 students and staff during the 15 weeks after the statewide masking policy was rescinded than those which did not.

Vaccines

So are the bivalent boosters really any better than the Classic boosters? There’s conflicting data — evaluations which use pseudoviruses say no, but evaluations which use actual live viruses say yes, some. Pfizer recently announced data in the latter camp. They are certainly no worse; they area also not huuugely better. A little better.

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Novavax Inc issued a press release which said that an experimental bivalent version wasn’t any better (or worse) than Novavax Classic.

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This study from Israel during the BA.1/BA.2 time period found that four doses of Pfizer were better than three, but that the fourth dose’s antibodies waned faster than the third dose’s: the fourth dose waned to third-dose-leve in 13 weeks (and then stabilized).

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This paper says that the antibodies which are most effective are the ones that glom onto the prefusion (“closed” configuration) spike, especially the S1 subunit. This surprised me, as one reason I had heard for Novavax’ surprisingly broad protection is that it does a better job showing the S2 subunit to the immune system than other vaccines. But then I saw that what they used to test effectiveness was the Wuhan strain! It’s not a big surprise that vaccines which elicited antibodies to the Wuhan S1 protein would do well. Unfortunately, S1 is where most of the VOC’s mutations are! It is easy for me to imagine that antibodies targeting the Wuhan S1 would not do well against the BA.5 S1s.

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I missed this paper from Moderna from October, but they tried an experimental vax which only had two (important) pieces of the spike protein instead of the full spike protein. They found that 10µg of the experimental vax worked about as well as 100µg of the Moderna Classic vax.

Pathology

This big study from the USA found that reinfections are (surprise!) bad. A reinfection more than doubled the risk of death (over people who just had one infection), more than tripled the risk of hospitalization, and Long COVID. The risks were biggest during the acute phase, but there was risk which lingered for at least six months. Interestingly, vaccination didn’t appear to reduce the risk of Long COVID for people who got reinfected.

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This article (about this paper from the USA) is wild. Apparently a fair number of people who have been put on a ventilator and anesthetized (because that’s what you do when you vent someone), when they recover enough to come off the vents and the anesthetic, they just… don’t wake up for a long time, like two or three weeks!

Treatments

This paper suggests that melatonin might be useful for treating Long COVID. (It’s pure speculation as far as I can tell, but intriguing.)

Recommended Reading

This article explores the (somewhat fringe) idea that COVID-19 can trash your immune system. I am skeptical because we have not seen measles outbreaks (if COVID-19 erases your immune system’s history like chemo/marrow transplants do) or unusual numbers of pneumocystis pneumonia (if COVID-19 destroys the immune system’s ability to fight like AIDS does ).  I sort of feel like if millions of people’s immune systems were getting trashed, we’d be seeing lots of cases of either measles or pneumocystis pneumonia. However, there are some interesting points in the article, and I am not a doctor, so could be wrong.

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This article talks about a shift from “how many doses” to “how recent was your last dose”.

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This article talks about how the pandemic changed Canadians’ relationship to food shopping/cooking

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This article talks about why so many kids are getting sick now. (Spoiler: because they didn’t get sick before.)

Brexit is in one of its periodic doldrums. That’s not to say that all the ongoing problems and miseries it has created have abated, or that the almost daily reminders of them have ceased. And of course the perennially unresolved Northern Ireland Protocol row continues.

More of the same

What also continues is the rather lame and repetitious attempt by Brexit ideologues, which I discussed last week, to refute the now irrefutable fact of Brexit’s economic failure. This week, the baton was passed to Larry Elliott, the Lexiter Economics Editor of the Guardian, and Telegraph columnist Roger Bootle (£), one of the members of Patrick Minford’s now disbanded Economists for Brexit group. I call it ‘baton passing’ because there is an inescapable sense of, if not actual coordination, then, at least, shared endeavour in what these people write. For example, Elliott, like Robert Tombs last week, invokes an IEA-dominated ‘Briefings for Britain’ report as his evidence for the lack of Brexit damage, showing, incidentally, the latest strange conjunction of left and right that Brexit has created.

The main line that all of them currently share is the deeply illogical one that, since the UK is experiencing severe economic problems, and since other countries are experiencing severe economic problems, then ‘therefore’ the UK’s economic problems cannot be due to Brexit. They also invariably anchor their dismissal of all negative economic assessments of Brexit in what they take to be the failure of the pre-referendum short-term economic forecasts of a vote to leave.

That is a tricky claim to unpick, because it’s true that remain campaigners were at fault in using it as if it were an unconditional prediction. In fact it was based, like all such forecasts, on numerous assumptions, some of which were not met (e.g. that David Cameron would, as he had promised, immediately trigger Article 50, or that the Bank Of England would not make any interventions to stabilize financial markets, which in the event it did). So although the worst warnings proved false, and perhaps would have done so even if all the assumptions had been met, that isn’t the slam-dunk the Brexiters imagine it to be. Anyway, whilst the remain campaign did use those forecasts in a highly simplified and therefore misleading way, that’s not something which those whose campaign included slogans like ‘£350 million a week for the NHS’ and ‘Turkey’s joining the EU’ are in a good position to criticize, frankly.

In any case, why keep bringing all this up now? The answer is that it is in order to pursue another deeply illogical argument: that since a warning of possible damage was (supposedly) once proven false, then ‘therefore’ all warnings of damage are false, and ‘therefore’ all reports of damage are false. The same goes for another commonality in the current round of Brexiter denial, shared by both Elliott and Bootle, along with Dominic Lawson as discussed last week, which is to take Mark Carney’s recent, and highly questionable, claim that due to Brexit the UK economy has fallen from being 90% the size of Germany’s in 2016 to being 70% of its size now. But, even if that is bogus, to keep repeating it is again to suggest that since one statement of the damage of Brexit is false then ‘therefore’ all such statements are false.

Bootle, whose article is slightly more balanced than most of them, does concede that Brexit has adversely impacted trade and investment, something Elliott ignores or dismisses, but both of them continue to insist that the benefits of Brexit remain in the future. That’s something else they share with the other Brexiter apologists discussed last week, though the important issue is the ever-present one that they undoubtedly have totally different ideas of what those benefits would be.

We can expect all this to rumble tediously on at the abstract level of arguing over macro-economic indicators, even as just about every business affected by Brexit groans under its impact. Those complaining include Next’s Chief Executive Lord Wolfson, an advocate of Brexit but now one of the many saying “this is not the Brexit I wanted”. Yet again the issue is the multiple meanings of Brexit, and the original sin of the Vote Leave campaign’s deliberate refusal to specify any particular one. I won’t discuss Wolfson’s latest intervention here because I did so on the previous occasion when he said the same thing, along with some other pro-Brexit business leaders, almost a year ago, in a post entitled ‘Not my Brexit’, and, depressingly, most of it still applies, a sign of the glacial slowness of the entire Brexit debate.

Reality wins, but painfully slowly

Also rumbling on is the gradual death of all the hopes and promises of Brexiters. This week it was finally announced that the plan to replace the Royal Yacht Britannia has been shelved. It was one of those symbols, like restoring Imperial units of measurement (of which we have heard nothing since the pathetic ‘public consultation’), that used to swell Brexiter hearts and hopes (£). Those hopes have now been dashed on the prosaic, but revealing, fact that Brexit Britain is simply too poor to afford such fripperies, and with potential Russian attacks on undersea internet cables the Navy has better uses for £250 million than a Boris Johnson vanity project.

Rather more substantive are the new concerns that have been raised about the reckless plan to scrap EU retained law by the end of next year, the more reckless as it has emerged this week that there is an even greater volume of law affected than was previously realised. This plan is also symbolic, though in a particularly asinine sense since the symbolism of getting rid of ‘foreign law’ is negated by the fact that, as retained EU law, it was written in to UK law by parliament as part of Brexit. Not to mention the fact that much of it was heavily influenced by UK priorities when an EU member. But, unlike the yacht plan, it is something that has the potential to cause real chaos.

That possibility reveals the underlying reality that, far from being some horrible regulatory burden holding the UK back, most of it is the vital regulatory infrastructure than enables to the UK to function at all. To properly go through, check, adopt, amend or repeal all this might take decades, according to law and policy commentator David Allen Green. Originally conceived by Jacob Rees-Mogg, the legislation involved was strongly endorsed by Rishi Sunak during his original (failed) leadership campaign, but there have been rumours for weeks that, with Rees-Mogg out of the government, Sunak wants to delay or even abandon it.

Already Rees-Mogg is fighting back from the backbenches, with a ludicrous article in the Telegraph (£) that simply denies all the practicalities. It was robustly taken apart by legal expert George Peretz KC, but legal issues aside Rees-Mogg is on shaky political ground when he insists that those questioning – or, as he puts it, “squealing” about – the legislation do so out of opposition to Brexit itself. For what is significant about the latest reports is that the concerns come from a committed Brexiter, Theresa Villiers, on the grounds of their impracticality. Again, reality is gradually winning out against Brexiter fantasies, but only at a crawl. As Nick Tyrone put it this week “Brexit is melting - but slowly”.

Northern Ireland: stasis

It's worth recalling the most notable role Villiers played in the Brexit referendum. For it was she, then the Northern Ireland Secretary, who used the weight of that office to echo Boris Johnson in saying that Brexit would have no implications for the Irish border. It is of course that falsehood, or what has arisen from it, which is now the main reason why the present doldrums are likely to be only a temporary calm. Most of us are so inured to it that what is actually astonishing hardly registers now: a full three years since the Northern Ireland Protocol was agreed, almost two years since it supposedly came into operation, and some eighteen months since the UK first unilaterally extended the grace periods on some of its provisions, the fundamental nature of the Protocol is still not settled and is still under negotiation.

The process has itself effectively been in the doldrums for over a year, to some large degree because of the political chaos of having  had three Prime Ministers during that period. In public, at least, nothing much has changed in terms of UK demands since the July 2021 Command Paper, or in terms of the EU position since the October 2021 proposals for adjustments to the Protocol (apart from the EU unilaterally granting an assurance of the supply of medicines to Northern Ireland). Meanwhile, the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) Bill continues to trundle through Parliament, whilst, formally, EU infringement proceedings against the UK for its failure to implement the original terms also continue.

The sense is that neither the UK nor the EU really know what to do. The EU position seems to be to wait and see how the politics plays out in the UK, whilst the UK government seems to just be hoping that something turns up. Both sides, of course, have many other things to occupy them. But this limbo can’t continue forever, not least because of where that leaves Northern Ireland and Northern Irish politics. By not, as he had promised – or threatened – immediately triggering Assembly elections, and this week continuing to postpone setting a date for them, the current Secretary of State, Chris Heaton-Harris, has apparently acknowledged that the likely outcome would not change anything in the absence of a resolution to the negotiations with the EU.

In so doing, the government has either deliberately or by default accepted that what exists is now what I have called a ‘quadrilemma’, in which restoring functioning devolved government is one of the moving parts along with the original ‘trilemma’ of hard Brexit/ no land border/ no sea border. One likely outcome of this quadrilemma is that no conceivable version of the NIP would be accepted by the DUP, unless it softens its demands, and if that is so then devolved government is in effect permanently suspended, with all that implies for the Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement (GFA), which will be 25 years old next year.

That anniversary is significant in all kinds of ways, including likely US displeasure with the UK if, by the time it falls, the Assembly is still not functioning. It is hard to feel sympathy with the DUP, given its support for hard Brexit, but it is certainly possible to do so for the unionist community. For the way things have developed was always one possible version of the way in which Brexit, unless in the very softest of forms, and perhaps even then, was bound to de-stabilise the fragile calibration of the GFA.

This is exactly what Tony Blair and John Major warned of in 2016 and exactly what Villiers, Johnson and other Brexiters denied. As for the consequences of the specific form the NIP took, for all that Heaton-Harris now says that these were not known when it was agreed, they were spelt out in detail in a civil service briefing at the time. In any case, the core objection of unionists is not to the details of its operation but to the basic principle of a trade border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. It’s simply absurd to pretend that this was an unforeseen consequence of the 2019 deal: it was the front and centre of that deal.

However, as everyone knows, the main barrier to Sunak agreeing a deal with the EU lies less in Belfast than in London, with his own fractured party. This week, Maros Sefovic has again been making very conciliatory statements about flexibility, and it’s clear that a deal is there for the doing (£). But that’s been true for a long time. Whether Sunak can and will do it remains unclear.

Sunak: no discernible agenda

In fact, Sunak’s entire agenda as Prime Minister, beyond that of clearing up the mess of the Truss mini-budget, is difficult to discern, and nowhere more so than as regards the NIP. So far as I know he has very little knowledge of, or prior interest in, Northern Ireland, although to his credit he attended the British-Irish Council summit this week, the first Prime Minister to do so since 2007. It’s known, or at least reported, that as Chancellor he opposed taking a ‘hard’ (i.e. illegal) line on the negotiations by pursuing the NIP Bill, apparently for fear of the economic consequences, but his overall position is ambiguous.

Similarly, it is unclear how he might approach the EU. There is some mood music that the tone of his interactions with EU leaders have been positive, with Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney making some especially optimistic comments, and he seems to have had harmonious meetings with Emmanuel Macron and Ursula von der Leyen this week. Nevertheless, he is extremely inexperienced in foreign policy, and his blunder in only going to COP27 under pressure either indicates a maladroitness in international affairs, or a lack of interest in them compared with domestic issues or, worse, that he initially saw ignoring COP27 not just as having lower priority than those issues but as a way of signaling sympathy to the right of his party that he, like them, is sceptical about Net Zero.

Even if that wasn’t the case, it certainly wouldn’t be a surprise if Sunak’s overwhelming priority is to prevent another outbreak of Tory civil war. And given that the ERG and like-minded Tory MPs are likely to oppose any deal with the EU over the NIP, it’s questionable whether he will be strong enough to over-ride them, even assuming he wanted to.

Same old Tory Party

That isn’t going to change however long the process drags on for, and it isn’t going to be resolved by the ongoing ‘technical talks’ because it is a political decision. In fact, by having gone on for so long, it is now very likely to intertwine with what happens over EU retained law. The ERG might conceivably swallow ‘backsliding’ on one of these, if only to avoid the sheer absurdity of potentially bringing down yet another leader, but not both. And with them and the Tory right generally - including someone I’d been happily unaware of before, Lee Anderson, but who even on first encounter seems worthy of a special award for his prolier than thou self-importance, nastiness and ignorance - frothing with spittle-flecked anger over asylum seekers, how long before their existing disdain for Sunak ‘the socialist’ turns into open revolt?

These three issues are linked not just in being pre-occupations of the Tory Right, but in showing the persistence of Brexity post-truth politics. For, as Professor Gerhard Schnyder sets out in his latest Brexit Impact Tracker, hopes that the collapse of the Truss mini-budget in the face of reality would be a turning point towards realism and pragmatism have proved over-optimistic, except in terms of the forthcoming budget and then only in a limited way, if at all. It’s notable, for example, that Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch seems still to be talking down the validity of OBR calculations.

Certainly as regards the scrapping of EU retained law, along with Rees-Mogg’s continuing denial of reality, David Jones of the ERG  is quoted as saying (£) he “absolutely believed” it could be completed by the end of 2023. Regarding asylum seekers, it is reported that “Ministers insist that the arrival of small boats must simply be stopped, but Home Office staff say the focus should now be on improving the dysfunctional asylum processing system”. And, of course, as regards the NIP, Brexit Ultras have simply never accepted the basic reality that hard Brexit entails a border. The one way in which the NIP issue is different is that, if Sunak does completely give in to the Tory right, which would put the UK on the path of breaking international law as well as a potential trade war, he might very well encounter a rebellion from the other wing of the party.

Politics on hold

For now, almost everything in UK politics is on hold until the Budget statement, but it is hard to see how the NIP can be left unresolved for very long after that. Perhaps it will be settled via some fudge that the DUP and ERG will accept. Perhaps, too, the scrapping of EU retained law will quietly be extended to the almost indefinite future. Perhaps, as happened under Johnson and looked set to continue under Truss, there will be a gradual loosening of immigration restrictions. Perhaps, even, and if only for the most disreputable of reasons, a fair, workable and legal asylum system will be established, including a sensible agreement with France.

Indeed perhaps Brexit itself will be permanently in the political doldrums, a constant drag on the British economy and on British international standing, yet scarcely discussed as if it were the habitual drunken lechery of an elderly uncle at family parties: unpleasant to contemplate and considered in bad taste to mention, until he finally dies at which point everyone says how much they loathed him.

Or perhaps this is just a hiatus until the next crisis, such as a massive rebellion from the Brexit Ultras over one or other, or all, of the NIP, retained law, and immigration. That would require the Ultras to be willing to place extreme dogma ahead of both practicality and political loyalty, but that is not exactly to put an outlandish strain on the imagination.

It’s not easy to say which scenario is the more likely, nor which is the more depressing.

Aaron McLeod 🇺🇦 @agmcleod
Some post rock tonight. @RussianCircles up soon :) #Toronto pic.twitter.com/5TWYtsiIKa

I just posted about the Ghost Flex Course currently running at Reclaim Edtech this month, and it occurred to me that is just one of two! Lauren Hanks and Maren Deepwell are deep into week three of their four-week session Hacks for Hybrid Working that’s been running since mid-October (watch previous sessions here).

It’s been a fun series of discussions around reclaiming your work environs, managing space and time with useful hacks, as well as just connecting around the new work realities many of us share. I’ve gotten a lot out of the sessions thus far, and later today at 11 AM Eastern they’ll be jumping on the mighty ds106radio to talk hybrid working with yours truly, and I’m fired up about that. So, if you have some time to tune in for a non-video mode of considering hybrid work, then this session may be right up your alley.

This is a re-post from today’s newsletter. I generally avoid doing this but the content here is def more “bloggy” than “newslettery”.

So, you’ve committed to abandoning the bird site, joined a instance, or three, and are now a citizen of the Fediverse. This is ! But, what if you want to dig into this brave new universe a bit and see how it works? Or, perhaps you would like to engage with a specific set of other folks without committing to a particular BBSnode?

Running a full-on Mastodon instance means dealing with PostgreSQL, Redis, Ruby (ugh), and NodeJS. Sure, Docker is an option, but this is still a big project, and it’s more than likely that you’re not a Ruby programmer (which makes it difficult to poke at the code to bend it to your will).

What if I told you there’s a way to run your own ActivityPub (et al.) server that:

• is built with Golang (requires libsqlite3)
• uses SQLite for persistence
• compiles in seconds
• sets up in minutes
• takes almost no system resources
• supports custom emojis
• allows markdown in posts (including source code block syntax highlighting)
• features location check-ins (like Foursquare back in the old days)
• enables filtering and censorship (for abuse prevention)
• sports a tiny but quite useful API
• lets folks consume your activity stream as an RSS feed

If that sounds more to your liking, let me introduce you to Honk by Ted Unangst (@tedu@honk.tedunangst.com), and walk you through my Honk (@bob@honk.hrbrmstr.de) setup.

Prepare To Honk

You can either use Mercurial and:

$ hg clone https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/honk

or grab a tarball and expand it (do either of these things on the box you will be running Honk). Then, just:

$ cd honk
$ make

and in a few seconds you’ll have a honk server binary ready to use.

Now, you’re also going to need a “TLS terminating reverse proxy”. We’ll be using Nginx since it is nigh ubiquitous and straightforward to setup. If you’ve never set up an HTTPS Nginx instance. Nginx drops in nicely almost everywhere, and this isn’t a terrible certbot/nginx ‘splainer. The rest of this drop assumes you have an Nginx instance ready to configure for honking.

I’m hosting my actual Honk instance on an overkill home data science server (you can use a Raspberry Pi to run Honk), which is exposed to one of my internet-facing Nginx reverse proxy servers via Tailscale. Using a setup like this means you can go super-cheap ($5/mo) on a VPS. You can also 100% just run Honk on the same internet-facing box as you do Nginx, just make sure to follow the specific guidance for that setup below, and mebbe spring for a slightly bigger server. FWIW I use SSD Nodes (full-disclosure: that is an affiliate link).

Finally, you’ll need a FQDN configured that points to your reverse proxy. Mine is honk.hrbrmstr.de which has an A record pointing to my internet-facing VPS. Your ActivityPub handle will be @user@ThisFQDNyouChose, so pick one you can live with.

Make sure all three of those things are ready for the remaining steps.

Configure + Run Honk

This part is pretty straightforward. Run:

$ ./honk init

on the box you’re running Honk from. It’s going to ask you for four pieces of information:

• username: the username you want. Again, this will be your @username@TheHonkFQDNyouChose identity, so pick one you can live with.
• password: the password you want; pick a long passphrase from a password manager generator that you’ll keep in said password manager. Honk does not support MFA. Attackers will find you. You cannot hide. Just make it hard for them.
• listenaddr: host + port Honk will listen on. If running Honk on the same system as Nginx make it something like 127.0.0.1:31337 so Honk itself is only accessible locally. I used my VPS’ Tailscale IP address.
• servername: the FQDN you configured in the previous section.

If you mess up, just remove the SQLite databases Honk just made and start over.

Feel free to get all fancy with whatever system service runner you like, but I just run Honk from a custom application directory with:

$ nohup ./honk &

You leave out the nohup and &, or tail -f nohup.out, if you want to see the log as you configure Nginx in the next section.

Configure Nginx

Remember that this bit assumes you’ve installed Nginx and set it up with a certbot TLS certificate. See above for links to resources to help you do that.

Now you need to tell Nginx where to serve up your honk instance. Modify your base config to look something like this:

server {

  server_name honk.example.com;

  location / {
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:31337;
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme; 
  }

  listen 443 ssl; # managed by Certbot

  ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/honk.example.com/fullchain.pem; # managed by Certbot
  ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/honk.example.com/privkey.pem; # managed by Certbot
  include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf; # managed by Certbot
  ssl_dhparam /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem; # managed by Certbot

}

server {

  if ($host = honk.example.com) {
    return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
  } # managed by Certbot

  listen 80;

  server_name honk.example.com;

  return 404; # managed by Certbot

}

Replace the proxy_pass, honk.example.com, and 127.0.0.1:31337 values with your specific config.

Restart Nginx and go to honk.example.com. If you don’t see the Honk main page, check the Nginx logs and the Honk logs and give it a go again.

Go Honkin’ Crazy

The Honk docs are useful and quite fun reads.

• The user manual should be required reading so, at the very least, you can grok the honking terminology.
• The server manual shows you some options you can use when starting Honk, explains how to customize Honk’s (it supports some fun customizations), explains user management, and some additional care and feeding tips. Read this thoroughly.
• The composition manual is a must-read since it shows off all the post composition features.
• The filtering and censorship system manual will help you deal with any abuse.
• The ActivityPub manual explains what Honk does and does not support in that protocol.
• The API manual has all the information you need to use your Honk instance via some programming language or just curl.

Stuff To Try!

• Follow folks on other servers! Hit me up at @hrbrmstr@mastodon.social or @bob@honk.hrbrmstr.de if you want to test following out (and get a reply).
• Customize your site CSS! Make it yours. The manuals provide all the information you need to do this.
• Add custom emoji and other components (again, the manuals are great).
• Write an API wrapper package so you can use your instance programmatically (this is a good way to make an ActivityPub bot).
• Look at the toys/ subdirectory. It has some fine example programs you can riff from (or just use):
  • autobonker.go – repeats mentioned posts
  • gettoken.go – obtains an authorization token
  • saytheday.go – posts a new honk that’s a date based look and say sequence
  • sprayandpray.go – send an activity with no error checking and hope it works
  • youvegothonks.go – polls for new messages
• Import your toots or Twitter archive
• Start a Honk instance for one of the communities you’re in. Honk really cannot support a large community, but small clubs can use Honk vs deal with a full-on Mastodon instance.
• Poke around the SQLite databases Honk uses.
• Help someone else setup a Honk instance
• Customize the Honk codebase and show off your additions

Get Familiar With The Protocols

WebFinger (mentioned yesterday) is the on-ramp to poking at things, and I prefer playing with instances I own vs annoy folks trying to run “real” Mastodon servers. Honk lets you play without being a bad netizen.

$ webfinger acct:bob@honk.hrbrmstr.de

drops the following to the terminal:

{
  "aliases": [
    "https://honk.hrbrmstr.de/u/bob"
  ],
  "links": [
    {
      "href": "https://honk.hrbrmstr.de/u/bob",
      "rel": "self",
      "type": "application/activity+json"
    }
  ],
  "subject": "acct:bob@honk.hrbrmstr.de"
}

Visit the aliases in a private browser session (so no cookies/etc are used and you see what the world sees) or just curl it from the terminal.

Explore links:

$ curl --header "Accept: application/activity+json" https://honk.hrbrmstr.de/u/bob

drops the following to the terminal (see what happens w/o that custom Accept header, too):

{
  "@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
  "followers": "https://honk.hrbrmstr.de/u/bob/followers",
  "following": "https://honk.hrbrmstr.de/u/bob/following",
  "icon": {
    "mediaType": "image/png",
    "type": "Image",
    "url": "https://honk.hrbrmstr.de/a?a=https%3A%2F%2Fhonk.hrbrmstr.de%2Fu%2Fbob&hex=1"
  },
  "id": "https://honk.hrbrmstr.de/u/bob",
  "inbox": "https://honk.hrbrmstr.de/u/bob/inbox",
  "name": "bob",
  "outbox": "https://honk.hrbrmstr.de/u/bob/outbox",
  "preferredUsername": "bob",
  "publicKey": {
    "id": "https://honk.hrbrmstr.de/u/bob#key",
    "owner": "https://honk.hrbrmstr.de/u/bob",
    "publicKeyPem": "CLIPPED B/C TOO BIG FOR SUBSTACK"
  },
  "summary": "BIO CLIPPED B/C TOO BIG FOR SUBSTACK",
  "tag": [
    {
      "href": "https://honk.hrbrmstr.de/o/rstats",
      "name": "#rstats",
      "type": "Hashtag"
    },
    {
      "href": "https://honk.hrbrmstr.de/o/blm",
      "name": "#blm",
      "type": "Hashtag"
    }
  ],
  "type": "Person",
  "url": "https://honk.hrbrmstr.de/u/bob"
}

Try all those endpoints and see what they drop (feel free to hit my server)

FIN

Honk is a great way to explore the various components of the Fediverse and I encourage folks to use it to get more familiar/comfortable with this tech. Drop comments if you run into any issues or have q’s (feel free to honk/toot q’s as well).

I skewered the email Elon Musk sent as he laid off half of Twitter. Now Mark Zuckerberg has dumped 11,000 Meta employees, 13% of the workforce. Zuck did it right, including clarity about options for laid off employees and taking responsibility for making an error. To be clear, Meta’s management made a serious error in … Continued

The post Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta layoff message was pretty good appeared first on without bullshit.

Some music recommendations from another place:

Properly interesting selection: "Minimalism in music, German experimental rock, the human voice, ambient techno, indie, hip hop instrumentals and the influence of dub"

Mostly outside genre. Really smart. Pop hits from a 'self taught, avant-garde violinist'.

And from there bandcamp recommended this, which is also mighty mighty.

Via Frank Meeuwsen I came across a.gup.pe which says it creates instant groups for Fediverse.

• You can join groups by following a group account like @grouptopic@a.gup.pe
• Mentioning a group’s name will get it distributed to all followers of that group
• Any mention of @sometopic@a.gup.pe that isn’t a group yet, will automatically create that group (much like my 33mail set-up does for email addresses.)

It seems to me it basically works as a repeater. Mentioning a group’s name will get your message boosted to all those who follow the group’s profile. Basically it boosts all posts on a topic you follow into your home timeline. Different than #tags because to follow those I need to set-up an additional column in my Mastodon interface.

When groups are small then this is potentially useful. But big topics will attract spammy behaviour soon I suspect. Suddenly you have the type of asymmetric amplification that otherwise doesn’t exist on Mastodon. Moderation is not done on the side of gup.pe I think. Anyone can send to the group, not just followers so there’s no route to moderation even. You’d need to mute or block unwanted boosts yourself. The flipside is that it may speed up discovery of new interesting accounts, and allows the type of group interaction that would otherwise require being e.g. in the same instance to be able to find/cluster together. I fear that noise easily will overcome such groups, but for now worth an experiment. I’ve created and joined a few groups from both my personal and work accounts, to see how it plays out over time.

Let’s say you’re going to set up a new WhatsApp, Signal, or Telegram chat for a group of people. It could be for family members, it could be for friends, or colleagues. It could be, which is a very familiar scenario for Team Belshaw, the way in which you find out when and where your kids sports matches are.

These chats have ‘admins’, people who have the power to change things like:

• Group avatar/icon
• Group name
• Group membership (i.e. adding / removing individuals)
• Deleting messages
• Setting whether messages disappear after a set time

Perhaps most of the time, there’s no problem. But things can go spectacularly wrong, as I’m sure you’ve either experienced yourself, or heard about from others.

The above example is of people who already have something in common, or some kind of relationship that precedes the setting-up of the group chat. While I can imagine the manager of a sports team mentioning that participation in the chat is subject to the club’s privacy policy and code of conduct, you wouldn’t really do that for chat groups for friends and family. It would be weird.

---

Now let’s talk about places which are set up for conversation where the context is different:

• Most people don’t know one another
• They can talk among themselves, but also with people outside the group
• When they talk with people outside of the group, the carry some of the group’s identity

Yes, I’m talking about the Fediverse. And, specifically, I’m talking about codes of conducts and ‘server rules’. Just as contracts are usually there to be referred to when things go wrong, so the server rules are there for when something goes awry.

If you’re a straight, middle-aged, white guy (like me!) playing life on the easiest difficulty setting, it might seem annoying to have to come up with server rules when you just want to set up a new Fediverse instance. Can’t everyone just be cool and get along? Well, frankly, no.

Conflict in social situations is inevitable; it’s the way that you handle each incident that matters. If you run a Fediverse instance with essentially no (or very few) rules, people playing life on harder difficulty settings won’t join. Moreover, some other servers might proactively block your instance. And even if they don’t, any small infraction from any of the people on your instance will lead to a look at the server rules. If you don’t have any/many, it’s likely to get blocked.

Most good codes of conduct are Creative Commons licensed. That way, we can built upon one another’s work. The one for exercise.cafe can be found here, and exists largely thanks to the work of people more experienced than me. Like the Mastodon Server Covenant it’s not perfect, but provides a base layer for building a code of conduct that works for communities.

So if you’re setting up a Fediverse instance, be as intentional about the server rules as you are about the technology choices you make! Think about the behaviours you want to encourage. Read and learn those written by those running successful instances. Endeavour to create a moderation team with documented workflows as soon as you can. That way, it won’t be just people like me who feel safe and included — it’ll be everyone!

The post On the importance of Fediverse server rules first appeared on Open Thinkering.

Paul Bailey, JISC, Nov 11, 2022

This is part one of something (not sure what) and raises the important question of reducing existing emissions as a part of any strategy to scale education globally. My main concern is that this presentation, coming as it does from a UK context, makes a lot of assumptions that don't hold elsewhere. For example, electricity use where I live has a much lower impact, because most (97%) of it is generated from non-carbon sources. Similarly, when though I use a PHEV, the energy cost of working from home is a fraction of what it costs to commute. There's a section on 'new buildings' and while I agree that there is a significant environmental cost there, it seems to make much more sense to cyber-commute and repurpose existing facilities. But most of all, I think: these impacts are a fraction of what is produced by much more questionable environmental sources in society: private jets and yachts, pointless invasions and wars, the lack of alternative power generation, continued use of pulp and paper, and more.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Casey Newton, Zoë Schiffer, Platformer, Nov 11, 2022

The Causes of Disaster presentation is almost twenty years old, but some things never change: as illustrated, the cause usually originates with the management and board. The same is true of the walking disaster we call social media, as this Platformer story (and many others) make plain. And to be clear: while there are good criticisms of Mastodon, the exodus from Twitter is just beginning; Black Twitter, for example, is on the move. Elon Mush will go down in history as the first person to have burned $44 billion dollars in something other than a war.

The rise of Mastodon is the people's response to the social media disaster (and therefore, as this Hacker News item makes plain, anathema to FAANG companies, a target to be co-opted and destroyed (look what they did to RSS and podcasting). The more popular you are, the less well Mastodon works for you, making it really hard for advertisers. Centralized search (so useful for spammers and trolls) breaks down in the fediverse. It also means, as Tim Bray suggests, there is no centralized culture.

More: the Midrange popup guide to Mastodon. How-to Geek offers ten fun Mastodon accounts to follow. Jim Groom launches a DS106 Mastodon. Humanities Commons has launched an instance for humanities scholars. Mastodon alternative Misskey, which I tried out yesterday (works nice!). (This post authored over 53 minutes while listening to the 1973 Genesis album Selling England by the Pound).

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Elizabeth Weil, Intelligencer, Nov 11, 2022

Today's social media meltdown news is placed once again in a single post (to prevent it from overwhelming the rest of the newsletter). But let me preface it with this piece from the Intelligencer: "We've made ourselves frantic and useless by assuming we need to transform ideology before we can act....  No, no, you don't. (We) want a beautiful, stable world for the people you love." But "The powerful are putting their desire for profit ahead of your life. The rest of us are getting hurt, killed, robbed, sick, punked, and gaslit." The Twitter saga is but one instance of that wider story, writ large.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Charts

From Jeff’s spreadsheet using MetroVan data:

Flu and colds

Okay, it’s not COVID-19, but other respiratory infections are going to affect COVID-19, particularly influenza. All of them affect hospitalizations. Both COVID-19 and influenza have vaccines which you make appointments for through the provincial GetVaccinated system, they can be mistaken for each other, they both kill… and besides, this is my blog I can do what I want. So I think on Friday’s I’ll give an update on cold/flu information.

From the BC CDC Pathogen Characterization website:

There were 441 cases of non-COVID respiratory viruses on 30 Oct 2022 (the last bar on the chart), while almost a year ago there were 613 cases (on 31 Oct 2021). However, there were 172 influenza cases in the week 30 Oct 2022 and only 35 cases on 31 Oct 2021.

I am really struck by how many RSV cases we are NOT having this year (83 vs. 266 last year), especially since the news from the US and Ontario is that pediatric hospitals are getting slammed, especially by RSV.

This article from 4 Nov claims that BC Children’s hospital is seeing about 20% higher patient volume than last year, but I don’t see it in the numbers. The most recent data I have says there were 157 pediatric respiratory cases in the week of 30 October, vs. 282 a year ago:

If you take out COVID-19, same story — 151 cases this year’s week vs. 196 last year’s week.

I see five possibilities:

• The hospitalization rate per case (CHR) is much higher this year than last year,
• kids are staying in the hospital for longer this year,
• cases are much more unevenly distributed this year than last year, with a lot more in Metro Van (BC Children’s Hospital’s catchment basin) and a lot fewer outside of Metro Van,
• there was a huge increase in the number of kids testing positive between 30 Oct and 4 Nov, or
• the severity was exaggerated in the article.

I’m betting on the latter.

It is quite possible that hospital capacity is down this year because health care workers have been getting burned out and quitting (which is understandable!), but the claim was not that hospitals were running closer to capacity, but that case numbers were higher.

mkalus shared this story from Lawyers, Guns & Money.

---

I know we’ve been discussing this a lot, but Elon Musk’s impulsive decision to buy Twitter for more than twice its market value because he was upset that a painfully unfunny winger satire site got a brief suspension for a transphobic “joke” and then quickly drive it straight into the ground with a bunch of half-baked (or, come to think of it in his case, extremely baked) ideas is a tale of hubris and incompetence so comprehensive no novelist could come up with it:

At Goldbird, Twitter’s revenue division, the company had to bring back those who ran key money-generating products that “no one else knows how to operate,” people with knowledge of the business said. One manager agreed to try rehiring some laid-off workers, but expressed concerns that they were “weak, lazy, unmotivated and they may even be against an Elon Twitter,” two people familiar with the matter said.

On Monday, some Twitter employees arrived at work to find that certain systems they had relied on no longer worked. In San Francisco, an engineer discovered that some contracts with vendors that provide software for managing user data had been put on hold or had expired, and that the managers and executives who could fix the problem had been laid off or resigned.

On Wednesday, workers in Twitter’s New York office were unable to use the Wi-Fi after a server room overheated and knocked it offline, two people said.

Mr. Musk plans to begin making employees pay for lunch — which had been free — at the company cafeteria, two people said.

nside Twitter, some employees have clashed with Mr. Musk’s advisers.

This week, security executives disagreed with Mr. Musk’s team over how Twitter should meet its obligations to the Federal Trade Commission. Twitter had agreed to a settlement with the F.T.C. in 2011 over privacy violations, which requires the company to submit regular reports about its privacy practices and open its doors to audits.

On Wednesday, a day before a deadline for Twitter to submit a report to the F.T.C., Twitter’s chief information security officer, Lea Kissner; chief privacy officer, Damien Kieran; and chief compliance officer, Marianne Fogarty, resigned.

In internal messages later that day, an employee wrote about the resignations and suggested that internal privacy reviews of Twitter’s products were not proceeding as they should under the F.T.C. settlement.

Some engineers could be required to “self-certify” that their projects complied with the settlement, rather than relying on reviews from lawyers and executives, a shift that could lead to “major incidents,” the employee wrote.

I must admit that these excerpts are arbitrary, because pretty much every graf of this excellent story is like this. And it doesn’t even fully get into, for example, his aborted plan that allowed anyone to imitate his advertisers with an emoji indicating that their account is authentic for $8 while also firing most of the staff tasked with account verification. There are going to be some great books about this.

mkalus shared this story from ByDonkeys on Twitter.

---

mkalus shared this story from ByDonkeys on Twitter.

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We have been aiming for proper Matrix support for the Chats application since the beginning of its development. The initial support for Matrix was provided with the purple-matrix plugin. It had rudimentary Matrix support for non-encrypted chats and decryption (but not for encryption). This plug-in has been unmaintained for quite a long time and making […]

The post Toward Matrix support in Chats appeared first on Purism.

Elon Musk’s new Twitter will be completely different because of the changes he’s made in who is verified. Here’s what happened, and what it will feel like: How this will change Twitter Currently, the Twitter algorithm prioritizes tweets from those you follow, especially tweets that get a lot of interaction, such as likes and retweets. … Continued

The post Here’s what’s sad about the place Twitter is becoming appeared first on without bullshit.

I’ve been sitting on this one for a while, as you can see from the time stamp on this Twitter screen grab. The issue of safety in group interactions comes up so often and I feel this little devil on one shoulder, angel on the other. I can’t claim to make a space fully safe. … Continue reading Psychological Safety?

Source

I heard some good jargon the other day. Something I've spent a lot of time fighting without having a good name for it. Announceable. Something you can announce. A policy idea or initiative that you can announce and get some headlines. It doesn't need any other merit and it doesn't need to be real. You see announceables on the news all the time.

The problem, of course, is that sometimes some poor team has to implement it.

On the other hand, sometimes, an announceable is an art. It it's harmless and fun and costs you nothing and doesn't get in the way of real work.

It's interesting that most ad agencies don't show the same flair for promoting themselves as promoting their clients goods

Charles Saatchi was a rare exception - here's John Hegarty talking about the early days of the agency

Via @davedyecom https://t.co/Q4Ft6rMs4b pic.twitter.com/FDdmUru8KB

— richard shotton (@rshotton) November 10, 2022

Clayton R. Wright, Stephen's Web, Nov 10, 2022

Once again here is the list of conferences and other development opportunities from Clayton R. Wright. He writes, "The 48th edition of the events list provides a potpourri of webinars, online courses and programs, hybrid conferences, and in-person events. Most organizations have returned to their normal ways by offering in-person events. Those who currently provide an online presence may only offer a limited version of their conference online as opposed to the full version that they offered during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Sincerely, I hope readers of the list explore it as they may find events that may be more congruent with their current professional interests than the ones they always attend. Also, they are likely to gain ideas that might enable them to establish a similar event closer to home. One does not have to attend an event in order to benefit from the list. If you want to know what may be the most current concerns of educators, take a look at the conference or event themes and examine the abstracts provided by the keynote speakers." 157 page MS-Word document.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Joyce Hwee Ling Koh, Ben Kei Daniel, International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, Nov 10, 2022

This is a review (26 page PDF) of 36 articles outlining "eight strategies used by higher education lecturers and students to maintain educational continuity during the COVID-19 pandemic." This includes five teaching and three learning strategies (view image). It notes, "The eight teaching and learning strategies effectively maintained test scores and attendance/completion rates, but many challenges surfaced during teaching, learning, and assessment." According to the authors, "Lecturers designed classroom replication, online practical skills training, online assessment integrity, and student engagement strategies to boost online learning quality, but students who used ineffective online participation strategies had poor engagement." Overall, "students may not successfully learn asynchronously unless they can effectively self-direct learning." Which, I think, we knew, but it's a finding worth replicating.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Update on January 31st:

We’re preparing to ship a 2nd build of Thunderbird 102.7.1 with an improved patch for the Microsoft 365 oAuth issue reported here. Our anticipated release window is before midnight Pacific Time, January 31.

---

Update on January 28th:

Some users still experienced issues with the solution to the authentication issue that was included in Thunderbird 102.7.1. A revised solution has been proposed and is expected to ship soon. We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused, and the disruption to your workflow. You can track this issue via Bug #1810760.

---

Update on January 20th:

Thunderbird 102.7.0 was scheduled to be released on Wednesday, January 18, but we decided to hold the release because of an issue detected which affects authentication of Microsoft 365 Business accounts.

A solution to the authentication issue will ship with version 102.7.1, releasing during the week of January 23. Version 102.7.0 is now available for manual download only, to allow unaffected users to choose to update and benefit from the fixes it delivers. 

Please note that automatic updates are currently disabled, and users of Microsoft 365 Business are cautioned to not update. 

*Users who update and encounter difficulty can simply reinstall 102.6.1. Thunderbird should automatically detect your existing profile. However, you can launch the Profile Manager if needed by following these instructions.

---

On Wednesday, January 18, Thunderbird 102.7.0 will be released with a crucial change to how we handle OAuth2 authorization with Microsoft accounts. This may involve some extra work for users currently using Microsoft-hosted accounts through their employer or educational institution.

In order to meet Microsoft’s requirements for publisher verification, it was necessary for us to switch to a new Azure application and application ID. However, some of these accounts are configured to require administrators to approve any applications accessing email.

If you encounter a screen saying “Need admin approval” during the login process, please contact your IT administrators to approve the client ID 9e5f94bc-e8a4-4e73-b8be-63364c29d753 for Mozilla Thunderbird (it previously appeared to non-admins as “Mzla Technologies Corporation”).

We request the following permissions:

• IMAP.AccessAsUser.All (Read and write access to mailboxes via IMAP.)
• POP.AccessAsUser.All (Read and write access to mailboxes via POP.)
• SMTP.Send (Send emails from mailboxes using SMTP AUTH.)
• offline_access

(Please note that this change was previously implemented in Thunderbird Beta, but the Thunderbird 102.7.0 release introduces this change to our stable ESR release.)

The post Important: Thunderbird 102.7.0 And Microsoft 365 Enterprise Users appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Are you watching this? Jake texted me about it, I immediately went to Rotten Tomatoes. The numbers were less than 80, not by a minor amount, so…I wrote it down, but did not put it at the top of the list. But last night, wanting to start a new show, I pulled up “Endeavour,” which […]

Home invasion: Mastodon's Eternal September begins

Hugh Rundle's thoughtful write-up of the impact of the massive influx of new users from Twitter on the existing Mastodon community. If you're new to Mastodon (like me) you should read this and think carefully about how best to respectfully integrate with your new online space.

My first Mastodon post (that I can find) dates from April 6, 2017. I try to check out interesting new life-online technologies, and this was one. But I found it sort of quiet and empty and didn’t say much. Now, following on Muskification, Twitter may become an unattractive online home, so it’s time to explore alternatives. I’ve been digging deeper into Mastodon (so have really a lot of other people) and this is a progress report.

[Update: This piece is mostly positive on Mastodon. But in view of this twitter thread from Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, I’m very uneasy about recommending for mainstream use until such point as the community figures out how to prevent this kind of dumb shit.]

Just the facts

1. I re-activated on Oct 28th.

2. I’ve posted (“tooted”, some say) 42 times.

3. I have 1.9K followers.

4. I’m following 182 other Mastodonians.

What it is

It’s open-source software written in Ruby on Rails with development led by Eugen Rochko. It’s built around the ActivityPub social-federation protocol.

Which means anyone can put up a Mastodon “instance”, invite people aboard, and those people can follow and message anyone from any other instance; the federation is automatic and built-in. So you have to pick an instance to get started, and that might make you nervous, but it shouldn’t because of instances’ most important feature: You can change your mind!

For example, I first signed up with mastodon.cloud and mastodon.social (I can’t remember why). I noticed that I was getting more interesting interaction on the former, so I hit the settings at .social and by pushing a button, was able to migrate my presence and all my followers over to .cloud. It worked great, except for I hadn’t got around to silencing my Mastodon notifications on my phone and there was extended dingety-dingety-dingety-ding.

Sorry, I’m going to stop there and let that sink in. Social-networking technology with lock-in engineered out.

This is the kind of system that we thought we were building the Web to support.

Picking an instance

While the instances are all running the same software (I think), each has its own admin (or admins) running the show. While some technology is involved, so far I get the feeling that running an instance is not that terribly taxing. So the central service provided by an admin is moderation. For that, you get the usual tools for admonishing and suspending and banning users, but you also get the (very powerful) defederation tool. This means that if there’s another instance that has a really lousy admin and is full of Nazis or whatever, you can just stop federating with it.

When you’re logged into Mastodon, you get your own feed and notifications that work about like Twitter’s. You also get a feed of all the posts on your instance, and an (entirely useless in my experience) “global feed”.

If you think about it, this creates two opportunities. First, instances can come with some sort of affinity: Geographical (e.g. Vancouver), cultural (e.g. birdwatching), linguistic (e.g. Basque), or, well, anything you can imagine.

Second, you can host yourself; all you need is a domain name and (for the moment) a certain amount of technical competence. There’s already a service, masto.host, that offers one-click self-hosting for a single-digit number of dollars per month. But, what with Elon’s traffic surge, they’ve shut down new subscriptions for the moment.

An instance doesn’t have to be offered for free! I already know of one, Cloud Island, in New Zealand, that charges a modest monthly subscription fee. Obviously, if Mastodon gets big, either you’re going to pay or there are going to be ads. I’d rather pay. I would have rather paid for Twitter, but I guess that’s not the way it’s going.

I think there are business opportunities here and, more important, a big opportunity for small “lifestyle” businesses; running instances for neighborhoods or small towns or hobbies or tourist destinations or whatever. I would love for there to be a class of online business that doesn’t converge inexorably to global tech titan.

Software

If you’re on a computer with a big screen, the browser interface is just fine. The default setting seems to be a TweetDeck-style thing with (by default) four separate columns for searching, your feed, your mentions, and individual threads. You can also point that last column at the global or instance feed. It works for me.

On Android, there’s an official Mastodon app in the Play store, and it’s OK. There’s another called Tusky that some say is better and it’s certainly more like Twitter, but I find neither gets in my way.

Because this is built around ActivityPub, which anyone can implement, you don’t even have to use the official Mastodon software on your instance server. There are alternatives called PixelFed, Pleroma, PeerTube, Lemmy, and Misskey. I haven’t had time to develop an opinion about any of them, except for I hear Pleroma is in Elixir, which might be a good scaling story. More on scaling below.

The culture issue

So, it turns out that in recent years, the (small) Mastodon community has developed its own pretty-strong culture. If you go there expecting it to be Just Like Twitter you’re apt to get a surprise. I found this out when I discovered that Mastodon’s search function is extremely limited: You can search for Mastodon handles, hashtags, and URLs, and that’s all.

So I posted a question wondering if there were an equivalent to Twitter’s “firehose” so someone could build an all-of-Mastodon search index. I got immediate and aggrieved pushback saying “We don’t want it and people will block you for implementing this” and “They tried at that fedisearch and look what happened” and “The entire thing that you’re doing is giving off massively creepy vibes and I suggest you just take a step back and not do anything.”

There are cultural specifics around Content Warnings and hashtags which I’m not going to try to teach since I’m just learning. But there are also plenty of getting-started guides.

OK, then. I could explain the cultural issues at length here, but instead I’ll point you at Home invasion: Mastodon's Eternal September begins at Information Flaneur. Specifically on search, there’s also Why Mastodon Search Seems So Unclear by Ernie Smith.

I respect unique online cultures. But there’s maybe a problem. If Twitter does implode, Mastodon could very quickly gain a whole bunch of new users, to the extent that long-term Mastodonians are like only 1% of the population, and the newer 99% has no appreciation of nor interest in “Mastodon culture”. The system is flexible enough that maybe there’s scope for an “og-mastodon” instance that would work in a more traditional way?

But still… Mastodon has an API, its posts have URIs, and it’s probably not technically feasible to keep someone from building a search index of the whole space, culture be damned. Now, I am 100% in sympathy with people who want to be able to type a few words into a computer that don’t become part of an immutable eternal public record.

Out in Web space, we have the Robot Exclusion Protocol, which works pretty well. I can testify, as the former operator of a couple of large-scale Web crawlers, that if you infringe on the protocol (accidentally, in my case) you will get angry interventions from people that you can’t ignore.

I believe, but haven’t verified, that Mastodon’s existing #NoBots hashtag is supposed to mean this? Anyhow, if I were one of the core Mastodon designers, I’d make sure this was totally clear, and get a good lawyer to create terms-of-service language so there’d be a plausible legal challenge to anyone who tried to ignore it.

And the Mastodonians do need to be aware, as I’m sure most readers here already are, that there will be certain public-sector organizations headquartered for example in Washington DC and Beijing, that are almost certainly gathering your words even now and will-preserve them in indexed-and-searchable form for the foreseeable future.

I confess to a bit of skepticism about the whole Mastodon-culture thing, based on the testimony of a couple of my tech heroes, both of whom happen to be women of color. See Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s thread; she’s abandoned Mastodon for the moment.

Also Timnit Gebru posted, on Mastodon, “Reading so many accounts of especially Black people being harassed on here to the point of leaving. And also the type of aversion there is to talking about it. SMH. Can’t we have anything that isn’t racist by default?” but I’m delighted that she has found a friendly instance and has made the jump: As of now her display-name on Twitter is “Timnit Gebru is on Mastodon”.

You will notice that I have deliberately not linked to the Mastodon discussions involving people who haven’t consented to such exposure. Feels weird but necessary, at least for now.

Scaling

On Nov. 6th, chief Mastodon Eugen Rochko posted “Hey, so, we've hit 1,028,362 monthly active users across the network today. 1,124 new Mastodon servers since Oct 27, and 489,003 new users. That's pretty cool.” Also pretty scary. Let’s see, a Rails-based service trying to stay on top of a global social mesh extending across not only an exponentially-growing number of users but also instances? What could go wrong?

It is already the case that while you can upload video into Mastodon, the instance admins would rather you didn’t because they don’t want to be on the hook to provide the storage.

Actually, I worry less about this than others seem to. Twitter was unreliable for years and nobody cared that much because what it offered was of value to people. I’m pretty sure that what Mastodon is trying to do can be done.

So, What’s going to happen?

Don’t be silly. Nobody knows. Especially Elon.

But, Mastodon, I like it. I feel welcomed, and the flavors which are new are mostly good.

Rhyming post titles will cost you extra!

@ReclaimHosting Y'all don't happen to help clients start up Mastodon servers, do you?

— Derek Bruff (@derekbruff) November 6, 2022

I got sucked down an elephant-sized rabbit hole the last couple of days taking the bait to see if I could get a Mastodon server up and running for ds106. Guess what….NOBODY!

As usual, it’s never a solo effort. My first go-around Tuesday morning was plagued with errors and issues when trying to install from Docker, so I switched quickly to using an Ubuntu 20.x VPS in Reclaim Cloud, and while I got further than with the docker image following this guide for installing Mastodon on a VPS, I still got jettisoned on the nginx setup (although there could have been much more wrong for sure).

Two-hour stream of Taylor and I figuring out how to install mastodon on Reclaim Cloud

But hope springs eternal, so later on Tuesday Taylor Jadin and I jumped on a stream in Reclaim Edtech’s Discord and walked through setting up Mastodon in a Debian 11.5 VPS, and this time it worked thanks to Taylor’s sysadmin kung-fu. Taylor’s mastodon notes can work in tandem with this official installation guide from Mastodon, and it just might get you where you want to go. Taylor’s notes outline the following:

If you get an error while running this command, you can ignore it:

cd ~/.rbenv && src/configure && make -C src

And when you exit back to root user in the guide be sure to start both postgresql and redis using the following two commands:

systemctl start postgresql

systemctl start redis

Also, when you get to the Mastodon setup command that prompts you for the domain, postgresql settings, redis settings, etc., you’re going to want to have a domain where your Mastodon lives (changing that post facto might be hairy), SMTP credentials for an email through something like Mailgun, and finally a S3 bucket setup on a service like AWS’s S3, Minio, or some other S3 compatible tool.* You can just use default values and ignore passwords for the postgre and redis prompts of the setup, but you will need values for the domain, e-mail, and S3 media offload values.

Here are the details you will need for email, using Mailgun in this example:

SMTP_SERVER=smtp.mailgun.org
SMTP_PORT=587
SMTP_LOGIN=postmaster@social.ds106.us
SMTP_PASSWORD=yourSMTPpasswordhere
SMTP_AUTH_METHOD=plain
SMTP_OPENSSL_VERIFY_MODE=none
SMTP_FROM_ADDRESS=’Mastodon <notifications@social.ds106.us>’

Keep in mind the login and password settings will be unique to your setup, but the rest should work unless you are using an EU server for Mailgun, if so the SMTP_SERVER may be different.

Where I ran into the most difficulty is piecing together offloading media to the cloud, and I would recommend doing that beforehand. If you want your server to scale, off-loading media will be important. This excellent guide on setting up AWS for Mastodon got me most of the way there, but my media was ultimately resolving to wonky URLs, and the following setup is what worked for me, again you will need your own bucket name, your specific S3 region, your own AWS key, and AWS secret.

S3_ENABLED=true
S3_BUCKET=reclaimsocialdev
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=yourAWSkeyhere
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=yourAWSsecretaccesskeyhere
S3_REGION=us-east-1
S3_PROTOCOL=https
S3_HOSTNAME=s3.amazonaws.com

The issue I ran into was the the different methods (and URL structures) for accessing media through AWS’s S3. This is a bit of a breakdown from their documentation, but long story short I wanted virtual-hosted style buckets rather than  paths-style buckets. Seems the latter are being deprecated by AWS, and for some reason beyond my understanding the URLs in Mastodon were using the path-style structure. I may have messed this up in the setup given I off-loaded media to the cloud after the instance was successfully setup—be better than me. When you are prompted to choose S3 bucket style, chose virtual buckets, or something equivalent. Even better, setup a CNAME alias that re-writes reclaimsocialdev.s3.amazonaws.com to something like files.ds106.us. I might still do this, but for now it’s working, and that’s not nothing given the hours sunk into this issue.

Once you get through the setup, there is going to be one last trick when you get the nginx part of the install guide from Mastodon. This was a bear for me given my limited understanding of nginx, but when working through it with Taylor we figured something out. Namely that when starting nginx (systemctl start nginx) you need to uncomment these two lines in the /etc/nginx/sites-available/mastodon file.

#listen 443 ssl http2;
# listen [::]:443 ssl http2;

And below them add these two lines:

listen 443;
listen [::]:443;

I can’t tell you why nginx starts cleanly after that, but it does. Once it is started and you setup your Let’s Encrypt certificate you can remove the two listen lines I told you to add, and uncomment the two above those. Also, certfbot will add lines to the server block that are duplicates, you will need to comment some of these out. I’m including my nginx config below for the server block in question found at /etc/nginx/sites-available/mastodon. It looks like this:

server {
server_name social.ds106.us;
root /home/mastodon/live/public;
location /.well-known/acme-challenge/ { allow all; }
location / { return 301 https://$host$request_uri; }

# listen [::]:443 ssl ipv6only=on; # managed by Certbot
# listen 443 ssl; # managed by Certbot
# ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/social.ds106.us/fullchain.pem; # managed by Certbot
# ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/social.ds106.us/privkey.pem; # managed by Certbot
# include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf; # managed by Certbot
# ssl_dhparam /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem; # managed by Certbot

}

Be careful given this may not copy lines in cleanly, but shout out to Tim Owens for noting you just need to comment out the lines where there is a “managed by certbot” line in the first server block, which made it easier to delineate. The last bit I struggled with is that if you have both a default and mastodon file in /etc/nginx/sites-available/ you may have to remove the default and rename the mastodon file default, at least that’s what I did. I also then went back in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf and specified the server to look for only the default file in /etc/nginx/sites-available/ rather than /etc/nginx/sites-available/* (which means it will find all files in that folder, I believe). I do realize I am jotting down some half-baked notes, so feel free to reach out with questions given I do know it will not be a straightforward install, no how much advice I provide here. It’s a very complicated install, Maude. You know, a lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta what-have-you’s.

Anyway, I think that is a decent breakdown of how I got to the point from which I write this, dear reader, and I also have a ds106 Mastodon server up and running on Reclaim Cloud for my labors. It can scale up to 8 GB right now, but it’s only using between 1-2 GB so far. I estimate it will cost about $24 a month. Add to that another $3 for the IP, and you are up to about $27 a month with no real activity to speak of. I will also be tracking the AWS costs for this media bucket to see what that runs, but I’m guessing maybe $5-$7 a month? So, if you can set one up and are comfortable with a bit of uncertainty around maintaining it, a solid server with offloaded media to S3 will run about $35 a month to start. We’ll see if that proves a solid figure over time, but luckily we control the vertical and the horizontal, so we can scale it baby! This is ds106 after all.

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*I had no luck with Digital Ocean’s Spaces or Cloudflare’s R2, so I had to revert to AWS’s S3.

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