People keep asking me, and I haven’t really had an answer, but now yeah, I’m thinking I’m back.

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Joined 14 days ago
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Cake day: March 18th, 2025

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  • On the one hand, one of the things we often tout about the Old Internet was the ability for anyone to run their own website, forum, blog, etc, free from corporatization. On the other hand, running your website is a responsibility on your part, and in the convenience-focused Internet we have now, seems to be a forgotten lesson.

    On the third, mutant hand growing out of our back, fedi software should be designed with security-by-default, i.e. no open registration, to prevent the forgotten lesson from being a huge problem.


  • In the wild, it’s far more common for them to just spin up a bunch of accounts across “good” instances (particularly those without registration applications) and coordinate.

    In 2023, this happened to a ton of unsecured Misskey instances who then proceeded to spam most of the Fediverse. It was just a troll in reality, but revealed that the Fediverse is no less vulnerable to coordinated, sophisticated attacks (and with how politically minded it is, there’s plenty of incentive for nation state actors to do so).








  • Wow… That’s quite the journey. Thank you for sharing it.

    It’s particularly enlightening is that the diversity of information presented to you is what helped you change. Not just one “gotcha” quote from some online commenter, one snippy remark about a noticeable hypocrisy. Not one source of disruption, but many. I think that’s fascinating, and extremely helpful for those of us with family who only get their news and opinions and politics from one place.

    Again, thanks for telling your story.






  • Small world, I’m also on the balatro/other games modding discord boat, and it is a rough ocean out here. The perennial argument is that users don’t know how to use an old school forum, nobody wants to moderate it, nobody wants to pay for the infrastructure.

    All those fall flat to me. Nobody even bothers to use discord’s “forums” or pinned messages for their bug reports/troubleshooting, no they just post straight to general, “this doesnt work can someone help” with no details whatsoever. Not like it would be any better or worse on a forum. It’s also not like BBS forums don’t have moderation tools, it’s not some lost art from an ancient civilization. As for paying for it… the whole discord server is propped up by nitro users. Like come on. Money can be exchanged for goods and services.