Technology

Principles. That the whole internet and all of the freedom and diversity it can harbour was being monopolised by big giant corporations that had no interest in embracing an open web. Instead, they were convincing the world, especially those growing up in that/this era that the internet had to be constrained to the few walled gardens of big platforms.

These principles were as obvious and relevant then as they are now. Unfortunately convenience is a helluva drug. And, in the "Google" era of the internet (~2005-2020 ?), there was a certain naive optimism about big-tech and the internet, which no doubt lulled us in by its being "free".

In reality, we all really thought that good and useful world-changing stuff was just going to be made for us for free. That the internet was going to inexorably make the world a better place. It was dumb and naive IMO and marks very well the failings of the Millennial generation (to which I belong FWIW). Unfortunately, it's a lesson we had to learn the hardway. There were probably only a handful of people in the world that understood what the new industry was actually doing and was actually about and that had the philosophical will and ability to think it through and communicate to the masses what the choices we were actually making.

We could turn to good ol’ PGP

Possible doesn't mean easily doable, unfortunately. Technically speaking, I don't know how hard it would be for the fediverse. I get the sense that overall it's been a mismanaged aspect of the ecosystem for a long time.

It touches on a broader issue of to what extent the software ecosystem enables users to exist on the fediverse at large as a single user or through a single interface. At the moment, it's basically not really a thing. Arguably, if the fediverse wants to make any claim to being an actual "federated universe" rather than just separate FOSS decentralised platforms (there is a big difference IMO) ... then it should definitely be a thing.

In relation to DMs, then, in a "true fediverse" the answer would be simply something like integrating matrix into your interface such that you and I could easily start a space on matrix and start chatting there if we wanted to.

I've come to the conclusion that for this to happen it needs to happen at the UI/client/app level. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if that happens in not too long a time. An app that understand and works well with all of the major platforms and gives you a single and well designed interface for working with all of them from a single space. This way the platform developers can focus on their specific funcionality and backend while the app/client developers can focus on the UI and the challenge of bringing things together. I see it as similar to the way we all have email apps that easily bring together multiple email clients.

Some of those that work forces...

tldr: yes

The raid was part of an investigation into a local protest.

Protests are illegal? Since when?

Yes, but the title makes it sound like it was because he was running an anarchist Mastodon instance. That's not why, he just happened to be doing a backup when he was raided, the backup was unencrypted, and they seized it. Has nothing to do with him running an anarchist instance from what I can tell.

Maybe the thinking is that whatever that server was raided for may have been federated to other servers, making them also targets for FBI raids.

Edit: Looks like the admin was raided for participating in a protest and the Mastodon instance wasn't the target at all, in which case why did they take that data at all?

Yeah, what the fuck are you supposed to do? Ask the FBI to please come back later?

It's a good reminder for folks with concerns to not say anything on a platform that isn't end-to-end encrypted that you don't want folks finding out about, to not use an email you don't want associated with yourself, and to use some sort.of VPN or Tor if you need to hide your IP address.

And if course use unique passwords but I would really hope people do that already.

Unfortunately, at the time of the raid, our admin was troubleshooting an issue and working with a backup copy of the Kolektiva.social database. This backup, dated from the first week of May 2023, was in an unencrypted state when the raid occurred and it was seized, along with everything else.

Oh the FBI just happened to visit when they unencrypted the database? How convenient!

They stopped teaching about computers. I tutored high schoolers about 10 years ago and they didn't know how to use computers fluently. It moved to the realm of expecting parents to teach to their kids along with taxes and career planning.

Speaking of which, I grew up in the 90s pre Internet, and started using the Internet in middle school. Definitely never got any official Internet safety lessons. Maybe I was a little too early? Idk. But by the time I was 30 schools were not teaching this at least from what I saw

Yeah pretty much. As soon as facebook broke the ice on "never use your real name on the internet" it was over. Now we have entire generations that were introduced to the internet as one that was ruled by social media sites. They were never even taught the same online safety stuff that we grew up with.