As a temporary fix, instead of service systemd-resolved restart as per the article, you can try this, service systemd-resolved stop
Once the service is stopped the port should be free. You’ll have to do this on every reboot (though maybe you can try adding the command to /etc/rc.local to stop it on every reboot)
Yep, it might be enough to just add that file with the setting set to no and restart.
I’m partial to ecosia.org myself. Search while helping to plant more trees!
Even without federation and such it’s an issue. Old twitter actually did a really good job of this, but other social networks have had problems in the past,
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/katie-hopkins-impersonated-parler/
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/02/republicans-parler-trolls-347737
We don’t have to guess if trolls will try to impersonate celebs and be successful at it, because it’s already happened elsewhere.
That said, there are two nice things about the fediverse. First, verification is explicitly not offered, so folks have to do the digging themselves to see if an account is official or not. (Which is as easy as checking a person’s web site). Or perhaps confusing a regular person’s account with a celeb of the same name.
Second, you can host your own instance. Celebs might not bother, but official gov’t agencies set up their own domains and websites - and in particular under domains like .gov which aren’t open to regular folks. So seeing if a gov’t agency is really authentic is potentially as simple as checking the domain that the instance is using.
What surprises me is that these seem to be all on other instances - including a few big ones like just.works - rather than someone spinning up their own instance to create unlimited accounts to downvote/spam/etc.
The author (who isn’t OP) is using federated wordpress blogs, so expect to see this pop up if you are subscribing to them.
That being the case, and also considering the rough edges around the fediverse right now, I think the link sharing is reasonable. I’ll add that this isn’t the first time I’ve seen it shared.
Surprised that no one has mentioned Vegemorphs from PBS’s Arthur yet.
Piefed? It does, at least somewhat. IIRC the main thing is that you can’t follow specific Mastodon users.
Agreed. It’s quite telling that despite all the asking, no one has been yet able to pinpoint a single issue on the mbin devs.
The most generous interpretation is that it’s just a half-remembered thing of discontent from folks who didn’t want kbin to get replaced (before it was known that kbin was dead).
For me it’s zero. In addition to reusing existing hardware, I have a subsidized internet connection that I reuse to connect my instance, and even the domain name is free.
Of course I also have fewer users - excluding me, zero.
Instead of having it be completely random, I am thinking of a site similar to sub.rehab.
Instances that are open to public signup would register on the site, and give updated states on how many users they have along with a brief description of what they are for.
Users can decide roughly what size instance they’d like to join and view a list of matches. We could add a “I’m Feeling Lucky” button that picks a random one out from the list.
Because the Fritzbox uses a DS-Lite tunnel.
Thanks, that pointed me in the right direction!
If I’m understanding https://en.avm.de/service/knowledge-base/dok/FRITZ-Box-3490/1611_What-is-DS-Lite-and-how-does-it-work/ and https://superuser.com/questions/1301857/using-pcp-port-control-protocol-in-practice correctly it seems that it’s technically via PCP (Port Control Protocol) that this is known, rather than DS Lite per se, but also that PCP only comes into play here because DS Lite is being used.
(Why point out the distinction? For future readers. I can imagine some braindead ISP somewhere (likely a super cheap reseller) offering DS Lite but then not knowing about PCP, and either not offering port forwarding at all - or they do but you have to fill out a form and snail mail them and then they snail mail you back a printed letter containing a list of port mappings.)
So, here’s a page from the online manual that specifies how to do this specifically for the FritzBox 7530
Based on the original post though I am 100% sure that OP has already seen this page, already tried it, and therefore knows that the warning under 2.10.b. applies to the OP’s case (i.e. FritzBox doesn’t allow it from UI because the ISP doesn’t allow it - that honestly had me wondering just how the FritzBox knows the ISP doesn’t allow it, but that’s a different topic).
And one can prototype this for free by using something like localhost.run or ngrok.com
As GDPR-fans will tell you, data protection is a fundamental human right.
And I completely agree with this. I’m one of those who is a GDPR-fan as well as a fediverse fan.
We don’t let just anyone perform surgery, so don’t expect that just anyone should be able to run a social media site.
So this is the fundamental disagreement I feel. Progress generally entails moving things into the hands of the people. We’re empowered because we can do things like program our own computers, 3-d print our own devices, and yes run our own social media site.
Deny a person that right, and you take a bit of their power away. By running my own single user instance, I make sure that I always own my own content, no one can take it away from me by suddenly shutting down their website (as has happened to e.g. elle.co for example).
As such, my goal here is to figure out how to let ma & pa joe run their own social media site on the fediverse, while staying GDPR compliant.
Of course, the same can be said of surgery but it’s still not allowed. Obviously the harm from letting anyone try it is much worse than strictly regulating it, but is running a social media site on the fediverse likewise so harmful? Is there no way at all to strike the balance?
They need legal experts on the team.
I’ve been thinking about this. You are right of course, but I’d wager that this is outside of what most folks running instances can afford. In particular new devs who want to run their own single user instance.
So what’s the way forward? I have come up with an idea for this. Basically we need to get some organization like the EU branch of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to research this and come up with a HOWTO guide that covers most of the average cases - along with pointers on when something is not covered by the guide (so at least you know going in that you’d need to pay for that extra legal firepower).
On mastodon, you follow a person, which they can refuse. Only then the data is automatically sent to your instance. On lemmy, you subscribe to a community and everyone’s posts and comments are sent to yours. At least, that’s how I understand it.
I think you have understood correctly. This actually provided me with the epiphany that I needed. On forum-like software that speaks ActivityPub (like pyfedi or mbin), there’s no actual need to actually transfer the content. Just send me a notification - with the “user” being a bot account named something like “federation_bot_messenger” with a link to the new post or comment, then bubble it up to the user to open in their browser. No content is shared, and no identifiers like a user name get shared, so there’s no risk of a GDPR violation. It’s just a link.
One could imagine that fancier web UIs might use an iframe or something to display the content inplace instead of requiring an extra manual click - but it’s still only on the end user’s browser that the content is transferred.
We could still have traditional federation - but just as you describe, the allow list for that is only for those instances where you know the folks (have contracts you said) and thus are assured that the transfer of content complies with the GDPR. For unknown instances, just do the link sharing. It could be implemented in a way that instances running older software would still see a post by the bot account with just the link inside. (Perhaps as an enhancement, folks could designate a trusted instance as the primary - e.g. my instance trusts lemmy.world as primary, so when it sends the links out, it sends out a lemmy.world link, to take the load off of my own instance from users clicking on links.)
Or am I missing anything here?
Bear in mind, that few of the people who passed the GDPR have any technical background. Of the people who interpret it - judges and lawyers - fewer still have one. They are not aware of how challenging any of these requirements are.
I think this is a bit unfair. Clearly they had technically knowledgable advisors at the very least. After all, they came up with exceptions like this,
here are two exceptions here: “Involuntary data transfer” is generally seen as not being part of the data handling. But that mainly applies to datascrapers like the web archive and similar usage where the data is transfered through general usage of a page that the DC cannot reasonaby prevent without limiting the usage of their service massively.
That said I think I might have been a bit unfair to the lemmy devs. From https://tech.michaelaltfield.net/2024/03/04/lemmy-fediverse-gdpr/ I can see that pretty much all of the issues raised directly on lemmy itself have since been resolved - by a dev writing code to fix the problem. Even if GDPR isn’t the highest priority, the devs are clearly at work trying to address what they can when they can.
I guess some people don’t get the joke.
The sayings potato/potahto and tomato/tomahto mean they’re the same thing.
No one in their right mind would say a potato is a tomato or vice versa, just like no one would ever argue Portuguese and Spanish are the same. They’re both of a category (veggies and languages respectively) but totally different and distinct items within that category.
Depends on your POV.
In one sense, if ActivityPub can be a bridge between two protocols (e.g. RSS vs email) then it’s always technically possible to cut out the middle man. In that sense, no not really.
From my POV though ActivityPub shines because it’s more content agnostic. RSS is specific to feeds and posts, while email is for email, Bluesky is Bluesky (twitter), etc, but ActivityPub can handle video (peertube), images (pixelfed), forums - including likes and downvotes (Lemmy), microblogging (Mastodon), etc. (Note that the ActivityPub to email implementation I mentioned currently doesn’t handle likes/downvotes for example.)
With the possible exception of email, I’d also say that ActivityPub has something these other protocols do not - ownership over your own data. If you run your own instance for yourself, you always retain a copy of your content - you don’t have the situation of ello.co where if the site suddenly goes down without warning you lose years of work. Even if you use someone else’s instance, if that goes down you may be able to recover your content from another instance that was federating to it (retrieving content posted to kbin.social from the copy at fedia.io for example). That’s the beautify of federation.
(This is also true of traditional email, but things like gmail and Outlook - where the email is simply hosted on someone else’s server - are moving away from that.)
The really intriguing thing about ActivityPub, at least to me, is it’s capability and potential to be a bridge for many other protocols.
For example, here’s ActivityPub via email: https://apubtest2.srcbeat.com/apas.html
That page also references the longstanding NNTP(Usenet)-email bridge that existed for the linux-kernel mailing list, so we could get ActivityPub to Usenet.
In fact there are a couple of RSS->Mastodon projects out there already, such as https://github.com/dariusk/rss-to-activitypub or https://github.com/jehna/mastofeeder
a purely personal or household activity
No chance. This is what makes it legal to share data within a family and, to a degree, among friends. Running an open social media platform is neither a personal nor a household activity.
Hmm.
So running a single user instance for my own personal use (and keeping in mind the nature of federation meaning the only stuff my instance sends out is the stuff that I write) is absolutely not covered by the above?
The UK is not part of the EU. They kept the GDPR when they left, but it should not be assumed that the UK interpretation is always the same.
That is a very good point indeed.
The GDPR is not very thoroughly enforced; much to the chagrin of some people. This may or may not change in the future. It would be politically quite unpopular, a bit like thoroughly enforcing no-parking zones.
Seems risky to rely on low enforcement though. For those of us who love federation and privacy and want to federate while complying with the GDPR - what must be done?
More or less.
I think to make that argument you’d have to first argue that this works elsewhere. But we see warnings like this, https://web.archive.org/web/20221104001618/https://old.reddit.com/r/TaylorSwift/comments/yljj15/swifties_be_warned_that_this_is_a_fake_account/ or like this, https://www.instagram.com/czaronline/p/CvAts_9MFDf/
then I’m not at all convinced that this is the case.
Perhaps it’s a generational thing? Back in the day you could. Bill Gates used to be reachable at bill.gates@microsoft.com and Jeff Bozos at jeff@amazon.com
On the flip side, just because a celebrity has a handle on a particular social media service doesn’t guarantee you can reach them. Taylor Swift has a tumblr but she hasn’t publicly used it in years.
What’s the reason? Two things come to my mind: first, Bill Gates supposedly said he had an entire team whose job was just to read and respond to his public email.
Second, email is direct contact, like a DM rather than a tweet (that everyone sees). The email equivalent would be a mailing list. If you want that, you can join Taylor Swift’s mailing list over at https://www.taylorswift.com/#mailing-list
I wouldn’t mind that much, tbh. Though considering the username in question, it’s very unlikely.
Much harder with a name like Taylor Swift. How many other people have the same name? Even on twitter there’s a different taylorswift - so the famous singer is taylorswift13 there.
My username is probably the wrong one to use for this example.
But more generally - does anyone want to be taylorswift@hotmail.com and taylorswift@gmail.com and taylorswift@outlook.com and taylorswift@yahoo.com all at once? (Well, okay, yes there probably is someone who wants that, with bad intentions, but practically speaking it’s kinda obvious that these aren’t all official email accounts by the singer.)
But Taylor Swift may not be able to sue the other person - she’s not the only one named Taylor Swift after all.
And then someone tries to be abffo8f4813c or abff08f48i3c.
uh … https://joinfediverse.wiki/Notable_Fediverse_accounts
I mean, there’s no accounting for the fans, sure. If anything, celebs seek out platforms that have lots of people to connect them with fans, rather than them bring fans to a platform, I’d guess.
Sure, but it’s not a required step.
Mastodon.social could implement a mimic of the old twitter style verification system for folks who join that particular instance - and those joining another instance simply wouldn’t have the guarantee.
And then threads can implement the verification system for folks joining directly through threads - and again those joined on another instance simply wouldn’t have the guarantee.
And then Bluesky can …
I don’t really see anyone but a commercial company even trying to do this - it’d be a headache - and probably expensive - in terms of the requirements to protect the data used (such as identify card verification).