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The technical implementations seem interesting. But, who scrubs the toilets in this social network? Who does the boring, dirty jobs required to clean up after

The technical implementations seem interesting. But, who scrubs the toilets in this social network? Who does the boring, dirty jobs required to clean up after users?

TheJoYo 6y ago
I host a single user instance, so I do the clean up which is none at all.
- kstrauser 6y ago
  Same. I've got a couple thousand users, and on average get a moderation request every other month or so.
  - ibeckermayer 6y ago
    Are you liable for illicit content being cached on your server? Like say a user on a server you’re federated with posts child porn, can you be criminally liable if it’s unknowingly downloaded onto the instance you host?
    - kstrauser 6y ago
      I'd say that varies by country, but section 230 of the CDA [0] would seem to say that Americans are generally OK: > No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. Wikipedia expounds to say: "The statute in Section 230(c)(2) further provides "Good Samaritan" protection from civil liability for operators of interactive computer services in the removal or moderation of third-party material they deem obscene or offensive, even of constitutionally protected speech, as long as it is done in good faith." My understanding is that you (if you're American) would be OK as long as you're not the source of it and that it's incidental to your operations, like your intent is to make a message board for normal conversational stuff and it's not called "Totally Not Child Porn Wink Wink.com". One nice feature of Mastodon in particular is that you can configure it not to cache content from specific servers. I use that to avoid hosting images from particular servers that specialize in stuff with a high "ick factor". If a use really wants to follow users on those servers, they can, but then that server is the one serving images to my user, not me. I like that setup. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230
      - ibeckermayer 6y ago
        Interesting, that's my hope re: 230 but I'm not 100% sure. > One nice feature of Mastodon in particular is that you can configure it not to cache content from specific servers. I use that to avoid hosting images from particular servers that specialize in stuff with a high "ick factor". If a use really wants to follow users on those servers, they can, but then that server is the one serving images to my user, not me. I like that setup. I wasn't aware of this feature; can you point me to a source for how to set that up?
        kstrauser 6y ago
        Preferences > Moderation > Federation > search for the instance you want to limit > Add new domain block. Now set Severity: None, click Reject media files, then Create block. There - now you're not disconnected from them at all, but neither are you hosting their media.
        ibeckermayer 6y ago
        Thank you!
      - teraku 6y ago
        Do you have any insights on resource needs of the hardware? One thing I ALWAYS find lacking in documentation of fediverse software is hardware specs for e.g. 1 user instances (as a basic benchline).
        kstrauser 6y ago
        For a very small instance, I'd look at Pleroma. (Disclaimer: I've never installed it, so this is hearsay.) My understanding is that it runs fine on 1GB RAM instance, and by default doesn't cache media locally so you don't have to have tons of drive space. Also, a single user instance will only have to have enough DB storage to track the toots of the users you follow, so unless you immediately log in and follow 4,000,000 users that shouldn't be a bottleneck either.

The technical implementations seem interesting. But, who scrubs the toilets in this social network? Who does the boring, dirty jobs required to clean up after users?

TheJoYo 6y ago

I host a single user instance, so I do the clean up which is none at all.

kstrauser 6y ago
Same. I've got a couple thousand users, and on average get a moderation request every other month or so.
- ibeckermayer 6y ago
  Are you liable for illicit content being cached on your server? Like say a user on a server you’re federated with posts child porn, can you be criminally liable if it’s unknowingly downloaded onto the instance you host?
  - kstrauser 6y ago
    I'd say that varies by country, but section 230 of the CDA [0] would seem to say that Americans are generally OK: > No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. Wikipedia expounds to say: "The statute in Section 230(c)(2) further provides "Good Samaritan" protection from civil liability for operators of interactive computer services in the removal or moderation of third-party material they deem obscene or offensive, even of constitutionally protected speech, as long as it is done in good faith." My understanding is that you (if you're American) would be OK as long as you're not the source of it and that it's incidental to your operations, like your intent is to make a message board for normal conversational stuff and it's not called "Totally Not Child Porn Wink Wink.com". One nice feature of Mastodon in particular is that you can configure it not to cache content from specific servers. I use that to avoid hosting images from particular servers that specialize in stuff with a high "ick factor". If a use really wants to follow users on those servers, they can, but then that server is the one serving images to my user, not me. I like that setup. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230
    - ibeckermayer 6y ago
      Interesting, that's my hope re: 230 but I'm not 100% sure. > One nice feature of Mastodon in particular is that you can configure it not to cache content from specific servers. I use that to avoid hosting images from particular servers that specialize in stuff with a high "ick factor". If a use really wants to follow users on those servers, they can, but then that server is the one serving images to my user, not me. I like that setup. I wasn't aware of this feature; can you point me to a source for how to set that up?
      - kstrauser 6y ago
        Preferences > Moderation > Federation > search for the instance you want to limit > Add new domain block. Now set Severity: None, click Reject media files, then Create block. There - now you're not disconnected from them at all, but neither are you hosting their media.
        ibeckermayer 6y ago
        Thank you!
    - teraku 6y ago
      Do you have any insights on resource needs of the hardware? One thing I ALWAYS find lacking in documentation of fediverse software is hardware specs for e.g. 1 user instances (as a basic benchline).
      - kstrauser 6y ago
        For a very small instance, I'd look at Pleroma. (Disclaimer: I've never installed it, so this is hearsay.) My understanding is that it runs fine on 1GB RAM instance, and by default doesn't cache media locally so you don't have to have tons of drive space. Also, a single user instance will only have to have enough DB storage to track the toots of the users you follow, so unless you immediately log in and follow 4,000,000 users that shouldn't be a bottleneck either.