Tag: Aral Balkan

Bookmarked Is the fediverse about to get Fryed? (Or, “Why every toot is also a potential denial of service attack”) (ar.al)

I love that the fediverse exists. And I have the utmost respect for the gargantuan effort that’s going into it.

And yet, I am also very concerned17 that the design decisions that have been made incentivise centralisation, not decentralisation. I implore us to acknowledge this, to mitigate the risks as best we can, to strive to learn from our mistakes, and to do even better going forward.

So to the ActivityPub and Mastodon folks, I say:

Consider me your canary in the coal mine…

Aral Balkan reflects upon the perils of managing his own instance of Mastodon. He explained the ever present dangers of denial of service and the challenges associated with this. (Personally, I experienced this in part once when Balkan shared a link to a post I had written.)

The big issue according to Balkan is the incentive to join an instance that seemingly absolves users of such problems, this however just kicks the can down the road. For Balkan, instances should be limited from getting too big and ideally we should all have our own instance linked to our own domain, the ultimate form of verification.

I have tinkered with using my site as an ‘instance of one‘. Although I liked the idea, I could not get it all to work how I would prefer, so I persisted with my POSSE approach. This also have me thinking about Jim Groom’s reflection on life in the cloud. I guess the reality is that there is always a cost.

Bookmarked Reclaiming RSS (Aral Balkan)

The more ways people have of consuming your content, the more resilient that content becomes and the more freedom people have.

I have written about RSS in the past, but I never knew about the meta tag to put into the header to support RSS discovery.

 <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="https://readwriterespond.com/feed/"/>