jr conlin's ink stained banana

So, stemming from my departure from Twitter, i decided to go for the third phase of being on Mastodon, and set up my own server. Mastodon is interesting because it’s pretty much like email. This may become a problem in the future, but i also tend to post a lot and have a fair bit of media in my posts, so paying for a server instead of just dropping a few coins in someone else’s bucket seemed like a fairer option.

(Even though i said i would never set up a server because “who wants to deal with that nightmare”?)

## The failed attempt

The first try was… not successful. i still don’t quite know why. i got an instance, and tried doing a docker-compose style install. Everything mostly went correctly, except that i could never properly federate. Requests would go out, and remote hosts would sometimes get them, but no approval responses would return. There were many rabbit holes to be fallen into, and i’ve seem to have found most of them.

Realizing that my life should be more than debugging this one, particular instance, i decided to try again on a different service.

## The successful attempt.

DigitalOcean offers a “1-click” setup for Mastodon. It’s more than one click.

i won’t go into to the same detail as many of the step-by-step guides, but here are some bits of guidance for the things not covered in the tutorials. (These are also here for my benefit, if i need to do this again.)

• i probably over provisioned. My “free”-ish failed attempt was going to cost me about $20 a month to run. Using that as a guideline, i picked a config that has 2vCPUs, 2GB of memory and 60GB of drive space, which should run me about $18 a month. (i’ll update this later to show actual cost.) Rather nicely, DigitalOcean appears to automatically update packages on initial install, but looks like i’ll need to rig up an automatic package updater, or just add it to my list of machines to manually update.
• Since my image has 60GB of storage, i didn’t get any additional block storage. (Block storage is added as a disk to the image, so you’d need to do some work to wire it into your mastodon configuration.)
• i also made sure to load up my dev public SSH key so that no root password login was possible.
• i followed the getting started steps for the app. i was a bit surprised about you SSH in as “root”, but i’m sure they have their reasons.
• Once i verified that things are working, i copied the ~mastodon/.env.production file to my local machine for archiving purposes.
• After that, i set about updating the droplet’s Mastodon 3 version to Mastodon 4 using this very well written guide.
• That done and proofed, i set about looking at pre-banning the nazis. This page lists a number of bad actors as well as some moderation automation tooling. i’m currently looking at integrating the Hackyderm Admin Blocklist tool, but i just sorta cheated and added the initial batch by hand.

Hopefully things work. FWIW, i don’t really have any plans on letting folk join my instance, mostly because of the HUGE increase in work being an admin entails. Right now, it’s a toy for me to amuse myself with, and i might go back to using a proper server in the future (that’s why i generally maintain older accounts).

Right, just so this is official and trackable.

i’m no longer on Twitter.

i closed my account tonight and will have nothing more to do with that site.

i’m on Mastodon, currently. You can check my network page for how to reach me, or just go to https://jrconlin.com/mastodon

Hey Elon, i’d tell you to turn the lights off before you leave, but that might require you getting someone to tell you how they work.

One of the most interesting aspects of the whole Blockchain thing is how it fails at one of it’s core concepts.

Consider, Blockchain requires that all transactions are made public using zero knowledge encryption to assure that both parties are valid and that no party can double spend. It is built off of the core principle that You Can Not Trust. Heck, advocates practically scream that Blockchain is superior to “fiat” currencies because they don’t trust the banks or government to manage them.

And yet, almost every sad case you read about on Web3IsGoingJustGreat is fundamentally due to someone’s misplaced trust.

Folks are trusting that various NFTs are legit, or not stolen, or will be valuable.
Folks trust that storage and management systems are secure and reliable.
Folks trust that the code for their smart contract is bug free and that the developers tested against all possible cases.
Folks trust that the exchanges are secure against attack and that their funds or holdings will not be stolen.
Folks trust that their fellow coin holders will not cash out and that their investment will continue to grow.

For a system built off of the concept of “Trust No One”, there’s an awful lot of trust at play.

It’s almost as if having a trust free system is infeasible. Unless you have unlimited time and resources, you can’t verify and validate every aspect of the system you’re partaking in. You can’t presume that the various exchanges aren’t favoring other exchanges over your transactions. You’re not always going to audit the code in whatever smart contract that’s tied to your Ether transaction, nor will you validate that the language implementation that runs your code is error free. You not going to independently audit and validate every system and interaction point that is required for your transaction to be recorded, validated, and authorized. Ultimately, you have to trust that someone, at some level is acting in your benefit for some reason.

And that’s where the Trust No-One thing kinda/sorta breaks down.

The problem is that once you trust someone, you immediately have to accept all the parties that they trust, regardless of whether or not they disclose those trusts. You can safeguard against those relationships to a degree, but it’s not going to be perfect because no trust relationship is. In that case, you have to start asking “so, what really differentiates this system with any other one?”

Well, for one, traditional “fiat” based systems have various regulations, monitoring and established law based on the fact that they’ve been “a thing” since the dawn of civilization, where as CryptoCurrencies have been around for less than 20 years and very proudly don’t have any of those. So, basically, you have a system of finance that is based off of centuries of preventing damage from bad actors trying literally everything possible to a group of dudes pushing a “Zero Trust” system by saying “Trust me.”

i guess, maybe, the big reason i’m cynical about blockchain and web3 and all the other crap is that i’ve been in tech long enough to know that you don’t trust tech.

According to my own records, i’ve been running this blog for 19 years now.

Well, 20 if you think that the new millennium started on January 1^st 2000.

According to the same indicator, i’ve published over 5500 posts.

i *could* make a comment here about this blog predating “web 2” and facing all the same challenges that face whoever wants to do any “web 3” thing (and probably as successful about it), but that would probably be snarky of me. Suffice to say, that you’ll see that not much has changed here, nor am i really planning on changing things in the future.

Japanese phone-booth green color scheme and all.

Every year (or twice a year) i’m reminded that most of the employee review process was created by folks that are not introverts.

This is highlighted by things like 360 Reviews, where you’re asked to provide feedback on lots of folk, like peers, and managers, and co-workers, and strangers. For introverts, this is kind of the worst case thing they can be asked to do. It’s not only forced social interaction, it’s forced social interaction that will impact your livelihood and whatever tenuous co-working relationships you may have managed to foster. Pile on to that the fact that folks have MASSIVE imposter syndrome and it’s just the worst time.

This is not to say that i don’t understand the value of this process. Managers are busy people who have enough on their plate that they often can’t assess a subordinate’s skills correctly. Likewise, relying on the viewpoint of a single individual means that there can be things missed. Well rounded feedback is invaluable in that it’s the outside perspective that we may be missing. i don’t know when i am screwing up for reals partly because i’m convinced i’m constantly screwing up, so having someone else give good critique about it is, well, critical.

Of course, my paranoid brain also notes that giving negative feedback, particularly around review time, and in a channel that is used by management, means that management has lots of ammo available to shoot down reasons that you might get a raise / promotion / recognition / whatever. “Well, Bob, i see here that you resolved seven critical security issues and single handedly kept this pillar system operational, but Dave thinks you need to write better comments, so here’s a ${CURRENT_BASE_INFLATION_RATE – 1}%¹ bump in salary. We’ll see what we can do about that comment issue next quarter, right?”

Added into the fun, folks are often asked to list all the people they worked with over the prior period. For introverts, this is going to be a small number. Maybe three or four if they’re feeling super social one week. It may be the folk that review their code, or folk that they might have talked about a project with, or just folk that they have a reasonable level of trust in. Which the other person may not realize. Thus the whole “from strangers” thing above.

Getting back to the top point, i get the feeling that whoever tends to design these things presumes that everyone has a rich network of connections and believes that all interactions are done in good faith. i understand that it’s impossible to address each and every persons broken psyche, but i do wonder if there might be a better way to approach this for folks that are not, let’s say, outgoing in the workplace.

Maybe ask them to put together a list of the folks they felt were meaningful (either good or bad) to them over the past few months. Maybe get in an introvert whisperer who will chat with folks to ask what about that person was meaningful and help craft a statement that the introvert can agree with. Point out that there might be things that the other person could do differently that might make working with them easier or things they do now that shouldn’t change.

People often say that introverts are socially awkward, but i’d argue that it’s because they’re hyper aware of social interaction. They are well, well aware of the weight that actions can take and they don’t want to cause undo damage. These sorts of requests are difficult to deal with because introverts are keenly aware of the sorts of outcomes they carry. For them, there’s no way to do this in a “light, casual” manner. They’re dealing with someone’s life and don’t want their misjudgement to be what ruins it.

Of course, i’m not a behavioral scientist, psychologist, or extrovert (regardless of how i may act), so Far Smarter People than i should probably work on this. i also wonder if it might be good if companies at least recognize this as a source of potential stress and at least give employees ways to either address, or help address it in their own ranks.

If not, folks are welcome to join me twice a year as i stare out into the endless sea surrounded by a dark cloud of anxiety and dread.

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¹ This is a pay cut.