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literature.cafe , but something happened today and they're temp shut down judging by the web page :(
hopefully they'll be back up and restored soon, the VM seems to have gotten hacked.
Heya! It's gabe here. The database is 100% restorable, so we will be back sometime. Hopefully sooner rather than later. It's just been a hell of a time trying to wrangle the instance back online for so many reasons. Each reason just getting more annoying than that last. Doesn't help I've likely been getting sick off and on all week and had a headache and a fever today. I don't know if the VM was actually hacked or if it was the VPS provider being fucky (probably the VPS hosting provider, they were going up and down like a bouncy ball all week) but I will make a more explaining post as to what exactly happened with the limited info I have. I basically logged in and UFW and fail2ban were simply uninstalled and logs were basically showing nonstop VPS up and down time and I completely panicked. I'm treating it as it if was a hack just to be safe and locking as much as I can down further, but it's been extra frustrating due to catching what is likely some sort of illness this past week long. At this point the only thing that's needed from people is just do the usual and change passwords if you used the same password on there as other sites and to be extra safe changing your password when we go back online. I am setting up with a different hosting provider this time and trying my best to fix things back up. I have others I am troubleshooting it with at least.
I honestly feel really shitty about all of it. Not as awful and personally hurt as before, but it still sucks so much and I'm hoping to bring it back up this weekend at the very latest. I'm really sorry :(
If you wanna follow updates I am posting them here: https://sleepy.ink
That's still instance dependant - I'm on a small instance and my all feed isn't that good because there aren't many others subscribing to niche communities etc.
The one that I'm using. Focuses heavilly on retro tech.
sdf.org also hosts a multitude of other services, including a public SSH server.
Also doesn't defederate with any servers and (from what I know) no servers defederated with it.
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jlai.lu because it allows to simply use the "Local" feed to browse most French related communities, while still being able to browse the rest of the Threadiverse using the "Subscribed" or "All" feeds.
To me, that's a huge improvement to Reddit, where it allows language-based and topic-based communities to have dedicated places which are easier to explore.
Some interest specific instances that I haven't seen here so far:
slrpnk.net
fanaticus.social
mander.xyz
There's also a brand new currently unfederated instance for legal professionals at links.esq.social
Sopuli.xyz is a Finnish instance that has a great, tight knit little homebrewing community that was such a nice change from reddit's homebrewing ("cider isnt really brewing/50 gallons minimum batch size") cider ("we're less for homebrewing and more for finding ciders") and mead ("you dumb fuck how are you not normalizing distilled water for mineral consistency and developing your own yeast nutrients? My latest brew has been clarifying longer than you've been in this hobby") communities.
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None, it's all 1 big network. Each instance is a different flavor of the same thing.
Tangent: I don't understand why existing in an instance somehow makes a user any different than anyone else. Yet, I hear people saying things like "typical lemm.ml user" or crap about Hexbear users. It's like people are taking the ideologies of the instance owners and labeling anyone in it to have the same ideologies. Where did this come from?
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Well those instances are very specific and you can assume a lot about the users who signed up there. Other instances seem to have normal spread of people.
We shouldn't make assumptions, but on the other hand if a user doesn't want people to assume they're a Trekkie, maybe don't sign up to StarTrek.website.
Instances have specific signup rules, moderation strategies, and accepted speech/posts.
It's ok to not understand things, but be informed that instances literally materially differentiates users. The impacts are internal and external facing.
There’s a little insight into human psychology provided by this whole decentralisation thing. People tend to get pretty tribal about which instance they’re on pretty quickly. It’s obviously pretty silly most of the time, but that’s human nature. In the end I think it counts toward a flaw of decentralisation, though not a fatal one … a lot of people don’t align strongly with any particular instance or their admins and moderation choices and the tribal baggage that comes along with it all, they’re more interested in the whole network … and yet we’re all forced to pick an instance because that’s the architecture.
Strong ideologically driven instances may be more invested in spreading the gospel, so depending on the frequency of posts that populate /c/all and topics that garner a lot of attention it can lead to certain instances standing out compared to more generic ones. It's kind of becomes like someone sporting a sports jersey versus others that might just be more generic clothing as an example.
Maybe better example might be like how people assume things by the bumper stickers people have on their cars, or signs and flags they choose to display in front of their houses compared to the general neighborhood. There's some passion that may be assumed.
It’s like people are taking the ideologies of the instance owners and labeling anyone in it to have the same ideologies. Where did this come from?
I generally agree, but hexbear exists mostly as a place where r/chapoTrapHouse users went after it got banned from reddit, so it tends to have a specific type of user. (not that I agree with de-federating them, despite not being exactly aligned with them politically)