Switching to mastodon has been such a breath of fresh air. No algo-driven feed manipulating me to constantly check in means that I have a much healthier relationship with it. If I'm, say, on the metro I can use it to kill time for 5 minutes... and then put it down, and I don't feel compelled to pick it up.
Be careful what air you breath in: "Twitter rival Mastodon rife with child-abuse material" [1] [2]. A lot of this was previously limited by X until a mass exodus to platforms such as Mastodon and BlueSky.
Every time I see a post from Mastodon it's always some hate and rage driven rant. Like "I can finally say what I want so f* this and that". Anecdotal of course but it doesn't really come off as less toxic.
What you can do, is curate who you follow / block so that you mostly don't see that. TBF you could do the same thing on X/Twitter to an extent but the platform has an incentive to circumvent your preferences.
If the platform wasn't the problem, nobody would've moved.
Closing down the API, charging for the checkmark, not displaying tweets to those not logged in, artificially boosting tweets by the owner itself etc etc.
it was also essentially unusable without a crapload of third party patches that DJB would not include into the master release, but yes it was quite secure :-)
And it was highly vulnerable to denial of service attacks. It didn't check if the mailbox was valid during the envelope phase, so it would queue basicaly everything, then check the mailbox and send a bounce if necessary. Sending thousands of messages to random boxes (dictionary spam attack) would queue thousands of bounce messages that would be rejected by the (faked) sender domain, bringing the Qmail server to it's knees. As me how I know this...
Thing is, in most companies, is cheaper and more efficient to deal with a sporadic vulnerability than having your e-mail system DOSed every other week.
This is the kind of compromises that normal people and companies have to do all the time, but radicals and cryptopunks like DJB can't seem to understand. Sure, he's a brilliant mathematician and cryptographer, but his grasp of reality outside academia seems very flimsy, IMO.
My qmail setup in 2000, on a humble beige box, was occasionally under a “thousands of bad addresses” attack, but I only found out about it a few days later while reviewing the logs. There surely was a threshold where it would be down on its knees - but “thousands” and even “tens of thousands” wasn’t it. The exchange server it replaced, though, would crash and burn very often, for a variety of reasons.
I'm still fuming from when Azure cancelled my organisations PowerBI A1 instance account, and refused to explain why.
We re-opened the account and got the report working. They cancelled it again.
A scientific reporting project trying PowerBI dead in the water.
I was called from leave, from the beach in Thailand, to try and untangle this mess. I couldn't. I'm the "linux guy" but all the "microsoft people" were at their wits end and didn't know what to do.
A colossal kafkaesque maze mess of Microsoft support agents with cheerful "have a nice day and is their anything else we can help you with" emails canning the project, over and over. AND REFUSING TO EXPLAIN WHY.
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I have a "normal" Melbourne brick veneer home, with decent roof insulation and insulated curtains. It handles the heat well for 1 day but a 2 or 3 day heatwave of 38 degree plus temperatures the bricks heat up in the sun and it gets quite uncomfortable even at night.
