Hi everyone,

I've been observing a concerning trend on Tucson.social that's prompting me to consider disabling downvotes. It seems many community-focused posts, particularly ones from the city government about Tucson's development, are being downvoted mainly by users who aren't local—over 95%, to be specific. I believe this often isn't nefarious; rather, it's likely the unintended consequence of users browsing their "All" feed and downvoting content that isn't relevant to them. This behavior inadvertently suppresses our most locally impactful content in favor of more broadly appealing posts.

Originally, I maintained the downvote feature because I see dissent as crucial, especially for a platform aiming to mirror our real-life community. However, the majority of our interactions come from users across the wider fediverse, many of whom likely don’t reside in Tucson or even Arizona. This distorts our goal of having the site reflect the community it serves.

We've taken steps to ensure t

As in title.

So it's time to make a decision on whether or not we De-federate from Threads.

What is Threads?

Threads is Facebook's Fediverse platform - and soon folks on Threads can make posts and subscribe to our instance.

So what's the problem?

Well, much of the current fediverse is filled with FOSS enthusiasts, Social Justice Warriors, Right Wing Grifters and other demographics that find privacy critically important. As such, the broad sentiment is that Facebook, being a big multinational corporation intends to "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" the Fediverse by becoming the largest instance - and thereby setting the future standards - with or without the larger Fediverse's approval.

This hesitancy is understandable for these people - but Tucson.social is not for these people. Tucson.social is for Tucsonans, and in my talking to a few average folks around town I've come to the conclusion that most people do not care or actually like the idea of being able to continue to talk t

Hi folks!

Man, time has flown by. We started this site back in June and while our signups are kinda low for this instance. We've had over 120 subscribers for our home tucson.social community and over 200 for the local politics community. People from all over the fediverse post, comment, and consume our content - many of them Tucsonans themselves - just calling different instances "home".

Anyways I can now be found at the Revolutionary Grounds coffee shop every Friday from noon to 5PM for anyone looking to meet your admin.

I'll generally be working from there but would be happy to have a quick chat with anyone that frequents Tucson.social. You can stop by to talk about criticism of the site, praise, or even a pitch for your business to work together with tucson.social to achieve some common goal.

The goal here at first is familiarity. I believe every Tucsonan who frequents Tucson.social is entitled to know who I am and that I live here with y'all - not just some tech-bro in a coa

We will be upgrading from v0.18.0 to v0.18.1 which brings with it many crucial improvements.

I anticipate the upgrade should take less than 30 minutes, and even as little as 1 minute depending on if any issues are found.

UPDATE: Maintenance complete. Hope we weren't gone long!

Newsbot will now automatically post articles from tucsonsentinel.com, and soon other sources as well.

I can use any site with an RSS feed and sane filtering. Feel free to recommend other local RSS feeds worth auto-posting here!

Are you a steadfast advocate for Tucson, fueled by a vision of a digital commons that isn't dominated by private interests, but truly reflective of our vibrant community?

Maybe you're a business owner in Tucson, passionate about creating an ethical, local space to engage customers, while championing sustainable practices that preserve our unique desert city.

Or perhaps you're an educator or student, always seeking innovative ways to bridge the gap between knowledge and accessibility, interested in leveraging this digital platform to share and foster a love for learning in the Tucson community.

You could be a community organizer, deeply committed to fostering greater diversity and inclusivity in our digital sphere, knowing that our online spaces should be as rich and diverse as the community we live in.

Or are you an artist, writer or cultural enthusiast, seeking to use the tucson.social platform to share and celebrate Tucson's artistic and cultural heritage, inspiring others throug

Hello All!

Effective now, tucson.social will be adopting the defederation list at beehaw.org.

This list consists of mostly places that:

• Host content that's illegal in the U.S.
• Have a high amount of spam bots
• Engage in brigading and harrassment of other fediverse sites.
• Provide an existential threat to the community by way of misinformation, bigotry, or hate.

I know this is contentious for a few, but I need to be clear here:

1. With the removal of CAPTCHA support in v0.18.0 the increase of bots on the network is expected to increase. Engaging with this issue by responding to future potential spam when it arrives will be a time-sink that I cannot handle alone - thus we need to defederate in a preventative fashion given our current capabilities.
2. tucson.social was NEVER EVER meant to be a community with cutting edge privacy features. We do not support TOR, and don't think we ever will. TOR users must access our communities from a different instance. This community is no

Hi All,

In the next update of lemmy there appears to be a change that removes the ability to use a CAPTCHA entirely. However, it will also ship crucial changes to how it functions such that the app will be WAY more bandwidth efficient and caching friendly.

Originally, I held the position that I would stay on the older version of 0.17.4 (the present version) and would only upgrade once CAPTCHA's were re-introduced in some way. However, given the hosting and bandwidth costs associated with running websockets to users, it makes better sense to use my resources and offload CAPTCHA to Cloudflare and upgrade to the next release.

To be clear, CAPTCHA and similar technologies do have flaws - especially the one Lemmy had been using. And that they also pose issues for people of varying abilities. However it's critical that these deterrents exist to keep low effort attacks and exploitation at bay. I still urge the developers to roll back the removal of the old CAPTCHA until a direct replace

Hi All!

Hope everyone is having a wonderful week!

Today I got permission from /u/omniiac to use his new "Tucson Flag" as our server icon.

Feel free to stop by his Insta for more cool art! https://www.instagram.com/omniiac/

The server icon should now be a LOT more identifiable in your browser tab list.

In other news:

Tucson.social is behind a cloudflare proxy for DDOS protection and such. I'd disabled the rules that were known to break Federation (the Kbin fiasco), but there were still some other rules that were causing issues. Notably, the OWASP rule set that attempts to protect us from malicious SQL injection, cookie spoofing, etc. However, this rule was blocking some federation activity as well as breaking image uploads.

In the short term, this ruleset has been disabled. In the long term, I will craft a more specific inclusion list so that we can protect ourselves while not also breaking things.

EDIT/UPDATE: More permanent exclusion list has been crafted, we're now about

Alright! The site is here, we can post as many sunset photos as we want!

But now begins the process of creating the rules by which we will abide.

In the next 7 days, I will hopefully hear from the /r/Tucson moderation team about what they'd like to do. Given the outcome of that we will either start from the /r/Tucson baseline or craft our own rules. Either way, I believe that hosting the Community Rules and Terms of Service in Github where discussion about them can be meaningfully had.

If we choose the /r/Tucson baseline, all the rules will be maintained and the Github Repository starts there, we would also adopt relevant regulatory stanzas from the Reddit TOS (we have to abide by much the same rules they do) whilst adopting it for a Federated reality. Those rules would then be placed in a public github repository for all to see, and offer improvements to.

If we choose to forge our own path, I will start with a vote on a baseline template - after all - these documents are long a