Notice regarding uploaded pictures
Due to a moderation issue, uploaded pictures are temporarily offline, and uploaded pictures older than 60 days will need to be purged.
I apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your understanding.
I forgot to mention, if you haven't already realized, that the upgrade was successful!
Lemmy Upgrade Coming Soon!
Lemmy 0.19.4 has finally been released! Upgrade will be planned for this weekend in the evening. This upgrade will require a significant database update which will cause a bit of offline time. I'll give a heads up when that will begin.
Let me know if you have any questions or concerns!
There was an issue with object storage. This was to test that it was working again!
Hi @[email protected] - apologies for the slight delay. Work and some other stuff kept my dance card more full than expected this past week.
How do we unblock any instance that got on Oliphant tier 0 but are later removed? Is that something that will be checked for?
I'd like to have a users council or other group-type decision for block/unblocking going forward. If I was put on the spot for my own personal thoughts, I'd say that unless an instance is primarily dedicated towards illegal, hateful, malicious, or otherwise disruptive activities, I'm inclined to not defederate. My own personal differences with the speech or opinions of another instance have ever been a factor in that decision. So, if there was an instance that needs to be unblocked that was blocked on Oliphant, then let's unblock it!
how does blocking and silencing affect the new search system? I guess blocking is obvious…but does silence block search?
Yeah, blocking/defederating would prevent search, so agreed that we need to be a bit more careful with who we block or not.
theATL.social to be organized under an LLC: FAQ and AMA!
theATL.social LLC Establishment FAQ
(References to “me” or “I” refer to Michael (@michael/@admin)
Additional questions, thoughts, or concerns? Ask away in this post and I'll be glad to answer
1. Why are you forming an LLC?
- To ensure the sustainable operation of theATL.social for as long as users want to use its services.
- To limit my personal financial and legal liability from operating and funding theATL.social services.
- To consolidate theATL.social resources under a single legal umbrella and de-aggregate those resources from my personal financial and infrastructure investments.
- To establish the ability for theATL.social to establish a bank account, enter into contracts, to purchase services as an independent entity, and not in my personal capacity.
2. What will be the impact of the LLC on day-to-day operations of theATL.social?
- The ultimate impact will be to ensure the sustainable operations of this instance as long as users want to use (and fund) it.
- In
This is super cool. Thanks for sharing! I'll take a closer look soon
Server Upgrades for theATL.social Services
Fediverse Services (Mastodon and Lemmy) for Metro Atlanta, GA
It's been super nifty watching seeing how both theATL.social (Mastodon) and yall.theATL.social (Lemmy) are being utilized to share information and news during all the...umm...current events in Atlanta.
All of the traffic, however, has increased usage on some of theATL's server infrastructure - specifically, the primary database. Provisioned resources for this server were increased this afternoon to accomodate. As a result, all services should be operating considerably faster.
The server runs on contributions from users like you! Both expenses and contributions are available on OpenCollective. Thank you in advance for you consideration - and thank you to all patrons of theATL.social!
This is part of the dehumanization process. Making gays the "other" signals to the community, and the students, that gay people (or well, probably any adjacent minority category) are not worthy of any respect of decency.
And then there's bullying, violence, or even worse. And when there is bullying or violence, there is no defense against it - because why would that be a bad thing when the community says gays are bad people?
And for gay/lesbian/trans/queer kids, it is just another dagger into the self-respect and self-worth. Having grown up in this shitty milleu in Cobb County, I can say it takes many years of personal work and therapy to purge oneself of internalized hatred.
theATL.social Financial Report for July 1 to August 1 2023
Greetings!
This post will be the first in a series of ongoing financial reports for theATL.social's services, which primarily include theATL.social (Mastodon) and yall.theATL.social (Lemmy) sites.
But first, thank you 🤗 to the contributors that fund operations of theATL.social. Without you, the services provided on these sites would not be possible.
To establish or change your contribution, visit the OpenCollective contributions site
Expenses this month totaled $231.02, an increase from last month's $197.46. The increase was due to an upgrade in specs for the Mastodon API Server, the server costs for the Lemmy Server (currently housed on only one server), and a $10 Patreon donation to the Mastodon organization.
Pledged Contributions (net of Stripe processing fees) are $148.98, for a monthly deficit of -$82.04.
Additional contributions to make up for this deficit are
Porches and Pies, a festival of pies 🥧 in Atlanta's Historic Adair Park on Sept 9th
Celebrating ATL bakers, pastry chefs, and restaurants. Family fun, music, food, beer garden, and artist market.
Join your neighbors on Sept 9th, 2023 from 12pm to 5pm in Atlanta's Historic Adair Park for Porches and Pies, a festival celebrating the joys of baking and eating savory and sweet pies.
The festival will have:
- Live entertainment
- Pie bake-off competition
- Pie tastings
- [Non-pie] food and beverages
- A generally nice time
Interested in participating in the pie baking competition? Enter into the competition by Aug 21!
Interested in eating the delicious pies from the competition? Purchase a tasting pass!
Proceeds from the festival benefit Adair Park Today, the neighborhood association for Adair Park.
yall.theatl.social upgraded to Lemmy v. 0.18.4
Greetings! This Lemmy server has been upgraded to version 0.18.4. AFAIK, there are no major changes, only minor fixes.
Additional logging and service resiliency measures were also implemented along with the upgrade.
Happy posting!
Hey Y'all!
I wanted to circle back on this discussion thread. Things got a bit busy with the instance upgrade (which is now upgraded to 4.1.6).
- With regards to Tier 0 Oliphant, I had initially thought that the list was primarily bottom-of-the-barrel sort of sites, but on closer look, there were sites included that well, people on the instance utilize - such as newsie.social. I thought that our discussion on our Lemmy server, plus DMs and feedback from the Mastodon side figured out which sites we wanted to exclude from the domain block list. All that being said, my objective with the blocks was to remove the known sources of abusive, illegal, or malicious (e.g., spam, malware) content.
- And then that leaves us in the gray zone. There are instances where 98% of the users are great Fediverse citizens, and then 2% are horrible trolls. There are instances where teams of moderators are carefully watching posts, and others were moderators only step in during extreme situations. And there are instances that are for-profit, non-profit, from different countries and contexts, and so on. I don't have any straightforward answer as to where the line is located in this grey area, with regards to if a domain should be defederated or not.
- @DecaturNature had a great point regarding what if theATL.social becomes either a target or source of disinformation. A group of users (real or actual) could create accounts on the instance in a coordinated fashion, and turn over the apple cart of our existing community posting disinformation and slander. It would seem the line would be clear that those individuals would not be welcome, but if someone is being a jerk or insincere, is that enough justification to ban them?
Final Thoughts
I'm going to chew through the above points. Obviously other err...large social networks have figured something out. And smaller Mastodon servers have done the same. It is quite likely that the current server rules are not satisfactory to cover all the potential issues, situations, and possibilities of human (or bot) behavior of theATL.social users, or content that is federated to theATL.social. If you have any additional thoughts, please feel free to include below. I don't have a timeline on changes for server rules, but when there are changes (if you wanted to propose changes), I would prefer if that was a collaborative exercise with the core group of users on this instance.
Thanks again for all your comments and feedback!
I wanted to thank you for your comment! I'm out of time (and steam) for today, but I will follow up on thoughts on your points tomorrow. (I'm in general agreement with what you wrote)
Duly noted! Thank you for your comment!
Agreed - that report is what drove the urgency to implement this. It is one thing if "bad stuff" ended up on the server after reasonable steps were taken to prevent. However, if reasonable steps were not taken to prevent and bad stuff showed up...well, I don't want to be in that position!
Duly noted! Thank you
Agreed - that instance was not blocjed.
Thank you, @DecaturNature - earlier this evening, I conducted a careful review of reading the domain names of the blocked Tier 0 instances. Many instances' names were self-describing the type of content hosted, and those descriptions were suffiicent criteria for exclusion. Others, as you mentioned, were banned for unclear or highly subjective reasons. The instanced that you mentioned were automatically not blocked or silenced because people on theATL.social were already following/engaged with them.
With regards to auto-updating the Tier 0 list, I am in agreement that an automatic update procedure is not ideal, as instances may be again be blocked without cause.
Perhaps it best, now that the worst of the worst are now blocked, to have a better documented review process for any future additions to the block list.
And I know that we did have a moderation council before from our earlier meetings with Andy, but coordination with that council fell apart a bit - which I'll take the blame for. Perhaps re-grouping that group would be helpful going forward.
Agreed. I can confirm that they were not blocked, and I do not see any reason why they should be blocked.
Thank you all for your comments. I will be responding to each point in the next day or so. However, I do see from the comments that there is an immediate need to implement the Tier 0 Oliphant block list, which has now occured.
Information on this block is available here: https://yall.theatl.social/post/55833
Note that there were some domains for which theATL.social users currently engage. I am giving a 2-week grace period for anyone who wants to keep those domains, otherwise the remaining domains will be blocked after that point.
Thank you all for your comments and contributions to making this instance a good place to be.
theATL.social will now utilize Oliphant Tier 0 Block List - requested comments on instances on that list with active engagement by theATL.social users
Greetings,
Based on user feedback and the importance of preventing illegal content, theATL.social (Mastodon) will utilize the Oliphant "Tier 0" block list, which represents the consensus block lists of 60-80% of Mastodon Instances.
The domain block list will be applied to Lemmy in the next day or so.
Of the instances on the block list, there are some with which theATL.social users have followed users, posts, etc. The list of those domains is here:
- shitposter.club
- raspberrypi.social
- qoto.org
- press.coop
- obo.sh
- noagendasocial.com
- newsie.social
- mstdn.jp
- mastodong.lol
- mastodon.se
- masthead.social
- liberdon.com
- feral.cafe
- femboys.love
- cryptodon.lol
- blob.cat
- berserker.town
- bae.st
- abestos.cafe
Barring any immediate or urgent reasons, these domains will remain for at least 2 weeks fromt the date of this post. If users wish to keep these domains off the block list, they may reach out to me. Otherwise, these domains will be blocked at that time.
...or if
To correct my initial post, @DecaturNature is correct. There are ~5 domains currently blocked, not 2. And, I'm in agreement thus far that a "light" approach to blocked domains is no longer appropriate. I'm looking forward to thoughts and feedback on this thread to inform the next steps on policy related to future domain blocks! Thank you for your time contributing to this discussion.
Let's Discuss: Moderation and Block Lists
Hi theATL.social (Mastodon) and yall.theATL.social (Lemmy) friends. Your friendly admin, @michael, here.
Currently, theATL.social blocks two domains from federation but does not utilize any block lists. the Lemmy yall.theATL.social does not block any domains.
My general admin philosophy is to let users decide what content they want to see, or not see. However, the Mastodon UI can make the adding/removing of domain block lists a bit tedious. (There are some tech/UI-related options to make this easier.)
On the other hand, I am personally not a free speech absolutist, and there are limits to what content could/should be relayed through theATL.social's servers.
For example, illegal content, instances dedicated solely to hate speech/harassment, etc. To that end, the Oliphant Tier 0 block list offers a "floor" to remove literally the worst instances operating on the Fediverse: https://codeberg.org/oliphant/blocklists/src/branch/main/blocklists
As your admin, I don't want to make any un
Glad to do so! Appreciate the questions and glad everything was sorted out.
Downtown Desolation Parking Rows in Smyrna
Map created by Tyler Bigler If Smyrna wants a vibrant, lively, and exciting downtown, the City should address the excessive parking lots that dominate our city center. But first, a shoutout to Tyle…
The market is next to the "Beacon" development, at the end of Grant Ave (https://goo.gl/maps/9zcdhhq3u5Ca7vNX7) - super easy to bike to, but there's only one bike rack, so people sort of just lock bikes together, or to random objects. On the other hand, driving and parking there appears always looks like a shitshow, so biking/walking is the best transportation method in any event.
So, all updated - the issue is that Lemmy (currently) does not pull older posts or other metadata from a community from another server until a subscription is made to that community/server.
So when you join a community from another server, you're not going to see a lot, until that server "pushes" new posts to yall.theatl.social
That behavior may change with software changes, but it is what it is for now. The same issue occurs on Mastodon too. If you are on a larger server, you won't have this issue, because it's likely that larger server has been receiving posts all along.
I've reviewed the logs and it appears the issue is that some instances (such as the ones you were attemping to view) are using a newer version of Lemmy than the official release. The latest tag for Lemmy software is 0.18.2, while the last release is 0.18.1. I try releases and not tags, so perhaps dev forgot to do so.
I'll update, and presume that things will federate properly afterwards.
New /c/AtlantaNews with auto-posting from Atlanta-based RSS Feeds
Repo with YAML file that lists the RSS re-posting bots published on yall.theatl.social - theatl-social/lemmy-rss-bots
Greetings!
- theATL.social's Mastodon instance previously hosted various news bots that reposted news from Atlanta-source or related RSS feeds are being relocated to here yall.theatl.social
- So far, the news feeds have been relocated, but feedback on the sports feeds and government news feeds would be helpful:
- should each team get its own community?
- or should all sports related news be located in a single community?
- what would be the most helpful or interesting RSS feeds?
Of course, any user may create and/or post bots too! There is an emerging ecosystem of Lemmy clients to do this in your preferred language.
The link in this post is to a public repository where new news feeds may be suggested!
What's Changed Remove actix_rt & use standard tokio spawn by @cetra3 in #3158 Add TLS support for diesel-async database connections by @sunaurus in #3189 after 30 days, replace comment.content and...
yall.theATL.social has been updated to Lemmy version 0.18.1.
This update contained many minor fixes, but no apparent functionality changes. If you notice any issues, feel free to reply to this post!
The Future of theATL.social: Legal Structure
The TL;DR:
- For financial, legal, and practical reasons, theATL.social needs to move into a legal structure.
- With the current donors and donations, plans need to be shared sooner-than-later.
- While a non-profit is preferred, a for-profit LLC is the least expensive and least complicated structure.
- Financial records will be maintained on OpenCollective, intending to convert/transfer assets into a non-profit or other shared governance model when there is the interest and capacity to do so.
The Details
With the Open Collective donations contributions ramping up (thank you, donors!), Sharing the current pathway for establishing a legal structure for theATL.social would be appropriate as funds are being contributed.
First, what's the status quo?
Michael (me) operates theATL.social services in my capacity as an individual. This means that any income I receive from the site can be taxed as personal income, any services I purchase from vendors are done under my name, and there is
about.theatl.social has now been updated
Updates and info about theATL.social, a Mastodon server for Atlanta, GA.
Reflects the current services offered, how to contribute to the server, and updated standards and practices.
Feel free to add any questions or comments here!
Finding (or creating) a new logo for yall.theatl.social
If anyone is interested in contributing a new logo for yall.theatl.social, I'd look forward to posting it as the primary graphic for this Lemmy instance.
I'm not terribly handy with Illustrator/Photoshop, so any creative contributions would be much appreciated.
And, I would be glad to add a reimbursement on OpenCollective to make note of the financial value of the contribution, which would be funded when funds are available.
Financial Stability of theATL.social
Notes on the Future of theATL.social: Financial Stability
TL;DR:
- Thank you, donors! ❤️
- Contributions need to match expenses - goal of August 31, 2023
- $2 per active user (per month) brings us to sustainability.
- All expenses now posted to OpenCollective
- OpenCollective is requested for use for future donations.
First, I want to acknowledge the donors who collectively have contributed nearly $500 via Patreon since theATL.social was established. Those donations have directly supported the operations of the instance. Thank you! 🤗
However, theATL.social has been running at a loss since the site was established. While this cost was sustainable in the short term, as we've reached the six-month anniversary of the instance, a pathway toward financial stability needs to be established.
Currently, expenses are at ~$200/month, and dona
Note on Privacy Expectations on theATL.social
An anarchist-oriented Mastodon server has seen one of its admins raided by the FBI. The admin in question was working with an unencrypted backup of the Mastodon server, which was also seized.
This is a post from theATL.social mastodon admin:
TL;DR:
- A Mastodon server's data in the US was seized by law enforcement due to actions of a server admin. theATL.social users are reminded that no presumption of privacy regarding their content should be made.
- In the event that such a situation occurs, theATL.social must comply with any lawful request for information from law enforcement in the United States and State of Georgia.
Recent news in the Mastodon-universe reported that an instance's (kolectiva.social) backups and equipment were seized by law enforcement in the US (see attached URL). The instance in question noted that their backups were not encrypted and thus announced both the seizure and that data on all server activity was now being reviewed and analyzed by law enforcement.
It is important for all theATL.social users to be aware that with the exception of personal data, login information, and passwords, content (including DMs) posted to the instance should be con
New Lemmy Community for Reporting theATL.social Mastodon Announcements and News
Greetings - for information, news, and announcements related to the theATL.social Mastodon Instance, this community will be used to post this information. Going forward, this community will also be used in lieu of substack.
Although anyone may post on this group, only posts from @[email protected] are "official" posts. Anyone may comment on any posts.
Zoning for safer streets!
Councilmember Jason Dozier is sponsoring a set of zoning papers for the BeltLine overlay districts to disallow new car-oriented businesses like gas stations, drive thrus, and service stations, and to eliminate the mandated minimum number of parking spaces for new developments.