Artisan Chat Status

Off-site status updates for artisan.chat

As I've been suggesting was inevitable based on the previous post, mastodon.Art has booted me from the Discord (just a few days before the server was being closed anyway). Less inevitable: they've defederated from us, silencing our server from their end.

“Centrism harmful to marginalized communities.”

The private reason field, I am told, is simply Karen so, since this is purely about me and not any actual complaint about the instance itself, it's a pretty clear signal that they want me to step down. And they're by far the 800-pound gorilla in this – we have more follow relationships with them than we do with the orders-of-magnitude larger flagship instance, mastodon.social.

So that's it: I'm out, and actively looking for a replacement. It's not a great rush, though obviously for y'all's sake I'd like to get it done ASAP so you're un-silenced. I've set October 31 as the goal since that's the EOY for the LLC, and shutting it down before that saves the $75 annual-report fee for the next year. The instance has the money if that deadline doesn't happen, though.

I have been terrible at writing monthly reports so I need to add up what our money situation looks like and get back to everybody with it (it's pretty simple, shouldn't take long if Patreon cooperates), but big-picture: the Patreon/Ko-Fi payments cover the Mastohost bill with enough left over to save for when Patreon randomly decides to skip a month, or we need to increase our database storage, etc. I expect we'll lose some “I forgot I was still donating to that fediverse thing after I went back to Twitter” folks during a changeover, but I'm sure with a little encouragement enough other folks will step up to keep that going.

Beyond that, Mastohost covers almost everything technical. A future administrator will want to spin up their own LLC (they're not transferable) or local equivalent, get a little liability insurance and a DMCA contact/number (or transfer this one, if that's a thing), and set up to pay Hugo the monthly fee and... that's about it. There's a whole official Discord for server owners, and folks there will answer any questions you might have. All you really need to do is the one thing I've been terrible at: schmooze. Get Artisans to know each other, get outsiders to follow Artisans, start fun hashtag games, all that kind of thing. Put the social in social media, y'know?

If this could be you, ping me at @Artifex.

If not, continue to keep an eye on the announcements, which is where I'll be calling on you to make collective decisions about who takes over and how. I'll also announce them as @Artifex in case you're on a client that doesn't show announcements, so make sure you follow that account (and once you've done that, you can click on the little bell in its profile on the web to get notifications of when it posts).

If you're not Extremely Fedi-Online, you may not even be aware of it, but at the moment there's a pitched battle between a bunch of young trans women and a bunch of allies of a Black man (Ro, creator of The Bad Space[^1] list of potentially-bad instances).

Or so it appears. I... have some doubts.

But I don't care about the stated arguments on either side.

I care about the chaos agents who are making false-flag statements “in support” of one side, then dashing to their alts on the other side to denounce them. I care about the chaos agents who are doing password resets and dictionary attacks to make it look like the other side is trying to hack servers.

I've heard people suggest this looks like a KiwiFarms op.

I've heard people suggest this looks like a Zuckerberg op.

I've heard people suggest this looks like a Musk op.

I haven't seen any hard evidence of any of these things, but the fact that those things are all plausible, and even if none of them are true, those are all parties who are or would be cheering the events should make every last one of us pause and ask ourselves what in the world we're thinking.

So that's all I have to say: take a few calming breaths, and when someone comes up with the latest outrageous thing you should be outraged about: stop. Ask yourself who they are. If you know who they are, ask them who they got the information from. If it's something the “other side” really did, ask yourself if it was really the “other side.” If you're really sure it was, ask yourself if they were responding to something “your side” really did. And so forth.

(And then check yourself. If there wasn't a lot of racism and transmisia on fedi, this fault line wouldn't exist to be exploited. But stop gleefully helping the chaos agents who are exploiting it.)

[^1]: Disclosure: Artisan Chat has been assigned a side since we're one of the sources of the blocklist Ro has built, but otherwise we haven't really taken one. Artisan Chat's blocklist is public, and has solid, public reasons for the vast majority of the entries, and anyone who wants to can use it as a source. Oliphant and Ro and a couple other folks explicitly asked if they could use it. I said yes. I will always say yes: that's why the list is public. Beyond that, I have to admit I hadn't really looked at the Bad Space, or most of the other block lists we're used in.

Looks like Host 2 is down for so-far-unknown reasons (https://status.masto.host/). I didn't look it up but I feel safe in saying that's the one ArtiChat lives on, since we're unreachable right now.

edit: and we're back!

#ArtiChat #ArtisanChat #MastoDown

OVH Issues

Hugo reports that OVH is having some service degradation, which means masto.host is having some service degradation, which means artisan.chat is having some service degradation.

So far no actual outages that I've seen (though other MastoHosties are having some), since we're kind of overprovisioned. Our background queues are backing up, though, so things are taking extra time to get delivered, timelines are slow to update, etc.

Hugo's keeping an eye on it for us.

18:14EST Update: OVH has rolled out a fix and our queues are dropping back to zero.

After weeks of waiting, we finally got the go-ahead from the US Copyright Office to post this magic incantation on our About page:

Our DMCA Registration Number is DMCA-1043892. DMCA Section 512 notices may be submitted using this form.

Sadly, we can't really make use of the reinstatement-on-appeal part of the DMCA, but that's a feature the software will have in the future.

Income

(Yes, I should track down the Paypal and Stripe payouts to get the exact Ko-Fi amount.)

Expenses

That leaves us somewhere south of $90 (especially after Paypal fees) going into December. The Ko-Fi is almost all one-off for the LLC/POB, and we're about to get another Patreon round in a few days, which will put us at about $180 (unless a bunch of people cancel). That'll cover the next month of hosting plus the $75 end-of-year LLC report, with a little cushion left over.

Artisan.Chat is up and running!