The other key thing we need to work on is setting up external monitoring of the infrastructure, so people can understand when infrastructure is down, and possibly why it's down, etc.

In terms of future commitments: the largest thing we have identified as a blocker for launching additional community services (such as Lemmy or kbin, for example) is the lack of a single sign-on infrastructure for Treehouse.

We discussed SSO options for a while, such as LDAP/Kerberos and Keycloak.

We concluded that there was not really any pre-existing solution that was developed on a stack that we felt confident maintaining (for example: we are not going to deploy Active Directory because we do not have the resources to manage a Windows machine, and Keycloak is a giant pile of barely-maintained Java), so we are considering writing our own light-weight OIDC/SAML single sign-on solution.

Although there is interest in deploying a Lemmy or kbin instance for discussion boards, this will roll out before we deploy a Lemmy or kbin instance. This also allows Lemmy and kbin to mature a little more before we pick and deploy one of them.

The other infrastructure issue is e-mail deliverability. Originally, Treehouse used my own personal e-mail infrastructure, which had excellent IP reputation and good deliverability.

Earlier this year I decided to decommission that infrastructure, and Treehouse now acquires its e-mail infrastructure from MXroute. Due to the providers that MXroute uses for its own infrastructure, we have had less than stellar e-mail deliverability.

We are open to suggestions from the general public on how to proceed with solving the e-mail problem.

What is not going well?

In a short word: Infrastructure.

Basically, Treehouse's community services have come about through experiments.

As a result of this, the infrastructure is entangled with my own personal infrastructure, although it is becoming less entangled over time due to the adoption of OpenStack on the hosts: Treehouse infrastructure now has its own dedicated kubernetes cluster, but further isolation work needs to be done before access can be given to more of our volunteers.

At present, the plan is to abstract most of these problems away with service accounts and IaC. Once the infrastructure is fully detangled, more "break glass" access will be given as needed to trusted volunteers.

The other problem is that we use kubernetes, and specifically the knative framework on top of kubernetes, with a custom traefik ingress setup. This setup is not particularly well-supported by upstream knative, although I am working on plans to upstream that work into knative directly, which should help a lot.

We were going to consider switching to Nomad, but Hashicorp decided to change the license, so we're probably not going to do that now.

What is not going well?

In a short word: Infrastructure.

Basically, Treehouse's community services have come about through experiments.

As a result of this, the infrastructure is entangled with my own personal infrastructure, although it is becoming less entangled over time due to the adoption of OpenStack on the hosts: Treehouse infrastructure now has its own dedicated kubernetes cluster, but further isolation work needs to be done before access can be given to more of our volunteers.

At present, the plan is to abstract most of these problems away with service accounts and IaC. Once the infrastructure is fully detangled, more "break glass" access will be given as needed to trusted volunteers.

The other problem is that we use kubernetes, and specifically the knative framework on top of kubernetes, with a custom traefik ingress setup. This setup is not particularly well-supported by upstream knative, although I am working on plans to upstream that work into knative directly, which should help a lot.

We were going to consider switching to Nomad, but Hashicorp decided to change the license, so we're probably not going to do that now.

What is going well?

We have built a very active, and well-moderated community, which has presence across multiple channels (Discord, Mastodon). This community is meaningful to a lot of people.

We have made useful contributions to the tools we use to manage our community, such as the Mastodon +th patchset, which adds additional capabilities to Mastodon based on the observations of our moderation team.

For the most part, we are beating our moderation SLOs: on both platforms, abuse reports get handled frequently within minutes of being received.

What is going well?

We have built a very active, and well-moderated community, which has presence across multiple channels (Discord, Mastodon). This community is meaningful to a lot of people.

We have made useful contributions to the tools we use to manage our community, such as the Mastodon +th patchset, which adds additional capabilities to Mastodon based on the observations of our moderation team.

For the most part, we are beating our moderation SLOs: on both platforms, abuse reports get handled frequently within minutes of being received.

First, to set why we did this: in just a few weeks, the Treehouse community will be 2 years old.

I originally started it partially in response to the fact that the decimation of Freenode resulted in a lot of my social graph being across disparate networks. I wanted to solve that problem, so I met people where they already were: Discord.

Another side-note (because this is the Internet): I don't like Discord, but it is a means to an end. We have evaluated Matrix multiple times, including setting up Matrix infrastructure, and have found the tooling unsuitable for production service. Same with XMPP. People are already using it, anyway.

And so, we decided that this would be a good time to have an off-site, so that we could get as many people involved in making this thing happen in the same space talking about what we've built.

We wanted to answer questions like:

- What commitments can we reasonably make in the future with the staffing resources we have?

- Out of those, which commitments SHOULD we make?

- What is going well?

- What is not going well?

Over the weekend, a lot of the lovely volunteers who help to staff the Treehouse community got together in Seattle at an off-site.

This thread, for transparency, will outline the topics discussed at the off-site, and what future steps we will be rolling out in the future based on said discussions.

As a side-note (because this is the Internet): everyone who attended the off-site was vaccinated, and common-sense COVID mitigations were taken wherever possible. A remote participation option was also available, which some attendees used.

Bluesky is pretty similar to Twitter. All of the accounts that have followed me there are bots or accounts with 20k follower/followings. 😭

Are the old posts gone?

finally found 4 strips after visiting three more stores today 😭

"The flame wars on soc.culture.african.american ignited on day one, despite the fact that the new group's charter tried to prohibit it. The participants scorched the earth, made it virtually uninhabitable for any black person to survive without their intelligence, morality, political interests, even their very identity being demeaned [...] This almost certainly went unnoticed by the vast majority of those already in, or headed to, cyberspace, but this reality awaited legions of black folk about to enter."

This excerpt from Charlton McIlwain's "Black Software" relates to a federated Internet social space from the year 1990, but to be honest, it could be describing the Fediverse in 2017, 2020, or today.

We have to do better.

Went to four pharmacies yesterday and not a single one had atomoxetine 😡 fml

Intessere Rivoluzioni 2023 https://gabrio.noblogs.org/post/2023/08/12/intessere-rivoluzioni-2023/#intessererivoluzioni#gentrificazione#SPECULAZIONE#ecologia#General#EsseNon#lavoro

Helo Storm

Helo Storm è il remake di un vecchio gioco arcade degli anni '80 chiamato Silkworm. Combattete con un elicottero o una jeep militare!

LINK --> https://www.lealternative.net/2023/08/11/helo-storm/

#Desktop