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@hakan_geijer a lot of these tech bro takes are coming from whitehats that work in Enterprise environments. Some of their arguments make sense, but not for a small crew like those behind kolektiva. The devs are the admins a lot of the times in these situations. Besides, do we really think other instances are going to put up resistance to LEA requests? Not one bit. I'll stick with the crew I know I can trust to stand up for me and mine when they can.

@hakan_geijer It would be nice to have some smaller instances to make it a little harder to get so much info all at once.

That's a fair criticism, but it involves people standing up their own better or at least as-good smaller instances as options with similar values and commitment to moderation.

@hakan_geijer ngl I am both very impressed by the fact kolektiva admins actually do stuff, but also I'm not sure I wanna be on a high risk instance I suppose? Like I'm very boring, I don't commit crimes, and if I did I wouldn't post about them, but I also idk I don't want to be on a high-risk instance.

Like my first thought was "oh the admin had an unencrypted db downloaded? Sounds like the sort of thing everyone says they'd never do until they need to and don't have an extra four hours to deal with an SSH connection to an in-production server using most of its processing power for other tasks". I haven't run a social media server before but I do run multiple VPS for mail administration and I've had to do that before, only difference is I have dedicated computers for this stuff because it's what I do for a living, I'm not a volunteer doing IT server administration from my fucking bedroom or w/e.

The thing that's suspicious to me is that IF what the feds were after was the server data specifically, and IF it wasn't a coincidence (which seems reasonable to assume, if you assume a mantra that you maybe shouldn't underestimate the imperial secret police), it's weird they knew precisely when to hit. I wouldn't jump to "there's a rat", there are several ways it could happen with all the tools available to the feds, but I am interested in how they knew when to hit.

I think there is also a good launch off point to think about how situations like this happen because there really are not enough hands on deck, as it were, to have clear and clean role based engagement that insulates the larger whole from bad beats. Wearing many hats that create a kind of crossover contamination isnt just one person's error or folly, its an ecosystem fault to some degree that someone feels they need to wear every hat and then manage that on their ownsome.

And even though there might be disagreement on divvying things up by roles and keeping them isolated from one another for insulation purposes, the point of there not being enough hands to do it well remains.

@hakan_geijer especially hearing it from people who still use Twitter and Instagram. Cops can just say please and see all your DMs on those platforms, they don't even need to raid your house for that. I don't know how to admin a server and I'm pretty grateful there's anarchists willing to do it.

@hakan_geijer

Lol. Yup.