Tucson.Social Meta

Hello all! Here's just a quick update from your friendly local admin. Tucson.social was not impacted by the vulnerability used to breach lemmy.world and other sites. The vulnerability is an issue with custom emojis, which we've never enabled and thus, was not an issue. ***Even so, I recommend everyone clear their browser cache and cookies for tucson.social and log back in to ensure we're all safe.*** Rest assured that we have already updated to the patched version, which brings with it it's own issues, but none nearly as severe. In the coming day or so, I'll spend time to restore the mod-log and then reassess our security stance anyways. I hope y'all are enjoying a relatively safe fediverse experience at tucson.social! Signing off, th3raid0r

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 that our users are indeed located in Arizona, although these measures aren't perfect. They hopefully help to ensure a more authentic user base. Considering our commitment to fairness and open dialogue, defederating or blocking individuals isn't a viable option. Thus, I propose we temporarily disable downvotes until our user base grows. This adjustment will encourage users to engage more constructively through comments or by choosing not to interact with content they disagree with. This change will not affect other instances; they can still downvote and show downvote totals for posts from our community, just as we can currently downvote posts from Beehaw. I believe this stop-gap measure will help us better prioritize our local members' voices as our user base expands. It’s the most practical solution for now. As always, such a change needs your input. Are there other solutions I might not have considered? Or do you think this is a mistake? Your feedback is invaluable. Looking forward to your feedback, th3raid0r@tucson.social --- *Footnote*: Our instance was impacted by the 'Bot wave' shortly after the initial Reddit-to-Lemmy migration following the third-party app debacle. This wave was much more severe for other instances which suffered thousands of bot sign-ups due to their lack of email validation. Thanks to our foresight, prompt action, and decades of experience in DDoS mitigation, we were able to limit the damage to about 40 'stub' users when the dust settled. These 'stub' accounts still exist and contribute to our user count - but have otherwise been permanently disabled.

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 to "Mom" or "Crazy Uncle Bob" on the Meta based platforms. People use social media primarily to connect with who they know, not to carve out an exclusive domain for themselves. #### Our Goals To re-iterate, our goal is to be a social media hub for Tucson and by Tucson - and while we CAN go it alone and de-federate from Meta, it makes our goals that much harder to achieve. It requires additional investments to advertise and educate to grow the platform when we shut ourselves off from what is now a good chunk of the fediverse. It's not a social media hub for ONLY the high minded fediverse enthusiasts of Tucson, but ALL of Tucson, and that goal requires an entirely different approach. One that understands that _most_ people aren't technical, _most_ people begrudgingly use Meta products so they can keep in touch with family, not because they want to. #### In conclusion: **Tucson.social will remain federated with Threads.** It's the pragmatic decision that best allows us to achieve our goals in the world we actually exist in. If this decision angers anyone, they are more than welcome to close their account and move onto something more ideologically in line with their values. I hope, however, they'll tolerate this difference and attempt to build a bigger, better Tucson.social with us.

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 coastal city with no connection to the community. Then after folks are familiar, I want this to become a space to build. Movements, projects, businesses, you name it. Tucson.social is merely our digital "third space", a manifestation of our desire to come together. It can be so much more if that also translates into physical third spaces. \* - note - Every Friday is indeed aspirational. This excludes common holidays or instances where I become ill.

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 through creativity? Even if you're a concerned citizen who's never held a formal leadership role but you've got the drive, commitment, and belief in the importance of community-owned platforms, we want to hear from you! Becoming a board member of tucson.social will require time, dedication, and occasionally financial resources, but the rewards are immense. This is not just about maintaining a website—it's about preserving Tucson's digital footprint, its community stories, local businesses, unique culture, and so much more. It's about ensuring that Tucson's digital commons is always run by Tucsonans, for Tucsonans. Consider the hours you'd invest as seeds sown for the future of our digital landscape, laying the groundwork for a community-owned platform that's as dynamic, diverse, and distinctive as Tucson itself. If you find resonance with any of these possibilities, we invite you to contact us via email at ***admin@tucson.social***. Send us a brief introduction and any notable experience you have in leading or contributing to organizations, moderating communities—be they online or physical—or handling the challenges that come with non-profit work. Together, we can create a vibrant, inclusive, and community-driven digital Tucson. TL;DR - Want to be a part of what we're building here at tucson.social? Contact us via email at ***admin@tucson.social***.

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 not a NSFW one, and will not host communities that typically desire anonymity. (piracy being a big one) 3. tucson.social was never about the rest of the Fediverse (though it certainly is wonderful) we are about being an online mirror of the real community of Tucson to allow for richer conversations, deeper understanding, and community solidarity. Being able to access other instances is a huge plus, and one that we want to maintain! But it can't be the primary goal of tucson.social - since our local community comes first. I invite feedback here, but please note disagreement should be polite, measured, and constructive. The biggest barrier for tucson.social to be able to handle open federation is our lack of moderators. I'd like to start with 3 to make sure our community is well moderated. If you feel that you have what it takes to help moderate tucson.social, please DM me to get the ball rolling. Otherwise understand that until I have more help on the moderation/administration standpoint, I literally can't keep federation 100% open.

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 replacement is implemented. Let's be frank, If a nation state wanted to hack tucson.social, they could probably do it given enough effort - but I'm not protecting against nation-states. I'm protecting against people with vendettas, small spam operations, internet edgelords with egos, etc. So in order to provide a better user experience at tucson.social, a "smarter" experience, and get ahead of a planned change that needs preparation anyways, I'll be dropping the Lemmy provided CAPTCHA **today** in favor of more intelligent and dynamic ones from Cloudflare. They should only pop up if your traffic is particularly "bot like" and should be easier to see and solve if you do get them. TL;DR - This "shouldn't" impact anyone and should improve the sign-up experience of the site.

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 as safe as we can be from bots/spam accounts using our instance as a home. I've also moved CAPTCHA duties off to Cloudflare as well since that's going to be removed in an upcoming release.

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 and require a lot of time to construct. Then implement that much like the above. When I hear ack from the /r/Tucson team, I will start the votes! Until then, Th3raid0r out!