Anil DashJun 13, 2023
Okay, Mastodon friends, I rarely ask for amplification about my day job, but I personally pushed for my employer to make a big investment in enabling the fediverse, and I'd love for everyone to show that the support is appreciated. On June 28, you can join us for a (FREE!) hands-on conversation about how the Fastly team worked to support @Mastodon while the service was under a *massive* DDOS attack. Everyone who cares about scaling the fediverse should join: https://learn.fastly.com/security-mitigating-ddos-and-traffic-surges-with-mastodon @devs
Mitigating DDOS in the Fediverse with Mastodon | Fastly

Experts from Mastodon and Fastly’s CSOC team share lessons learned from mitigating DDOS attacks on Mastodon Social and techniques for protecting federated architectures.

Show threadAlexJun 13, 2023

@anildash @Mastodon @devs

Fastly is a publicy-traded company with revenues in the hundreds of millions. Are "Publicly-traded cloud computing company" and "decentralized, privacy-focused social media service" compatible concepts?

Show threadOpenDNA⚙️

@yowtfbecool @anildash @Mastodon @devs I don't see why it would be incompatible without a lot of effort.

A cloud infra company thrives with many successful subscribers and chokes when they're big enough to run their own infrastructure (i.e. Facebook doesn’t need Fastly). Privacy invasion comes from an ad-based revenue model when end-users need to be converted to revenue; cloud infra is B2B subscription model with neither incentive nor easy access to end-users.

Jun 14, 2023 at 6:43amWeb
Show threadAlexJun 14, 2023

@opendna @anildash @Mastodon @devs

you're right that they aren't necessarily incompatible. a major undertaking, but it will happen if there is a good opportunity there.

wrt ad-rev model: the data handled by cloud services will be of relative low quality. however, it won't be of zero value, meaning revenue potential exists. now, consider that a public company has a duty to generate returns f/ investors. what value ($$) represents an opportunity? see: the credit collections industry.

Show threadOpenDNA⚙️Jun 14, 2023

@yowtfbecool @anildash @Mastodon @devs You're right and I don't dispute your logic. Fastly trades on a certain ethic which precludes the behavior I think you're describing. It would be an exceptional bag which made betraying both customers and employees attractive to shareholders.

Unlikely but, as we saw with Twitter, not impossible.

Show threadAlexJun 14, 2023

@opendna @anildash @Mastodon @devs

in the end, something is better than nothing. if we trust in our paranoia and remain vigilant, we can, at the very least, afford ourselves the delusion of privacy.