I’m still here, which is nice.
I stood up a Mastodon instance on a domain I control using a fresh Digital Ocean droplet. It was delightful for a while. Plus, I owned the namespace, so that gave me a little more confidence.
Then the droplet got hacked.
The CPU was pegged. I rebooted and it got back into the same state within a couple of minutes. I didn’t investigate deeply, but that smells like a rootkit crypto miner. Joy.
You can never trust a machine once it’s been compromised, so I nuked the droplet.
Then, it was time to decide whether to rebuild it or go to a shared instance. I could have rebuilt it, but I’m in growth mode at the day job so I really don’t have the time right now. So, shared instance it is!
You can find me on Mastodon @jpbutler@mastodon.boston. I’m still @jpbutler on Twitter though I’m spending a little less time there these days.
I look forward to watching the fediverse’s continued growth. It sometimes feels a little like 1998 on the web, but people have a lot more experience with computer stuff and social gestures now.
If you want a fun view of history repeating itself, check out Derek Powazek’s Design for Community, from 2001! Human nature doesn’t change very much. (I still have my original copy here somewhere…)