Denise

A guide to potential liability pitfalls for people running a Mastodon instance

denise@dreamwidth.org — Sun, 20 Nov 2022 05:13:46 GMT

[EDIT 10 Feb 2026: please note I have not kept this entry up to date with shifting legal landscape since its initial publication and there are a lot more considerations today. I will update this eventually and remove this note when I do.]

I posted a thread on Twitter about potential legal liabilities for United States people who decide to run a Mastodon instance, and the response made it clear there's a lot of people who could use the extended background. So here is a guide to potential liability pitfalls for people who are running a Mastodon instance, and how to mitigate them. This is mostly US-specific, but I noted which things to think about are likely to apply worldwide. This is not legal advice and you should contact a lawyer licensed in your jurisdiction for the exact details of the liability you're exposed to and a detailed risk assessment.

This is not about just creating a Mastodon account: it's for people who are running a Mastodon server. If you just made an account on someone else's server, you can safely ignore this.

Mastodon calls each specific server an "instance". My Twitter thread made it super clear that people, even people who are running instances, don't know what this means, so having used the Mastodon technical language in the intro, I will now shift to calling them "servers" from here on out. (In several places I am using more commonly understood terms rather than the correct technical terms.)

I'm only addressing legal/liability issues, not the practicality of running a service. Things like "make backups", "keep backups offsite/on a different network", "try restoring from backup occasionally to make sure they're working", "evaluate every release of every new package installed on the machine you're hosting on to weigh security fixes vs potential for your platform breaking", "lock down the machine you're hosting on to minimize network intrusions", "what kind of content moderation policies you should have for social other than legal purposes" etc, are all outside the scope of this document.

A very kind internet lawyer on Twitter provided a few posts that you may want to read for this, although the second was written in 2010 and doesn't cover some of the other stuff I'm going to get into:

* Copywrong Again: Founding the Next Pinterest or Napster?
* If You Build It, They Will Abuse It

( A guide to potential liability pitfalls for running a Mastodon server in the US )

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testing

denise@dreamwidth.org — Tue, 25 Jun 2019 16:26:16 GMT

user
user

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denise@dreamwidth.org — Thu, 30 Jul 2015 04:53:05 GMT

Today I found out that open source community member, feminist, activist, and fucking awesome human being Nóirín Plunkett has died. I have no words for what we've lost in losing Nóirín; I think the open source community is going to keep running headfirst into that loss for years to come.

Nóirín, wherever you are now, I hope it's full of everything you would consider paradise. It's going to be a long fucking time before I stop looking for you at every conference I go to.

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Post for testing screening and re-screening

denise@dreamwidth.org — Fri, 26 Jun 2015 04:51:45 GMT

All comments to this post are screened la la la

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When your code is nearly old enough to vote

denise@dreamwidth.org — Tue, 27 Jan 2015 06:28:57 GMT

My talk at this year's linux.conf.au was "When Your Codebase Is Nearly Old Enough To Vote": a case study of Dreamwidth and all the horrible horrible things we've found down there underneath the couch cushions, along with the lessons we've learned about when to rewrite them and when to leave them alone.

You can view the YouTube recording (sorry, no transcript), or check out the slides!

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Let's spend Sumana's money!

denise@dreamwidth.org — Tue, 30 Dec 2014 21:24:02 GMT

Stumptown Syndicate, the 501(c)(3) organization that puts on a bunch of wonderful events including Open Source Bridge (which is probably my favorite conference) is running a fundraiser right now, and the wonderful Sumana Harihareswara (aka brainwane) is offering a matching donation: she and her partner will match up to $15,000 donated before 1:30pm PST tomorrow (Dec 31).

Sumana's post goes into a lot of detail about why OSB and Stumptown Syndicate are worth giving money to. Like her, OSB is the tech conference I've found most welcoming. Now that I've been (last year was my second year) I'm going to make it a point of never missing it again, short of utter disaster. Unlike many conferences, it's about the whole open source ecosystem -- design, documentation, project management, and culture, in addition to programming. It's the most welcoming conference I've ever attended; I've never once felt out of place, marginalized, or uncomfortable there. Their speaker lineup is the most diverse of any conference I've ever seen. They're fabulous at all the small touches that make the event feel like they want everyone there, from taped-off accessibility travel lanes, to catering that takes all manner of diet, food sensitivities, and allergies into account, to a quiet room to hang out in, to inclusive language everywhere -- and so many more little touches that make it clear inclusiveness is a top priority. And, of course, they give back to the open source world in many other ways: all the tools they've developed to run the event are available under an open license, including Open Conference Ware, the engine that runs everything.

There are a lot of conferences in the tech world that I'll go to, but I'll go with my armor up, waiting to stumble over the thing that reminds me I am not what they think of when they think of their target audience. Going to OSB is something you can do without that armor, and once you show up, you get to spend four days hanging out with some of the most amazing people in the tech world and geeking out about the things you love. As Sumana says, this fundraiser will help to take OSB's already-awesome inclusiveness and help it level up: they're hoping to fund childcare, improve the accomodations for Deaf or hard of hearing folks, and enable scholarships and travel assistance for people who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford to attend. I think these are awesome goals!

So, if you have a few bucks you're not using, you can double their reach by donating now and unlocking more of Sumana's matching funds. And if you're looking for a great conference, OSB is running June 23-26 this year; I hope to see you there!

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Impostor syndrome

denise@dreamwidth.org — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 05:38:36 GMT

I've been talking a lot at conferences this year about impostor syndrome, and if you're interested, the Ada Initiative has transcribed and captioned the talk I gave at linux.conf.au this year:

Kicking Impostor Syndrome In The Head: Lessons from AdaCamp DC and SF

This is the shorter version of the talk -- I gave the longer one at Open Source Bridge last week, and the slides for that one can be found at Kicking Impostor Syndrome In The Head. (The longer talk also includes a section on how you can help people around you with their impostor syndrome, especially if you're in a position of social or technical authority or status in your group or project.) I'm pretty sure video of that talk will be available at some point, too!

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#dwgoestoyapc

denise@dreamwidth.org — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 19:20:47 GMT

(I need to email in these photos so I can link them from the news post!)

Photo #1: us outside our server hosting company, complete with bonus dive and cheyinka and their adorable tiny human. Photo #2: sunset over the Capitol building, as seen from our hotel room balcony. Both photos by the lovely and talented sarah.

( ack, forgot the cut! )

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denise@dreamwidth.org — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 13:15:34 GMT

Happy fourth birthday, Dreamwidth.

Good Lord, it feels like it's either been absolutely honking forever, or that we just started yesterday. Occasionally at the same time.

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denise@dreamwidth.org — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 13:42:37 GMT

applications for adacamp san francisco (june 8-9) are now open!

adacamp is a two-day unconference for supporters of women in open technology and culture. if you are significantly female-identified (*) and into open stuff -- not just programming or technical matters, but any form of open data, open government, fan and remix culture, open education, open source, open technology, and so on -- you should really consider attending.

there's childcare available, too, if that would be a limiting factor! and there's (limited) travel funding you can apply for. the conference itself is "by invitation", but the invitation process is basically to make sure people have a basic level of awareness of feminism in order to get the most out of things and not be detrimental to the group as a whole; it's not there to exclude people who aren't "technical enough" (if you're reading this on the internet right now, you're technical enough). so if you're interested in hanging out for a weekend and talking with other women about open technology and culture, you should apply.

i went to adacamp dc and it was an awesome experience being around so many smart, interesting, engaging women. i'm not 100% sure yet whether or not i'm going to be able to go to this one, but if you can, you really should.

(*) based on feedback and requests, the main adacamp sf programming is restricted to women and people who are significantly female-identified. there's a parallel allies track for people of all other genders, being held on june 8. the ada initiative uses an inclusive definition of female-identified: if you identify primarily or significantly as a woman, you can register for the main track.

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bug counts are getting back in the saddle

denise@dreamwidth.org — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 19:10:01 GMT

it's been ages and ages since the last time i did a bug count post! (no, really, ages. the last one was over a year ago, eep!)

but i'm in the middle of working through a whole fuckton of bugzilla cleanup this week, and i thought i'd post a count at the midpoint. the "all open" numbers look scary, but they're down considerably from where we started at the beginning of the week, so i am ridiculously pleased!

All open: 897
All assigned: 181
All unassigned: 716
Bugs only: 572
Enhancements only: 325
All resolved: 4025
All resolved-fixed: 3462

(some of the queries have been removed, since we've moved to github for submitting patches, so the queries are no longer meaningful!)

of particular note: we have passed 4000 resolved bugs, and are approaching 3500 resolved/fixed!

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unique hazards of this job

denise@dreamwidth.org — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 11:33:06 GMT

Using site search with certain keywords to find search-engine-ranking-boosting spammers, and getting distracted because the keywords also turn up interesting-looking fic.

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HOORAY!

denise@dreamwidth.org — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 21:01:19 GMT

Both mark and I got notice this afternoon that our proposed tutorials have been accepted for LinuxConf Australia in Canberra in January!

I will be giving (with help from deborah on the development thereof, but alas, she had a conflict with the conference itself) a one and a half hour tutorial called "Beyond Alt Text: What Every Project Should Know About Accessibility":

( working description of tutorial! )

I'm totally looking forward to it. We went to LCA a few years back (the year it was held in Wellington) and it was a fabulous conference full of fabulous people talking about smart and fabulous things. I'm looking forward to being able to return.

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denise@dreamwidth.org — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 10:06:03 GMT

Awesomeness: load the Latest Things page and see so many posts that are like "I'm testing out email posting so I can try the first draft of file hosting!" We released this way because it was soooo much easier (seriously, "upload from file" is a pain in the goddamn ass to do right and really easily to do badly) but the side effect of spotlighting one of our lesser-known features is kind of great.

Less awesomeness: a full week of trying to shoehorn myself into a 24-hour sleep schedule means that despite having woken up at a reasonable-ish time today, I am sitting here WIDE AWAKE and the alarm will be going off in four and a half hours for breakfast, last bits of packing, and heading to the airport :(

Not awesome at all: having to go back home and leaving behind all the amazing energy, enthusiasm, and excitement that comes from having ten people all sitting in a room hacking on DW. We are totally doing this again sometime.

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The only real problem...

denise@dreamwidth.org — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 08:13:19 GMT

...with having so many of our contributors here for OSCON is that we have to balance "going to talks and conference sessions to learn awesome things" with "hunkering down on the couches and tables in the hotel lobby and hacking on awesome things".

(Things that people are or have been hacking on this week: image hosting; HTML5/jQuery/responsive-design etc mobile page; "fuzzy" feed matching so there will be fewer duplicate feed accounts and allowing for a "did you mean?" suggestion when creating a feed; extra icon add-ons; the bookmarks/memories overhaul; HTML5, responsive-design site skin; "clean up ALLLLLL the tiny bugs!" (that would be me!); backend/site-reliability stuff; upgrading the code to run on Perl 5.14 ... I'm pretty sure I'm missing stuff, too. Heh.)

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denise@dreamwidth.org — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 16:27:29 GMT

"We made it so you could switch [the $[ variable] back on, but you had to DECLARE your SINS."

...I love listening to Damien Conway's talks so much, hee.

Other good ones: talking about upgrading Perl and then trying to run scripts that weren't running under 'strict', since 5.12 and onward assumes 'use strict' by default (EDIT: when you declare the version with 'use', I forgot to specify that): "If you upgrade to [Perl 5.12], your program may do unexpected things. That's just a delayed form of justice."

"Why didn't Perl have a println? Pascal has a println!"

"Every time I write a say, I get this little ... BURST of happiness!"

"A lot of people want to tear [smartmatching] down and put up this little tiny effigy in place of it."

"Let's be honest here, Perl only DWIMs if you're Larry Wall."

"You can just use braces instead, but that's two extra characters of typing. With a shift key. Unacceptable."

"How is this different than 'use constant'? 'use constant' is an abomination before God, and this isn't."

"Unlike C++, Perl6 is not sent from hell itself."

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denise@dreamwidth.org — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 16:30:34 GMT

Kind of awesome: I'm at Peter Scott's "Perl: The First Three Days" tutorial at OSCON, and the room is like 85% Macs. *g*

I picked this tutorial because despite knowing a ton of useful intermediate and advanced Perl stuff, I am kind of laughably bad at some of the basics, and I have hit the point where the lack of the basics is totally messing with me. So I figure, I will keep taking intro stuff until I figure out data types and context properly :)

Also! We are having a BOF on diversity in open source, on Wednesday at 8PM. (I forget what room, but it's on the signup board.) If you are here at OSCON, come hang out with us and we'll talk about all kinds of stuff.

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OSCON!

denise@dreamwidth.org — Sat, 14 Jul 2012 02:06:33 GMT

So, is anybody else going to be at OSCON next week? We're bringing a whole DW contingent!

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we've come a long way, baby

denise@dreamwidth.org — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 15:12:45 GMT

I wanted to specifically post congratulations to Jon "maddog" Hall (executive director of Linux International), who announced this week in his Linux Pro Magazine column, in honor of the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing's birth, that he is gay. It's humbling to realize that someone who is no more than twice my age was born in a time when such an announcement would have been unthinkable, where today the majority's reaction is usually more along the lines of "oh? Okay then!"

In 2001 or so, I was working for Prudential Insurance & Financial, and the department I worked for had a "lunch and learn" type event to celebrate Pride month -- one of those "have a talk with real live gay people to talk about what it's like being gay" forms of diversity training. It was organized by one of the VPs of the department, a woman about 20 years older than I was who'd been living with her "roommate" for years, and one of the guys in the project management team, a guy about a decade older than me. Both of them were out in the not-really-out-but-not-really-trying-to-hide-it-too-hard kind of way, and that lunch was the first time either of them discussed being queer at work in any way other than to carefully-selected friends.

I'd already been out at work, mostly because I am so very, very, very bad at staying in the closet and tended even then to out myself accidentally all the time. (Bruce Byfield contacted me yesterday for permission to name me in his article on LGBTQ presence in the open source world that stemmed from maddog's announcement, saying he knew some people were out to friends/family but not more publicly. I thanked him for his consideration but reassured him that people on Mars probably know I'm a dyke. *g*) Even so, and even though we were in a room full of other queer people and straight people whose presence at the (voluntary and self-selected) discussion group meant they were pretty far along the path towards ally-hood, I remember how ridiculously hard it was to actually open my mouth in front of a room full of my coworkers and peers and say, yeah, I'm a lesbian. I wouldn't have thought it would be, until I was halfway through a point I was making and realized I was shaking like a leaf.

Today, only a little more than a decade later, I don't have any problem at all calling sarah "my wife" in front of other people -- at work (and it's not just because my 'coworkers' now are people I'm also good friends with), at conferences, during doctor appointments, to people I'm talking with casually. Part of it is definitely because I live in a relatively liberal area of the US -- there are certainly parts of this country I'd be a little more careful and countries where I wouldn't mention it at all, and unfortunately that 'relatively' does still need to be in there because there are still many, many things that Maryland and Marylanders fail at -- and part of it is definitely because I've grown into a lot more confidence as I've gotten older. But a huge, huge part of it is changing societal attitudes and the increasing visibility of queerness.

Things aren't perfect. They aren't going to be perfect for a long time. But they are so, so much better, and every voice standing up to say "I'm so-and-so and I'm gay" helps to turn that tide.

Congratulations on being able to make your announcement, maddog. And thank you for doing it. :)

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A heartening example of the status quo being challenged

denise@dreamwidth.org — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 14:19:12 GMT

Readers of the Geek Feminism blog will have already seen that this week was a disheartening week to be a woman in tech, with not one but at least three instances of being reminded that to a nonzero number of people in the tech world, I am valued more for my bra size than for my brain size. This is not, sadly, unusual, but this time on the Sexism Merry-Go-Round, I was pleased to see the script play out a little differently in one of those cases.

Long story short, the company Sqoot advertised a hackathon in extremely sexist terms, and a number of the hackathon's sponsors acted swiftly and decisively to express their displeasure. When the issue was not resolved to their satisfaction, they then pulled their sponsorship, with statements denouncing Sqoot's actions. Examples include:

* Cloudmine, a company providing backend for mobile apps, pulled their sponsorship and posted About Sexism in Tech (which I felt was an excellent post, and could probably be used as a textbook example of how to write an apology post);

* Heroku, a cloud application platform, investigated and pulled their sponsorship;

* Apigee, a data platform for mobile apps, pulled their sponsorship;

* MongoHQ, a hosted platform for using MongoDB, began with discussion and moved to pulling their sponsorship

Local area user groups also made strong statements against Sqoot's actions, which were also great to hear.

It seems like every time this happens -- and shit like this keeps fucking happening -- the discussion gets derailed into an endless series of explanations about why shit like this really is a problem and why exhortations for women to lighten up are never an appropriate response. Today, I am pleased to see so many voices challenging "brogrammer" culture and speaking up to say that casual sexism and the marketing of women as a "perk" of a hackathon is Not Okay.

I'm also really, really encouraged at how many of those comments are coming from men. It's easy, sometimes, for me to forget that there are so many male allies out there who are just as frustrated by this crap as I am. Thank you to all the awesome men out there who have my back, and thank you to the companies who refused to even passively support this kind of behavior.

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statistics, then and now

denise@dreamwidth.org — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 06:07:49 GMT

Occasionally (when I remember to) I take a snapshot of the site's statistics for future reference and comparison (in the future we'll have historical stats as well as present-day stats -- the data's there, there's just no pretty frontend for the comparisons yet). I was doing that tonight, and I figured, for shits and giggles it might be neat to present a "then and now" comparison.

Behind the cut: a table with comparison figures for three time periods, as close to one year apart as I have the data.

( Dreamwidth: Then and now! )

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kind of awesome

denise@dreamwidth.org — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 05:55:40 GMT

This week, we resolved the last outstanding single-digit bug.

(Bug 8: Add ability to subscribe to a particular user's posts to a community; patched by sophie.)

We have 25 remaining double-digit bugs, some of which are metabugs/admin bugs that won't/can't be resolved and most of which are really involved epic projects I logged into Bugzilla off my initial "shit I'd love to do someday but probably we won't get to for a while" list I was keeping back during the initial brainstorming phase -- and I'm sure some of them could probably be closed now because they don't mesh with the direction the site developed, but I haven't been through Bugzilla on a "close bugs that are no longer relevant" run in a while -- but we now officially have knocked out all the single-digit bugs. I think this is very nifty. :)

Also of the nifty: we have 3369 bugs RESOLVED since we started using Bugzilla as a bugtracker in mid-January of 2009 (before then it was all just in our heads and in a few spreadsheets while we figured out how we wanted to set up bug tracking); we have 2975 bugs RESOLVED/FIXED. (The difference being: any time a bug is closed at all, it's counted as RESOLVED; RESOLVED/FIXED is for things where we explicitly made a change, while the others include such statuses as DUPLICATE, LATER, WONTFIX, and INVALID.) Some of those were massive sweeping changes; some of them were one-line fixes. I love every single one of them, because it means we're constantly trying to make things better. :)

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it has been a while since i have said this

denise@dreamwidth.org — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 06:52:47 GMT

I absolutely, completely, and wholly adore each and every one of the people who make Dreamwidth such a delightful place to run. Writing posts in dw_news is a chore (seriously, it takes forever to chug through a whole thing -- anywhere from 7-10 hours depending on how much research I need to do and how many sections there are to write), but it's always worth it, because when I hit that 'post entry' button, the outpouring of love and awesomeness we get is just stunning.

I love working on Dreamwidth, because whenever I get discouraged or demoralized or just plain down -- which happens a lot; it's not easy working at home, in relative isolation, with nobody to re-energize yourself with face to face, and AIM and irc doesn't always work -- I can go and read all the awesome comments of encouragement and love, and it reminds me that there are people using this thing that we made and they are using it in awesome ways, and it reminds me that there are people out there who really get what we're trying to do with this whole thing and they appreciate all the time we take to get the little things right, and no matter how little a particular change is, it will always turn out to be that one thing that's been annoying the hell out of someone, and basically WE HAVE THE BEST USERS EVER. THE END. I LOVE YOU ALL. A LOT. THANK YOU FOR BEING FUCKING AWESOME.

(That all having been said, redpyre has now officially won dw_news commenting forever and ever with this comment.)

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bug counts just did a whole bunch of bugzilla cleanup

denise@dreamwidth.org — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 05:11:18 GMT

All open: 880
All assigned: 176
All assigned, no patch: 153
All unassigned: 704
Bugs only: 546
Enhancements only: 334
Needs-commit: 17
Needs-review: 27
All resolved: 3324
All resolved-fixed: 2938

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denise@dreamwidth.org — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 07:44:50 GMT

Happy 2012 to everyone! May your 2012 be full of kittens and puppies and rainbows and shiny happy things.

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