Hi, I’m owls of the godless internets. I make software for a major university in the US midwest. In my free time, I run an expansive criminal syndicate that fronts as a heavy industrial conglomerate.

I like some games (GW2, DF, PoE, TTRPGs), PHP & Laravel, and fine dining.

You can find me on mastodon at @owls, which is probably a better way to get in touch with me. So if you need some time-sensitive mod/admin stuff, @ me there!

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • If I’m running a tiny little single-user instance on a potato and my post goes to the mastodon.social federated feed, it would be impolite for them to direct 20,000 requests at my potato all at once. Instead, their servers grabs one copy and serves it to their users. If they’re set up for 20k eyeballs online at once, they’ve got capacity to serve them all the photo.

    Mastodon has a configurable clean-up period for cached media so you don’t use infinite disk. That gives a bad actor an easy way to robustly host images for a couple days: post it, let it federate out, and then take your server down. Everyone else is now doing crimes for you, and cleaning it up is a reactive process by dozens of server admins.