Webdock forced me to send them a photo of my passport, which is something most hosting companies force you to do nowadays, BUT Webdock went a step further asking me to open my webcam and take a selfie…. Very invasive. Very terrible. Fucked up even. Mind you, these things will add up and in the future we will get very entangled with companies and governments. More power to them! Terrible!
I used to pay around 80 Euros a month for a Dreamhost server with 4GB of RAM 80GB SSD and 4 vCPUS. That’s the price for a managed server. Meaning you don’t do anything, just install WordPress and that’s all basically.
Then I felt equipped enough with some Linux skills to take on unmnaged servers. I found Contabo. They were super cheap and provided some control over the servers. 22 Euros a month for 32GB of RAM, 800GB SSD, and 8 vCPUs. As you can see the difference in price is immense. I moved all of the websites there. Took a while to understand how to manage an unmanaged server, but thanks to Yunohost it was quite easy.
Therefore, a server that we have control over, with an old but ok control panel.
For me it is crucial to have such a control panel. I want to easily install an operating system, like Debian. I want to restart the server in case it gets stuck, and MOST importantly to take snapshots.
SNAP-SHOTS!
They are too important! They saved my ass countless of times. Basically you can take a snapshots of your server, in seconds, and then restore to it in case you have to. Before every major system or apps update, I take a snapshot. Imagine if an update nukes your server….what do you do? If you have snapshots you fix it in a second!
At times I had to update our Matrix server that had a 200GB database. If that update fucked Matrix, then restoring a backup of 200GB is not pretty. A few times I had to resort to snapshots because of Matrix.
Therefore I NEED snapshots. Actually I need to be SAFE.
BE SAFE!
3-4 years ago I was testing TROMjaro on my laptop and wanted to install it on an external HDD I had around. Problem was I had some 5 HDDs connected to my computer and by mistake I chose the wrong HDD to install TROMjaro, thus I deleted 4TB of personal files. Photos, videos, whateverelse. Had no backups… This happened twice to me until I learned a lesson: backups are a must!
Now I backup my computer in the cloud with Borgbase daily. I like it because they are incremental and encrypted. Borgbase has no clue what I host there. That’s how it should be.
I have become obsessed with being safe with my digital files, because you will truly regret it if you are not. So I cannot accept to not have daily backups for our servers, to a remote location!
Yunohost made it super easy to use Borg and backup to Borgbase. So that’s what I’ve been doing for the past years. Daily. Fully. 6TB of data.
Why move?
In short because Contabo forced me to remove a Nitter link a year or more ago and we had a huge fight over it. See the details here. They were wrong and douchebags. I cannot accept to be bullied like that. I had to comply eventually but then Countabo refused to sell me any other service. Look at what they say:
Thanks for reaching out to Contabo customer support. For internal reasons we had to take the decision not to provide you with any new products this time, we are awfully sorry to say. “For internal reasons” means we are not going to communicate our motivation. Our decision is not up for debate; we kindly ask for your understanding. Please do not take our decision personally. It has nothing to do with you but rather with reasons that we are not going to explain since we do not want you to misunderstand us or misinterpret our statements. Exactly because of this, we consider all information as internal company information. Still, we are always available for you personally and will respond to all of your questions as soon as possible. Always feel free to contact us.
Fucking hell. This is insane. You see I could not find a cheaper alternative so I was trying to move past that incident and buy a bigger server because 3 years ago we started this TROM.tf suite of websites that grew and grew and we needed more storage space….
So now that I cannot continue with Cuntabo, I had to look for options.
For this I need around 200GB SSD, 20GB of RAM, and some 6 vCPUs.
For TROM.tf it is a different and developing story. So let’s focus on these TROM-sites for now.
I need a server that allows me to control it from a separate panel (restart, shut down, install or reinstall OS), plus one that has backups/snapshots.
Webdock
After months of searching I caved in for Webdock. A hosting provider that Alexio was bragging about for years now 🙂 – he hosts his websites there. Why them?
Custom builds and low prices.
The fantastic part is that you can configure it any way you want.
So you get exactly what you need. Yes Cuntabo is cheaper, but I only used 200GB our of 800GB of diskspace there, and 20GB of RAM out of 36GB. No point in wasting resources. The above setup is what I got and it is 1 Euro cheaper than Cuntabo 🙂
Upgrade/downgrade
With Cuntabo you could only upgrade and it was not that easy. Here you can upgrade/downgrade even for like 1 vCPU and stuff like that. This is crucial for me in case I quickly need to upgrade, or even downgrade. Great!
Snapshots!
This one I LOVE! You see Cuntabo made snapshots on the same server. That’s like an image of the server. Took seconds to do and restore, which was super fantastic, but these are not backups. If anything happens to that datacenter you are fucked. Webdock on the other hand does FULL backups of your entire server, to another location basically. And yes it can take up to 40 minutes to do one for a beefy server, but the moment you click to create a snapshot that’s it, it will create a backup of your server the way it is when you clicked. So you can do whatever you want on your server from then on, it will not affect the snapshots.
This is super duper cool. They provide 3 manual snapshots, like Cuntabo, but you can store them for 6 months compared to 3 on Cuntabo. Even more cool they do daily automated snapshots and keep 5 of them. This is fabulous! Imagine something terrible happens to your server, but you know that you can restore it with a click because you have daily automated snapshots. For me this is a must!
Great control panel
It took a day or two to get used to it but then I ended up really liking the panel. You have a lot of control over your server: reboot, reinstall, even create and manage shell users, execute scripts and so forth.
So far great tech support
Cuntabo’s tech support was always either missing or extremely unhelpful. Everyone complained about that. Webdock brags about how awesome they are at that. They even have a live chat for that. And so far so awesome. So fast, so useful, so friendly. I am impressed. They brag about the Trustpilot reviews on their first page:
I am trying to tame my enthusiasm about this but so far the support was stellar. It feels more friendly and less companyish…
So let’s see…
So yeah, Webdock seems like a great choice. The irony is that they made everything so easy to understand and setup, but their “trial” pricing is a complete mess. I was totally confused….they give you some credits in Euros to test the service, and you cannot build a custom server unless this credit expires or you ask them to switch your account to a non-trial one….it is messy. But well…
How to move?
Let’s’ get technical now. If you have Yunohost and remote backups like say with Borg on Borgbase, then it is not that difficult to move. Mind you we have to move ALL of the websites and configs and users. Emails, domains, files….
Backups to the rescue!
Imagine this: I have an archive backup for EACH of our website.
They are encrypted and stored with a 3rd party. Even if Cuntabo was to entirely cut me off, I had them there. So no biggie!
Set up the new server!
When I bought the Webdock server I chose to have it installed with Debian 11. This is needed for Yunohost. Super fast! I did not have to manually install Debian and that’s awesome!
The SSH madness….
Now you have to login via SSH to the server and install Yunohost. Well….this was by far the hardest part! Not installing Yunohost, but log in via SSH, and SSH keys overall. I don’t know but I am confused by these keys. Webdock tries to make it super secure and enforces SSH keys by default, but anyway….you can disable that, however it took me more than an hour to connect to the server via SSH because this key, or that key, or both, are not recognized and all of that. This was painful, I hate this SSH keys. I HATE THEM!
So you have to open the terminal in Linux and do ssh user@server-ip to connect to your server. Then lose your mind for an hour because it asks you for the key, and keys and shit like that, and then you add your password and does not work and bullshit. This is a general issue, nothing to do with Webdock really, but once you manage to connect it is so so simple.
Install Yunohost
Install Yunohost with this command: curl https://install.yunohost.org | bash
Then follow the very simple instructions and let YNH deal with your SSH user. Once installed, it will tell you to visit your IP (in the browser) and setup your admin password.
Now YNH has created a new SSH user and that fucks things up again with your connection since you are trying to connect to the same IP but different user and keys….that also put me off for hours trying to figure it…. Your SSH user is now the YNH admin and the password you chose when you visited your IP via the browser and set it all up. Remember that!
Ok. YNH is installed!
Now install Borg Backups app from the YNH panel. Use the same repository from your Borgbase so it connects to it. Then add your public key from the Borg YNH settings to your Borgbase’s repository.
These SSH keys are nuts. You have to figure this shit out in order to connect!
After you do that you have to one by one grab the archives and restore. Here’s how I did it:
1. List the archives
In SSH do: app=borg; BORG_PASSPHRASE="$(yunohost app setting $app passphrase)" BORG_RSH="ssh -i /root/.ssh/id_${app}_ed25519 -oStrictHostKeyChecking=yes " borg list "$(yunohost app setting $app repository)" | less This will list all of your archives from your Borgbase. That if you don’t get a connection error because the repository does not recognize your SSH key….and you spend a few more hours using ChatGPT to figure it out. You may need to force Borgbase to “please take your SSH key!” to let you connect.
Pause here.
The only major issues for me were to connect. From my computer to the server, from the server to the backups, and so forth. All because of SSH keys. This took THE MOST time. If it wasn’t for this, would have been a ton easier.Also ChatGPT is really useful in these situations and helped me figure shit out.
Anyway.
To exit that list press q.
2. Download a backup
You should see a list of backup archives. Now copy the full name of any archive you want, and replace it in this example: app=borg; BORG_PASSPHRASE="$(yunohost app setting $app passphrase)" BORG_RSH="ssh -i /root/.ssh/id_${app}_ed25519 -oStrictHostKeyChecking=yes " borg export-tar "$(yunohost app setting $app repository)::_auto_my_webapp-2023-09-24_17:36" /home/yunohost.backup/archives/_auto_my_webapp-2023-09-24_17:367.tar Replace the _auto_my_webapp-2023-09-24_17:367 with the backup you want to download. Paste that into your terminal. It should start to download your backup archive.
RESTORE THE YNH CONFIG FIRST!
I suggest you first download your server backup data. Maybe it is simply called Auto Borg. You want to first restore your YNH configs: users, data, settings, domains, etc.. So download that first. Then go to the YNH Backup panel and restore it as you would normally do.
Mind you, now your original users from your backup are the ones in charge, so your admin and password, and thus SSH users have again changed. They are your old ones, keep that in mind. You have to relogin via SSH and deal again with a cluster fuck of SSH keys.
But once this is done, it is easy peasy!
Also make sure you select your default domain as it was before. This is important to make sure your email works with your email client. Do it from the YNH panel. Easy.
3. Deal with the DNS!
Your new server has a new IP, of course. This is how I would do things: first download the backup of say Nextcloud. Then go to the YNH Diagnosis and check the domain for my nextcloud, say drive.tromsite.com and take the information from there and add to my DNS where my domain is registered.
So from here:
To here:
One by one. It is likely that you only have to change the IPv4 and IPv6 info.
It may take several minutes for the DNS to propagate, but by now the Nextcloud archive is probably downloaded from Borgbase. Head over the YNH backups panel and simply restore.
Download the archive from Borgbase -> Change the DNS values -> Restore!
That’s it!
Now the drive.tromsite.com domain is redirecting to our new server where we restored the Nextcloud installation. And that’s all it is!
One by one. Download and archive with that command, tweak the DNS in your domain registrar panel, then restore the archive via YNH.
How easy!
By far the most painful experience is to deal with the connections….those SSH keys….and the SSH users….because the rest, thanks to YNH, is so easy to do!
And how important it is to have backups via Borg to a remote location. It took me a few days to move all of our websites to Webdock, and that’s mainly (and repeating over 100 times), because of those SSH connections issues….
Now I am confident that even if Webdock decides to shut me down, I can move to a different hosting provider and I will get everything back in a few days time.
Here’s the recap:
1. Get a new VPS with Debian
2. Install Yunohost on it via SSH
3. Considering you have Borg backups, install the Borg app via YNH, and connect it to your Borgbase.
4. Via SSH grab the list of your Borgbase archives, then with another command select the one you want to download. First do so for your YNH config.
5. Restore your YNH data (configs, users, etc.)
6. Select your default domain and change the DNS for it.
7. Proceed to download a new archive and restore it via the YNH backup then change the DNS.
DONE!
The next big adventure is to move our TROM.tf services, some 2TB of files, to a new server. Probably with a different company to make sure we don’t put all of our eggs into one basket. I will make an article about that too.
I forgot to mention.
Webdock forced me to send them a photo of my passport, which is something most hosting companies force you to do nowadays, BUT Webdock went a step further asking me to open my webcam and take a selfie…. Very invasive. Very terrible. Fucked up even. Mind you, these things will add up and in the future we will get very entangled with companies and governments. More power to them! Terrible!
Our TROM Social (friendica) was down for the past 10+ hours because we had to remove millions of entries from our database that were "injected" by troll instances. We went from around 40 million entries in the database table to around 200 thousand. From 10GB in size to 50MB.
We aim to make our services very reliable. If they are down very often then people cannot use them. So far so great, but lately because we are forced to move to a different (and better) server we need to optimize some databases before moving our websites. So there will be downtimes. We are sorry.
We have successfully transferred all of our websites, except the TROM.tf ones, to a new location in Finland. Everything seems to be working really well. In less than a week we will start the transfer of TROM.tf, and this can take more time, be aware of that. But we will expand our storage capacity and allow even more videos on Peertube and even more storage for TROM Files.
For the past days I worked on optimizing the Synapse (Matrix) database. Pain in the rear-end. I managed to reduce it from some 300 GB to around 100 GB. Still insane how huge the database is. idk if I can do more...
Now I will try to optimize the Friendica database and start the move to the new servers, little by little. A lot of work ahead.....
It is a complicated issue with Matrix... see github.com/matrix-org/synapse/… - many are having similar issues. The database does not store any media file and yet it is so massive.
I had the same issue. It got 60gb on a single user instance and the images were offsite on R2. I stopped hosting one when infosec.exchange went up with their own
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Use TROMjaro we even have an ads and tracker blocker system wide, thanks to @TBlock so even when Linux distros will start to insert ads, because some will in the future I am sure, then you'll be protected against this bullshit.
A Trade-Free operating system based on Manjaro Linux Designed for your brain, but you can install it on a computer.No more ads and trackers consuming you, no ‘free’ trials, noContinue readingHOME
A Trade-Free operating system based on Manjaro Linux Designed for your brain, but you can install it on a computer.No more ads and trackers consuming you, no ‘free’ trials, no …
ZDay, also known as The Zeitgeist Day, is an annual event organized by The Zeitgeist Movement (TZM) for the past many years. For those unfamiliar, TZM started as the activism arm of The Venus Project back in 2008 I think.
Anyway, they were making these annual events where they would invite all sorts of people to give talks, mostly those active within the movement. Some talks were very interesting, some boring, a few very weird 🙂 . But overall I was always interested in this ZDay and I would watch it either live or the recordings. At least some of the interesting ones (in my view).
For the past few years I tried to get myself into these ZDay evens to present TROM. I was close to get to the Frankfurt one a few years back, but they had no more available spaces for my presentation. A few months ago I’ve red that there is a new ZDay coming in Prague, and it would be the last one because TZM wants to decentralize the movement. So, being the last one, combined with the fact that one of my best TROM friends lives in Prague,
I said that now is the time for me to invite myself to ZDay :). And make sure I go there!
I sent some 2-3 emails but got no reply. After a few weeks someone got back to me and told me that they are aware of TROM and they would like to have me there.
Exciting!
You see I always kept myself active with TROM, but I was never invited anywhere to present it. Maybe it is because before 2018 I was not willing to do these sort of things at all, and I would not put myself out there. But also because I am not on Facebook, Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord and all of these trade-based platforms where most activists hang out, so I did not make friends/contacts with any of them really. And I get the feeling that this is how you get into these events.
Anyway, excited to go. I had a month to prepare but I worked more than half of the month on a new big release of TROMjaro. So I had around 2 weeks left to come up with a presentation. We do so much at TROM that it is insane to try and present it all in 30-40 minutes, the time they would give me for my talk. So I had to come up with a more unique way of presenting it.
It was my first time using LibreOffice Presentation so it took a few days to get used to it, but then I LOVED it! You can easily animate stuff, create shapes, paste images, do it all!
My talk would be called: How to Grow a Saner Society. A Lifetime Adventure!
I wanted to keep it more positive and focused on our trade-free approach. I figured that the people who were familiar with TZM are already over-saturated with the “how bad this society is” and want to hear something new. Like what we can do about it.
I bought a wireless presentation remote controller and I practiced the presentation. I was quite happy with it. Sasha and Georgi were my test subjects and they seemed to love it. That was encouraging.
I bought the tickets to Prague – expensive as fuck – and put everything I needed into one small backpack. Let me say that I LOVE the fact that now I have a proper laptop, thanks to Roma and Gui mostly who donated enough money for the campaign to buy me a new laptop. It helps a fuck ton because I do a lot on the laptop and to be able to carry it with me was a must. It is thin, metal, powerful, lots of storage, but big enough so I do not even need an external screen to do my work most of the time.
See how happy I am because of this laptop? 🙂
All I need is my 18-buttons mouse and I am all set:
Now I can go. I have control over all of the TROM projects thanks to the laptop and my mouse 😉
The TROM Crew!
Roma was about to host me for the entire stay, and I decided to stay for 13 days or so. Aaron, who lives in Dresden (2h away from Prague with the bus/train) would join too. But also Vicky and Rafa from Spain who came to support me, us, everyone :). I was so happy that we had a part of the TROM Crew for the ZDay!
These people are so nice, and calm, and friendly. They are family! I don’t say it lightly.
We spent the next day together and it was relaxing. That’s the OK sign for when you dive! So you know 😉
Roma hosted me like I was a king or something. Everything was so neat at his place, and clean, and organized.
He even gave me his own big room and he slept on a mattress in the livingroom. You know I am not the best when it comes to go visit people and places. I would say I may be the worst. Even when I was a kid I never “slept over” to any of my friends’ places, because I feel uncomfortable. I get very easily bothered if I do not have my own kind of comfort. I struggle with the sleep (light burns me alive and I go to sleep early in the morning so if the room is not very dark the vampire in me will suffer a lot); I also struggle with eating….You know actually there are 3 essential things that put a huge toll on my life: eat, sleep, and shit. 🙂
I have a lot of digestive issues so I can only eat a few kinds of foods. Therefore I am always stressed about what I am going to eat. I need those specific foods! And because of that, the other side of the coin colon has to struggle to deliver. Ok. I’ll stop here, but these normal things are very abnormal for me and are stressful. Combine that with the fact that I struggle to fall asleep and keep myself asleep….and you get a clusterfuck of daily issues.
Is it clear now that I need my own comfort and control over my daily life?!
Ok. So basically Roma hosted me in a way that I felt at home. And this is quite an achievement I would say. His apartment was so nice I wouldn’t mind to sleep in the living-room on his NEW mattress that is better than my bed at home! But he insisted to give me his room.
I was happy and relaxed:
Thank you Roma, you are the best human I swear! 🙂
Ok. Time for ZDay!
We went to the venue and I thought we would see a bunch of people outside waiting. But it was no one. I was told that some 40 people reserved a seat weeks ago and that they were reserving more. That there are some 100 seats available and I think I’ve heard that they were all booked before the event.
Anyway, I was expecting to see some people outside. One guy came to us and recognized that we were from TROM. That was nice. Likely our TROM “handprint” tshirts were a clue :).
We went inside and we saw a few people. The venue was very nice. I recognized some of the people. They were all very nice! We were in!
The venue was a lot smaller than I thought:
But very neat and well organized. They even had super tasty foods there:
I wish I could fucking eat some!
Mind you everything was free there, no one paid anything. These guys organized it all from their own money and donations. So kudos to them it was a super nice place.
They even had live translations with live-human-flesh-and-meat translators. They gave us individual headphones:
Am telling you they were very well organized. Well, almost.
The first hurdle was that they had a Widows laptop that was the main machine streaming the presentations to the projector, and my presentation was made in LibreOffice (LO). So it was not working…we had to install LO, then a font, then test a bit to make it work. I told them I will use LO weeks before the event, and I was told that “This should not be a problem. All of the computers will be running Linux to my knowledge.” – Well it was fine eventually. But I was a bit surprised.
I was also surprised that they did not have a remote controller for the presentation. Luckily I brought mine and everyone would eventually use it. Without one how are you going to present? Using the laptop arrow keys?…
But don’t get me wrong, these are small details. Everything else was great there. Super duper nice and organized.
At one point this guy approached me and he told me that he translated the TROM II documentary into Polish. He was “Jaro”, or “Jaromatrix”? That’s how I know him from the TROM Chats.
It was so cool to see someone in person who was part of our chats for some months now, if not longer. Such a nice guy! He wanted for us to talk more, but it was a bit too chaotic and busy for me, so we didn’t get to spend too much time together. Thank you man for coming and I hope to meet you again!
We had some interesting discussions before the event started:
I was very surprised to see Zach and Arjang. I was aware of their youtube channels because I added them to our TROM Curated Videos a few months ago. Zach is part of this Moneyless Society project, and Arjang has his own Beyond Capitalism channel. They did not present at ZDay because there was no more space, but we got to talk a bit. Interesting people!
Ok, and so it started!
There were not many people, but it was still exciting.
The issue with languages!
The entire presentation and the talks were in Czech. Only I did the talk in English. Most people in the audience did not understand Czech. So for the first 3 talks that were in Czech, we had to wear these headphones and listen to the live english translations:
And it was….well….not fun! It was really difficult to focus on the presentation and listen to them. It is difficult to do live translations let’s be honest. Plus the speakers had a few slides mostly with text, in Czech, so it was basically impossible for me or anyone I talked to, to understand the talks…. It is unfortunate that we do not speak a common language and have to struggle so much.
I appreciate very much the effort, honestly, however for us it was impossible to make sense of the presentations. I think one presentation was about a sort of credit-trade-system, and one about permaculture, but as I said it was impossible to get much out of them.
The problem with the recording.
30 people seeing my talk is very good, but it would be a shame not to record and share it with hundreds or thousands of people online. So having the recording of my talk was paramount for me.
We decided on the spot that perhaps it is a good idea for us to film too. Roma had a camera and a tripod and I am so happy that we took that decision!
You see, I asked beforehand the organizers if they would film and make the recordings available for us too. They said that of course they will. However when we were there they would stream with an ipad that was either in one corner or moving around, and Zach was also filming at times. But it didn’t look to me like they had that very organized. I later was told that the streaming was in Czech, even mine…so for those who wanted to watch the livestream (probably the vast majority of people) it was not watchable.
Look, I understand that the event was held in the Czech Republic, and some Czech people do not understand English, but I think it would have been good to stream it in English honestly. But anyway, the streaming quality was not great for later use anyway.
Zach also filmed but for one he did so more dynamically, and he would move around quite a bit. And so he will not capture my slides many times. Tthe way that I made my presentation was to rely on the slides, make it fun, animated, interesting, funny at times. Without the slides it does not make sense. Zach also filmed with a camera in RAW format, a format that I think it is proprietary (.braw). Some 150GB in size for less than an hour of footage. Plus because it is RAW you get a washed out video that needs color grading/editing. This made it nearly impossible for us to share these files and edit them. I can’t even play these files in Linux without their proprietary/licensed codec. To edit I had to install the trade-based Davinci Resolve video editor, the editor made by the same company that made the camera that Zach was using. And the recording from Zach was missing a few bits here and there.
Look, call me crazy but I think it is insane to make the digital media so enormous. 4k, 8k, raw and whatever K, in my mind they make no sense, unless you are BBC filming a nature documentary all around the world and presenting it on large screens in cinemas… I am not trying to be mean, and Zach if you read this post please be open minded and do not take it personally. We need to be mindful about the fact that the digital too has a real impact on resources: pollution, waste. You know you have to store large files on physical hardware, and transport, and download, and backup. Energy consumption, manufacturing, waste. Multiply with billions of times and you get a massive impact. Plus it is impractical, especially when these formats are locked-down.
Anyway. Zach was very patient and shared with us the files.
He also recorded the audio from a stage mic, separate form the one we were holding for the presentations. Because of that it recorded with a lot of echo. The audio was attached to the videos so it was again difficult to deal with them because you had to, well, extract the audio from those super massive-in-size videos.
Therefore we were left with Roma’s recording, with the mic from the camera itself. As you may imagine, a lot of echo and background noise. I really wanted to take my lavmic with me, but I was SURE they will record directly from the presentation mic itself….
I wanted to give you all of these details because the presentation that you will see has a bad audio…and we really tried to improve it but it is kinda impossible to make it sound well. I worked for the past weeks on this ZDay presentation and that’s only because I had to deal with the above issues. Else I would have made this article a lot sooner.
Basically we ended up with two presentations. One from Roma’s camera: video and audio. And one a mix between Roma’s and Zach’s footage and recordings. Whatever you like best….
Here I am on the stage:
I was not nervous really. People were asking me about that. It is because I know what I want to say and the things I was presenting are important and real. For me this is not a presentation, it is me talking to people about some really fucking important things! Why would I be nervous?
Ok here’s the Roma-based presentation:
And this is the Roma-Zach-based presentation:
I think the analogy with evolution works wonders. And it gives people a great visual of all that we are trying to say and achieve. It worked out a lot better than I expected. I thought about this analogy while we were recording for TROM II, but I didn’t include it in the documentary because it was a spontaneous thing and not so well thought as this presentation. In a way I think this presentation is a very well explanation of what we do at TROM. Maybe the best and shortest presentation about TROM.
It seems that many people really liked it. So that was super fantastic.
After my presentation there were a few video remote presentations. Basically pre-recorded videos that we would watch. I want to briefly mention this one about Humania. I’ve heard about this project a month before ZDay. Now, I cannot show you the presentation because where can I find it? But I was aware of them presenting this project before I went to Prague. Someone even sent me their slides. I looked over the project and I want to say a few things. For one I am quite sure that the people behind it are good people. One of them, Ziad, is someone I worked with on TROM for several years. I was so surprised to see him involved in this. Ziad helped me rebuild TROMsite and VideoNeat several times. We spent many nights working online on these projects. He was always so kind and very computer-smart. Anyway, I am happy to see him active because he kinda disappeared a few years ago. We haven’t talked since then.
Now, Humania….it is a project that wants to build a community, kinda like TVP. This is their “3D planning”:
They even had to start the presentation by saying that “No, it’s not The Venus Project…” 🙂 – well if you see their presentation then this is kinda the Venus Project…but should not matter. What matters is that I’ve heard about these projects hundreds of times for the past decade. And none survived. None went beyond some Google Docs and some 3D models. And I am not saying this in a mean way, I wish these people had the resources to do something, but I am FRUSTRATED at this approach overall.
TVP made people dream about new worlds, built almost like in parallel with this one. Dome houses, maglev transport, circle-shaped cities, automation, etc.. I am quite sure Fresco was not that naive to think that this is the future, and he said it a bunch of times actually. But people started to focus more and more on these technologies. And forgot the message: this monetary system (trade system more exactly) is the source of most problems. This is a long conversation to have and we made several TROMcasts about it, but in essence I now realize that people got the wrong message and they fantasize about building a new city to prove how a new society looks like. TVP itself jumped on this train for the past many years, to the point of sounding like a cult.
My frustration is with the fact that people focus too much on these fantasy lands that are at best some simplistic 3D models, while ignoring the real things and progress that we can do today. The volunteering, the open source, the organizations helping others, and so forth. We NEED to work with these in order to change something! TVP made people ignore these real and realistic approaches because they think that these approaches are patchworks.
Anyway watch our TROM II documentary to see what I’m talking about in terms of a realistic approach to maybe change this society.
So I was a bit concerned that after my presentation which was about real things, the Humania presentation will make people fantasize again about things that do not exist, nor will they ever exist in that manner.
We had a Q&A where people would kind of push this sort of mentality a bit and I answered a few questions. I would love to show you that, but only Zach recorded it and I do not have the mental resources to extract all of that from the .BRAW files….maybe I’ll do it one day, but I tried to explain these things in the Q&A. There weren’t many questions tho, and not a lot of engagement.
But after the Humania presentation I quite enjoyed the TZM Italy video presentation that was very down to earth, about sharing and communities that were real:
How they organize sharing events and stuff like that. They were a lot more in tune with TROM I would say than any other at the event.
Overall I really enjoyed it and except for the recording part, everything was really well put together.
After the event.
After the event was over we spent an hour or so at the same place and many people came to talk to me. They told me they knew about TROM and were impressed by how active we still are. It was a great feeling to meet such people. All of them were very nice, very chill, it was so cool to have important discussions with so many people. You see, I said that I was surprised to see so few people attending, but after the event was over I was so happy there weren’t more than 30 or so, because it would have been chaotic after the event. I enjoyed the after-event a lot more than the event itself, because I got to talk to these people. I talked so much that I could not even go pee haha. I was glued there.
Man….I don’t know how to put it in words, but I felt like I was part of something. Physically. These were people that I didn’t know, and yet they were very much aware of the things I was talking about for years now. We could click immediately.
This is Lenka:
She came because she got our TROM Newsletter about the event. She is from the Czech Republic and was living in Prague. She recently watched the TROM II documentary and got to know about TROM from one of her friends, Benji. Benji follows TROM from almost the beginning of it all, but he could not come unfortunately. We clicked with Lenka within minutes, as if she was our friend for years now. From discussions to jokes, from how kind she is to how down to earth she is.
We also met Ante, from Croatia.
His tshirt was saying “f*ck capitalism” and that made him a welcome friend in our group. haha. He was so nice, friendly, and I really enjoyed the conversations we had.
Cihan, Cliff, Kristina, and a bunch of others were such great people.
We went out to eat something after the event, and spent a few hours passionately talking to each other. I got to talk a lot with Cihan and Cliff (one of the main organizers of the event). We talked about this approach of building communities, or not building them. About TZM, activism, TROM, and more. Unfortunately there were a few people with who I did not talk much, and I thought we will the next day when we should have met again. But not all came for the next day meeting. It is unfortunate because I really wanted to talk to all of them.
I was so tired by midnight. So we headed home.
Next day, fun day.
We went to meet for one last time with everyone else. Zach also wanted to interview me for a film/documentary he is working on. He is traveling to many places and interviews “activists” or people who have something important to say I suppose. He understands, like we do, that this is a fucked up society, and why it is fucked up; and the guy is very active trying to make people aware of this, but he’s also aware of how many good people are in the world and how we could think about change. And he wants to put these people in the spotlight.
I had some more discussions with him and Arjang (the guy at the piano – he is good at that), but we had to say goodby. Both of these guys do their own thing and I am very happy to see that. Maybe we can collaborate in the future. Videos, projects, podcasts, discussions.
We met with the few rest again and went to eat something. Unfortunately only a few were present this second day, because the rest had to leave. But overall lengthy, funny, interesting discussions that lasted for hours at this Indian restaurant that could have killed me if I were to touch any of their foods, even if only with my bare hands.
The less hectic and more calm parts of my journey were here. Aaron had to go home unfortunately, and I, Rafa, Vicky, Roma and Ante, went to Roma’s place for some chill time. We ordered some pizza and had lenghty and really interesting discussions.
I hope to meet Ante again because I really liked the guy. We exchanged contacts and I will for sure contact Ante at some point.
Vicky and Rafa had to leave the next day. These guys were the glue for all of us because they are kind and hug everyone.
Vicky is so funny with her “custom” English, she makes us all laugh so hard. She says “Fucking shit!” so many times, and with her Spanish accent it is hilarious.
One time we were talking about Rafa’s parents and I ask her “How do you get along with Rafa’s father?” and she said, in a cute and spanglish-voice “Oh I love your father!”. hahahah. She always mistakes the mine, yours, their, he, she. And that’s so funny. One time she showed us a butterfly, because she is studying about insects, and she said “This boterfly es dangeros.”. And I was like “Hmm….doesn’t look like it.”. “No, she is dangeros!” – she said, and she quickly pulls up the translation app on her phone to make sure she said it right, and while typing I see the translation “This butterfly is in danger of extinction.”. hahahah
She is so funny. And Rafa too. And so homie. Chill. Nice. Always lovely to meet them!
The next fun and awesome days.
I already feel nostalgia while writing about this, and that’s a good sign that I enjoyed it so much. The next days we met with Lenka, and we had such a nice time together.
We went to the Illusions museum.
And it was very confusing and fun.
I want to emphasize on how well we got along with Lenka because it was so surprising to feel so comfortable with someone that you just met. And the wonderful message I got from her friend Benji. It would be a great shame if we were not to meet again, Lenka, and I cannot accept not meeting you Benji. We have to!
Lenka took us to some nice places outside the city center, because she also hates these crowded places and she likes the nature more. I think the saner you are, the more you gravitate towards this, because crows usually means tourists and consumption. Also pollution, waste, concrete jungles.
We talked a lot lot, and we laughed a bunch 🙂
I spent my days relaxing and working on my laptop from the great comfort of Roma’s apartment. Unfortunately Roma had to work every day. That made me quite angry because this guy should not be forced to work on things that he does not want to work on. No one should! I fantasize about him being able to take his skills and come join TROM fully….and who knows maybe it can happen. This guy works so hard to take care of his parents, it is quite inspiring. And he had to come alone to Europe from Russia, and create a life for himself and manage a lot of things. He got his shit together believe me! Down to earth, organized, calm and sticking to his plans!
My friendship with Roma got really strong and real. We are not friends anymore, we are brothers. We have so many things in common. On top of our TROM-Discussions I can talk for hours with Roma about tech, because we are equally fascinated by it.
Let’s visit Aaron!
Believe it or not but I’ve never traveled with a train. And Aaron was 2h away with the train….2 plus 2 equals Dresden. Let’s take the train to Aaron!
I honestly very much enjoyed the train ride. It was quite nice inside and the ride is so smooth I never felt like I was going somewhere. In the car or the bus you can get sick pretty easily (at least I do) if you stay on your laptop, or talk to people and not pay attention to the road. Because it is too snakey….But with the train it’s so much nicer!
We stayed at Aaron’s nice place, in the attic basically. And I’ve said it so many times but Aaron is one of the most chill and nice dudes I know.
We would spend only 2 days in Dresden but it felt like 4 to me. Aaron took us around to visit the place. We went to a nice park and we played table tennis:
And saw some weird places…
I was surprised to see how in Germany people are very keen to share, to do open source projects, and so on. Look at this place:
Places like these should be everywhere. You would also see cardboard boxes with stuff all around the city, where people would put stuff for others to grab. I love this mentality. And the icing on the cake was when Aaron took us to this Hackerspace. These spaces are basically, from what I understand, meant to allow anyone to come there for free and work on their projects. Take a sit, connect to the internet, grab a drink, even cook some fucking food….all for free. They even had lots of tools to repair your devices:
I talked to one of the guys “in charge” of the place and he was so nice and down to earth. They were working on some software to help the refugees/ukrainians find a place to stay in Germany, and on other projects too. The guy never had a job and he was saying “If you take care of your mother, is that a job?”. I immediately loved it. They get it. We should not have “jobs” but focus on the things that we consider as important and not expect anything in return for that. Enjoy the things that we do. As simple as that! I talked to them about TROM too.
It was such a cozy place. I am grateful to Aaron for taking us there. I loved it. And there are hundreds, if not thousands of such spaces in the world. Here’s a map:
We even worked a bit to fix Aaron’s laptop. Glue, tools, space. No one asks you anything. Go do it!
You know there are so many people around the world that understand we should take care of each other and be good humans, and fuck this consumerism! That gives me some hope. We need to find them, tell them about TROM too, share the views, discuss, promote, and scream louder together.
The next day Aaron took us around some nice, more nature-oriented places. We had something good to eat, then we headed back to Prague.
I spent 2 more days with the awesome Roma and I really felt relaxed and unusually for me, at home.
I really enjoyed it. The ZDay was well organized and I met new wonderful people, my best friends came with me for the event and I made new friends there. I was treated so well by Roma that I cannot thank him enough. And we visited some very cool places too.
I hope that at least some people got curious about what we do at TROM, and who knows maybe join us, even invite me to other events to present it. If I have the money and means I will go. I am fearless 🙂 I go anywhere now haha.
BUT
I am however extremely happy to be back home. I was missing Sasha and she is still my wonderful-one. It is such a shame she could not come. Work, papers…bullshit. I hope if there is a next time we will go together. I hope Georgi can also come, and other TROM friends!
You know, I am happy to live in a very small town….
I went at the beach the next day, and I was reflecting back at how big cities are not meant for humans. Both Prague and Dresden are too big….You want go meet your friends? 30-40 minutes with the public transport. Wanna go to a park/forest? You have to cross many streets and walk for quite a bit, or take again the public transport for half an hour. Cars, trams, buses, subways….many people, all busy. A huge rush. A lot of buildings, a lot of concrete. I was missing the quietness, the nature, the calmness, the fucking trees, the fucking sea. HELLO fucking NATURE!
And it is so expensive in big cities. I spent so much money. Here I never spend money when I go out. Here, when I go out, I go directly into he “out” where I want to go. The beach is 5 minutes away, the mountain is 10. Forest is 20. And that’s barely crossing any streets. And it is so empty and quiet when it is off season. I was missing that a lot. I got so tired in Prague because of so many people, all almost running somewhere. I do not think humans should live like this. Luckily Roma stays outside of Prague a bit. And it is calm there. Thank fuck! I am happy for him!
Maybe it’s just me but I could never live in a big city.
This was the first time I went somewhere to present TROM and I will not forget this experience for a long long time. But trust me when I say this, 70% of the success of this experience (for me) is because of how well Roma treated me. If I were to feel uncomfortable, and it doesn’t take much to make me very uncomfortable, then everything else would have been a painful experience. Thank you man!
This event inspired me to think about creating our own yearly event, like the Trade-Free Yearly Event where we invite many organizations and people from around the world to give speeches/lectures, even have some workshops to for example showcase TROMjaro and so on. Wild ideas for now….but making a 14 hours documentary in 2011 was also a wild idea. Even doing the TROM Meeting, or TROMjaro…. So maybe, maybe we will do this….
Stay tuned! Follow our work at tromsite.com/ because we are hellishly active!
Thank you again to everyone who organized this ZDay, overall I loved it! Any sort of criticism I said in this article is in fact not that important, and at the end of the day the overall experience matters and that was fantastic!
The Venus Project proposes an alternative vision of the future,if we apply what we already know in order to achieve a sustainable new socio-economic system
Finally finished reading this 😄 Wow that was a wonderful experience, all of the people you met at zday and the new friendships that formed there - all great! 😀 I also really liked the illusion museum, I can tell from the photos that you really enjoyed your time there. And man those "sharing places" @aaron showed you were amazing, now I have a newfound appreciation for Germany 'cause of all these great things they do 😁 I hope more and more people around the world start doing these.
I was kinda surprised to learn that you've never been in a train before, but makes sense if you've never had to travel very far. Hope you enjoyed your ride, it is one of the better ways to travel IMO. And man I could totally relate to your feeling of wanting your own comfort place and familiar food, lol 😄 Thanks a lot to @esh who did a great job hosting you there 🙏
And like you I also prefer going to less crowded places, especially in nature where there is quiet and peaceful 😌
I wanted to ask why @bigworldsmallsasha didn't come with you but thought it might be related to the job or the residency situation in Spain, guess I was not entirely wrong. Hopefully everyone can come next time when you go for an event like this, or who knows maybe we'd have our own TROM event one day 🤞
In Germany they came up with a plan: pay a monthly fee of about 50 Euros and have access to all of the public transport across Germany. Lately they proposed that if you are to "surrender" your driving license, you can get access to all of that for free. (source).
Now this, if properly managed and made even more accessible for everyone in Germany, can severely cut down the use of cars. Why would anyone want to buy a car, maintain, take care of, repair and so forth, if they have access to an affordable and good transportation system that is efficient? If people are to use a lot less cars, then we need a lot less roads. Thus you can transform the roads and parking spaces into green public spaces. Add bikes to the mix and you can create much better places for people to live.
Think about how much space cars take:
And the fact that the more lanes we make, the more traffic there is:
And the fact that most cars transport only 1-2 people. A massive waste of space...
And of course, how polluting they are:
Did you know that most of the microplastics in the air is due to car tires? It is true.
So of course it makes total sense to ditch this outdated practice. Paris, Barcelona and other places are trying do to similar schemes. Some cities are restricting the access to cars in some areas.
This is one of those massive problems that we can easily fix even within this bullshit trade system. And the solution is simple: make the public transport very cheap (or free), and efficient. Plus restrict car access to many areas. The goal should be to make it trade-free, so that it will become a lot more efficient. No more tickets, no more ads in the buses or any of that crap. Because what many seem to not realize is that advertising is a massive drive of consumerism (of course, that's its only purpose), and that in turn creates the destruction, waste, pollution and all of the crap we see.
Therefore the way forward is to aim for a trade-free transport system in different parts of the world. No currency, no data trading, no ads, no bullshit. And this will create a much better environment for people and nature.
Restoring nature... and a good life....
Doable now. Happening (little by little) now.
Healthcare
In USA the healthcare is private and thus trade-based for its citizens. Therefore USA has the most expensive healthcare systems in the world with a life expectancy of just 76. (source 1, 2) - In short the people in that tribe pay more because companies decide what's the price of this drug, that surgery, and so forth. And their incentive is of course to charge more and more.
In other tribes like Spain where the tribe members do not have to pay anything, the government is the one negotiating the prices with companies, and thus they are able to get a less expensive deal. And overall a much better organized healthcare system. The life expectancy is around 83-84 years, almost 10 years more than in the USA. (source 1, 2).
It is obvious that if you create a healthcare system that's free (or trade-free if you can) then people live longer, healthier, and you spend a lot less resources on that.
Conclusion.
In both cases, the evidence is clear: if we make these services free (and aim to make them trade-free eventually) then we see a lot of positive outcomes. And as you can see it is not only doable, but happening. However we need to push for more of these, in more parts of the world, and inform people about trade as the origin of most problems.
Let's stop dreaming about hyperloops, round cities, futuristic 3D nonsense. These are fantasies. We need to focus on realistic solutions that can have an enormous impact, while keeping an aim in sight: that of making this trade based society obsolete.
We have improved the audio for the ZDay presentation as much as we could. Plus we added the recordings from a secondary camera to make it more interesting.
The video is translated into Spanish, Catalan, Polish, Romanian, Czech and Portuguese. And it is perhaps the shortest and most to-the-point video about what we are trying to do at TROM.
These people who keep on reporting @Topless Topics videos from our Peertube instance, because of a naked body, are really in need of more relaxed and fun life. And educated. Imagine feeling offended by seeing a human's body. I mean don't look at it if you don't want to, but to report the video....haha. It is hilarious and sad.
So no. Of course, we will never delete videos from our Peertube just because of the naked human body.
For those who don't know, these videos are not porn or spam or anything like that, just an activist trying to normalize nonsexual nudity, I don't think she even makes any kinda money out of this.
@futureisfoss I definitely don't, haha. In fact, the entire decade and a half I've been making online videos, it's just been a constant time and money sink. Any equipment upgrades or software subscriptions (like to actually, you know, edit the videos) I've had to pay through unrelated sources, like my dead mom's life insurance 🙃 So it's hilarious when trolls assume I must be making money hand over fist. If I was actually selling porn, sure, but actually trying to normalize nonsexual female nipples, given that all the "free" platforms ban female nipples and the ones that do allow it are either porn sites that take a massive cut (Onlyfans is 25%) or the few alternative platforms that don't have options for monetization at all...and of course sponsors won't touch me with a ten foot pole. So no, can confidently say I don't make a cent, and in fact all I do is lose money...if I was independently wealthy it would be fine, but man does it get wearying (and my husband is a saint... Show more...
@futureisfoss I definitely don't, haha. In fact, the entire decade and a half I've been making online videos, it's just been a constant time and money sink. Any equipment upgrades or software subscriptions (like to actually, you know, edit the videos) I've had to pay through unrelated sources, like my dead mom's life insurance 🙃 So it's hilarious when trolls assume I must be making money hand over fist. If I was actually selling porn, sure, but actually trying to normalize nonsexual female nipples, given that all the "free" platforms ban female nipples and the ones that do allow it are either porn sites that take a massive cut (Onlyfans is 25%) or the few alternative platforms that don't have options for monetization at all...and of course sponsors won't touch me with a ten foot pole. So no, can confidently say I don't make a cent, and in fact all I do is lose money...if I was independently wealthy it would be fine, but man does it get wearying (and my husband is a saint for not getting too mad that I work so many hours at all this yet he's the only one able to pay any bills because he's the only one with a "real" job)
Man'o'man optimizing the Matrix 280GB database is a LONG and painful process. It may take days....but now I am also working on that ZDay article. Maybe I will publish it tomorrow. After the article is publish all focus is on moving our websites to the servers. We will update about that soonish. #tromstuff
Wow thank you so much for the 260 Euros donation dear anonymous donor!
We really need support now because we work hard to move our servers to a different location for multiple reasons. But basically we are forced to. So we have to pay a lot more money to move them. But we plan to provide more storage space for TROM Files and maybe more services via TROM.tf too. We are expanding!
In Germany if you "surrender" your driving license you can use most (or all!?) public transport for free euronews.com/green/2023/09/18/…
This is one of the things I am talking about in regards to big changes, Take transport. Imagine if we make all public transport as trade-free (that should be the goal), then why would people ever use cars? Sure some may, but most won't. And the better you make this transport system, the less reliance on individual boxes on wheels aka cars.
Yes perhaps we need to introduce these things in such mix-and-match schemes, but if we keep the goal clear, then we can have a real impact.
Imagine if you could hop into any train, bus, tube, and go anywhere, for free. No tickets, no ads, no data collection, no bullshit. Imagine the streets transformed into parks and walking paths. Green, healthy, cozy. Imagine the parking spaces transformed into playing ground
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In Germany if you "surrender" your driving license you can use most (or all!?) public transport for free euronews.com/green/2023/09/18/…
This is one of the things I am talking about in regards to big changes, Take transport. Imagine if we make all public transport as trade-free (that should be the goal), then why would people ever use cars? Sure some may, but most won't. And the better you make this transport system, the less reliance on individual boxes on wheels aka cars.
Yes perhaps we need to introduce these things in such mix-and-match schemes, but if we keep the goal clear, then we can have a real impact.
Imagine if you could hop into any train, bus, tube, and go anywhere, for free. No tickets, no ads, no data collection, no bullshit. Imagine the streets transformed into parks and walking paths. Green, healthy, cozy. Imagine the parking spaces transformed into playing grounds for kids and adults. This is one of those changes that we can do NOW and can have a massive impact for people and the environment!
I wish people would be aware of the practice of trade and how that's the force behind most of the idiotic decisions that we take in our world, like the car-centric model.
These news are a rarity of real and positive news.
And now ditch the ads Germany! Because you don't understand that ads = attention and data trading. And that leads to more consumerism, and to more pollution and destruction and waste. So the goal is to not make them "free" but "trade-free".
I started a conversation with @Roma about optimizing our Matrix database and we ended up talking about carpets. Go figure! That was weird haha.
But hey I am optimizing our Matrix database. Currently at 240GB which is insane! May take 1-3 days to do it. It is slow....but I've heard you can reduce it by a fuck ton so let's see....
The plan: optimize the Matrix and hopefully Friendica database. Move our websites, except trom.tf, to a different server (will take many days); then test to see where we can move our trom.tf.
It will be a lot of server work these next weeks. But we need to run away from Contabo, run run.
I am quite sure that what prevents me from going into a deep depression is my workaholism. I am always busy with things, some new, some old, some experimental. I always want to do new projects, write, create, enable. The fact that soon after I released TROM II, a 3 years work, I jumped into new adventures, says a lot. Many would fucking retire for a few years after working so much on a project, or drop dead.
I always do stuff. And that keeps me away from thinking about many truths. Some that really piss me off are these wannabe "activists" and "organizations" that bitch about this society and then have pompous motivational vomits about how we should do something, and help, and fight, and all that. Yet none, or almost none, of these motherfuckers that I know have ever helped TROM and the many projects that we have, even with a share or something.
We have so many tools that people can use, so many books, a new documentary, and more. I am always available for any podcasts, debate, presentation, wheteverthefuck. I am here screaming for more than a decade, but if I think ho
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I am quite sure that what prevents me from going into a deep depression is my workaholism. I am always busy with things, some new, some old, some experimental. I always want to do new projects, write, create, enable. The fact that soon after I released TROM II, a 3 years work, I jumped into new adventures, says a lot. Many would fucking retire for a few years after working so much on a project, or drop dead.
I always do stuff. And that keeps me away from thinking about many truths. Some that really piss me off are these wannabe "activists" and "organizations" that bitch about this society and then have pompous motivational vomits about how we should do something, and help, and fight, and all that. Yet none, or almost none, of these motherfuckers that I know have ever helped TROM and the many projects that we have, even with a share or something.
We have so many tools that people can use, so many books, a new documentary, and more. I am always available for any podcasts, debate, presentation, wheteverthefuck. I am here screaming for more than a decade, but if I think how ignored TROM is, especially by these cunts :), then I could go into depression mode quite fast.
That's the truth.
Better to keep myself busy with my TROM work, else I may realize how hypocritical many people are. I will always share whatever is important in regards to TROM, regardless of the source. And we do daily on tromnews.com and such. And I've helped other projects whenever I could.
What just triggered me is this video by TVP . Ok made, but the message of: "We should change the world by getting involved. You can do something even from behind the computer!" Is so hypocritical coming from an organization that will NEVER share anything from anyone else. They will NEVER help those people who are active and fight.
TVP has some online reach so hey go ahead share TROM II, or TROM.tf, or other orgs from our Trade Free Directory! They won't! They never did. I worked with them for years. They just talk. Bullshitters. Many bullshitters out there.
Thanks for reaching out to Contabo customer support. For internal reasons we had to take the decision not to provide you with any new products this time, we are awfully sorry to say. "For internal reasons" means we are not going to communicate our motivation. Our decision is not up for debate; we kindly ask for your understanding. Please do not take our decision personally. It has nothing to do with you but rather with reasons that we are not going to explain since we do not want you to misunderstand us or misinterpret our statements. Exactly because of this, we consider all information as internal company information. Still, we are always available for you personally and will respond to all of your questions as soon as possible. Always feel free to contact us.
I am not even sure if this is legal to refuse without explanation. But it is time to move away from these terrible human beings. It is already a struggle to work on these trade-free projects and provide for everyone, last thing I need is t
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Yeah so Contabo will not sell me any new service:
Thanks for reaching out to Contabo customer support. For internal reasons we had to take the decision not to provide you with any new products this time, we are awfully sorry to say. "For internal reasons" means we are not going to communicate our motivation. Our decision is not up for debate; we kindly ask for your understanding. Please do not take our decision personally. It has nothing to do with you but rather with reasons that we are not going to explain since we do not want you to misunderstand us or misinterpret our statements. Exactly because of this, we consider all information as internal company information. Still, we are always available for you personally and will respond to all of your questions as soon as possible. Always feel free to contact us.
I am not even sure if this is legal to refuse without explanation. But it is time to move away from these terrible human beings. It is already a struggle to work on these trade-free projects and provide for everyone, last thing I need is this kind of shitty treatment and unfair.
I'm sure Hetzner would want your business. This is making me rethink the server I have at Contabo too to be honest. I don't wish to support businesses that treat people poorly (employees or customers).
Hetzner seems to be the only viable option but I've heard horror stories from people using it too. And the sad thing is that I do not have a business, I do not make any money, I provide free services for people, and materials. So I have these servers for other people basically, and yet I am treated like that.
Contabo has shockingly low prices, and shockingly terrible "customer support" and overall relation with the "customers".
Take this for what it's worth but I moved all my servers off of Linode when they were bought out by Akamai over to Hetzner. Most of my servers are in Falkenstein Germany, and a few are in Seattle. When possible I'm using ARM64 servers (only available in one data center last I checked). Hetzner has been very good both service wise and customer service wise. But I use auto-pay and have all charges going to my credit card. In all I spend about 100€ with them a month. I also have one Contabo server (my mail server) and I've been loathe to move it over to Hetzner because ... knock wood ... anybody that runs a mail server knows this ... my subnet is not blocked anywhere. It's $15 a month for the server. I could probably pay less at Hetzner but honestly I'm afraid to "fix something" that's not "broken" there.
But you're the 2nd person in about as many months where I've read horror stories from Contabo or about the way Contabo has treated a customer. You're the first I've heard where Contabo flat out refused to sell any servers to, too.
I had been looking to diversifying
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Take this for what it's worth but I moved all my servers off of Linode when they were bought out by Akamai over to Hetzner. Most of my servers are in Falkenstein Germany, and a few are in Seattle. When possible I'm using ARM64 servers (only available in one data center last I checked). Hetzner has been very good both service wise and customer service wise. But I use auto-pay and have all charges going to my credit card. In all I spend about 100€ with them a month. I also have one Contabo server (my mail server) and I've been loathe to move it over to Hetzner because ... knock wood ... anybody that runs a mail server knows this ... my subnet is not blocked anywhere. It's $15 a month for the server. I could probably pay less at Hetzner but honestly I'm afraid to "fix something" that's not "broken" there.
But you're the 2nd person in about as many months where I've read horror stories from Contabo or about the way Contabo has treated a customer. You're the first I've heard where Contabo flat out refused to sell any servers to, too.
I had been looking to diversifying my server deployments and using Contabo more because I really want to deploy some servers to Canada and Hetzner doesn't have a Canadian presence and OVH flat out won't sell me any VPSes in Canada since I'm a US citizen.....
@gme I’ve been using hetzner dedicated servers for 6 months now and they’ve been nothing but amazing as far as service AND customer support. They’re very technically competent and have been able to handle whatever request I throw their way. I haven’t come close to a bad experience except when I accidentally didn’t masquerade my VMs on a host and they sent me a mail about that but that was my issue and an easy fix. I also love that their installimage tool and others are open source too! github.com/hetzneronline
You know I can't remember. I think they did. But I also opened an account under my business. I do remember they asked for my business registration information. I didn't have a problem with that. I've worked is security and in internet/ web my entire adult professional life so I completely understand KYC (know your customer) type requirements and laws.
@gme a third party service had to verify I was a human being and that was one of the verification methods. I think it’s honestly to combat fraud and bad actors (paying customers or not).
Awful.. Sounds like a typical message from the bank or something when they refuse you to open an account or dismantle an existing one with no explanaition. Sadly, banks are allowed to do so by the law now. And this is considering you can't survive sometimes without a bank account at all. But some hosting provider? Give me a break 😤
With banks in many countries no reason is code for money laundering, since laws often make it illegal to tell someone that they're under investigation.
For example under UK law it's a crime carrying a maximum 2 year prison sentence.
TROM Search (searxng), and Translate (lingva) are trade-free (TF) interfaces for trade-based services. And they may or may not work. Now we make sure people understand that:
We have removed TROM Bird (nitter - a Twitter TF interface) because for one it rarely worked since the billionaire introduced new rules, and second we do not see it relevant. We have the Fediverse where anyone can join for free.
Bibliogram (TF for Instagram), Teddit (TF interface for Reddit), and Invidious (TF for Youtube) were also removed in the past, because they either didn't work at all, or it was nearly impossible to keep them functional.
All of these TF interfaces are either a pain to develop, deploy and maintain, or they do not work anymore. Our server IP is getting limited or blocked by these big companies, so it is not a good idea to try and host them. Simply put these companies want for people to use their platforms to see ads and collect their data, or sell shit to them. If you still use them, then you should considering ditching them!
In the end these are not alternatives to trade-based services, they are interfaces for these services. So for example we rely on Friendica instead of Facebook, because Friendica is a true alternative. A different social network! Same when we rely on Peertube instead of Youtube. Or Nextcloud instead of Google Drive, and so forth. These and more, are the true services that we provide via trom.tf/ !
Yes, most videos are on Youtube and it will take a long time until we could match that on Peertube, so for now keep calm and use FreeTube (local TF interface for Youtube), and keep on posting on Peertube!
Yes Reddit has a lot of interesting content. So use an ad and tracker blocker! And give Lemmy a try!
In the near future we will replace the TROM Translate with a proper Translation engine that we run on our server. As for a search engine it is damn tricky....we do not know what alternative there is.
And please consider supporting us here tromsite.com/donate/ so that we keep on providing real Trade Free alternatives to what has become a cancer of the Internet world: Google, Facebook, Twitter and the like.
I am thinking of giving up our SearxNG instance since our IP gets a bad reputation because of so many times trying to access google or the other search engines. Is there a meta-search that uses SearxNG that basically randoms through different instances when you do a search?
EDIT: I remember ofc searx.neocities.org - but if anyone knows any other....
I've been struggling these days with the work on TROM. I worked in parrallel on TROMjaro, to find a way to make TROM.tf sustainable in terms of the server and specifically diskspace, and I also work on an article about the ZDay experience. Oh and I tried to improve the ZDay audio and all that...
And I did not have too much success but I am progressing. TROMjaro ISO released, 30% of the ZDay article done, but the solution for TROM.tf is still floating in mid-air....
The main issue is that we are running out of diskspace. So we urgently need to do something about that. Peertube eats by far the most, around 800GB and the saner solution is to move the storage to an Object Storage. I tried and tried and tried and had partial success.... So it is either that I will move our Peertube to an Object Storage or I move the entire TROM.tf server to a server that has more storage space. Problem is, I found such a server, and would be cheaper overall, but it is from Contabo and they seem to refuse to sell me any new service because of the
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I've been struggling these days with the work on TROM. I worked in parrallel on TROMjaro, to find a way to make TROM.tf sustainable in terms of the server and specifically diskspace, and I also work on an article about the ZDay experience. Oh and I tried to improve the ZDay audio and all that...
And I did not have too much success but I am progressing. TROMjaro ISO released, 30% of the ZDay article done, but the solution for TROM.tf is still floating in mid-air....
The main issue is that we are running out of diskspace. So we urgently need to do something about that. Peertube eats by far the most, around 800GB and the saner solution is to move the storage to an Object Storage. I tried and tried and tried and had partial success.... So it is either that I will move our Peertube to an Object Storage or I move the entire TROM.tf server to a server that has more storage space. Problem is, I found such a server, and would be cheaper overall, but it is from Contabo and they seem to refuse to sell me any new service because of the conflict we had a while back.
I got kinda tired these days. My eyes hurt. I even forgot to mention that I've also tried to test stuff for the Friendica YNH package and submit issues/changes/ideas to the devs to make sure we make the YNH Friendica reliable.
Too many things man....and a lot of computer-things that is....and with computers and so many projects there is ALWAYS something to fix/improve. IDK if I like this....I LOVE the end result tho. Us having our own video platform, social network, OS, and so forth...
Well, keep calm and work. Try not to stress. Go out sometimes. Thanks for the advice :)
Our first example of forced takedown has to do with our Nitter instance. Nitter is a front end for Twitter, a proxy service. All it does is requesting a page from Twittter on your (the visitor) behalf. It will only display the Twitter content, without trackers and using its own (more humane theme). It is not storing any data on the server.
No page on bird.trom.tf/ exists unless you visit it to generate it. Remember this.
On 11/8/22, 17:35 we have received this from our hosting provider:
Dear ******,
We have received complaints about your VPS XL SSD, specifically about the following IP address(es):
*******
Please see the forwarded e-mail below for more details. Apparently, your VPS XL SSD is used for phishing which is strictly forbidden by our ToS.
Abuse is a serious threat in the Internet and can cause a huge amount of damage; thus, we ask for your understanding that once an ABUSE case is reported to us, we must handle abuse strictly and with no tolerance.
Please take immediate action to stop the ongoing server misuse. It is required that you solve the problem within the next 12 hours, and that we receive your reply within this period, too. Your reply must contain all information which enable us to understand exactly which measures you took to stop the abuse and prevent such or similar incidents in the future.
We will suspend access to your VPS XL SSD if we do not receive your reply within the given time frame, and if the problem is not solved in due time; both is essential - the solution and your response. The reactivation of a VPS XL SSD always demands a reactivation fee of at least €36.30. Please respond in due time to save these expenses.
We would appreciate your immediate attention to this matter.
Original complaint from tfp.report.ctac@appgate.com Subject: Unauthorized Use of Trademark
The original complaint that was sent to our hosting provider was this:
Greetings, This is an official message from AppGate, on behalf of our Banco del Pacifico G.F. We need your cooperation in the removal of the content located in the site: bird.trom.tf/BancoPacificoEC The target site is the following URL(s): twitter.com/BancoPacificoEC We kindly ask you to shut down this content as soon as possible. We expect a prompt and affirmative response.
Thanks for helping make the Internet safer.
Sincerely,
DTP Team - Appgate
We replied:
Dear Contabo,
For one bird.trom.tf/BancoPacificoEC is a front-end access to the twitter page twitter.com/BancoPacificoEC. It is not a content that is available on our server. We are using Nitter a Twitter front-end github.com/zedeus/nitter . Like thousands do. How can we be responsible for the Twitter content now? This is not something we can ever remove since it is not on our server. Please understand.
Second, did you check to see if this bank account is phishing? bancodelpacifico.com/ - they have a verified Twitter account and all that. They seem like any other bank...
Please get back to me on this or put me in contact with the ones who filled the complain.
Cheers!
I thought for sure that they accuse us of mirroring a real Twitter phishing account.
But well, we were worried that they will shut down our entire server that hosts 20+ Open Source services that thousands of people use, so the same day we sent another email because no one would reply:
So this is a proxy service, mind you. If the ones contacting you are the owners of that Twitter account please make them aware that it is legal to host proxies and we do not host any materials from this proxy on our server. Here is a discussion about Nitter and DMCA github.com/zedeus/nitter/issue…
Sent one more because we were stressed by the 12 hour deadline they gave us:
Hello,
bird.trom.tf hosts Nitter, a private Twitter front-end, meaning it is simply a proxy to access Twitter assets and user generated content without tracking from Twitter. Thus, all content is proxied from Twitter and is not stored on our servers and if Twitter chooses to remove an asset, it will no longer appear on our site.
Our bird.trom.tf is hosted in the European Union, so the European Union's laws apply. Under the directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the harmonization of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society, "temporary acts of reproduction referred to in Article 2, which are transient or incidental [and] an integral and essential part of a technological process and whose sole purpose is to enable: a transmission in a network between third parties by an intermediary" is allowed, and legal.
As such, all takedown requests must be sent to Twitter, as we don't have any control on the data that they have on their servers.
Thank you,
After several hours of no reply we sent one more:
So please be mindful and do not remove our server. The link bird.trom.tf/BancoPacificoEC is not phishing. You gave me 12h to fix the problem and since you have not replied for the past hours I am concerned about that short deadline. I may not be available for the next 10 hours from now on, simply because I may be asleep, so please do not remove our server as it has not breached any of your ToS.
We got no reply until 22/8/22 10:46. 11 days later! We got this:
Dear ****,
So, where is the final solution? We will give 12 hours to finally close this case.
If you have any questions or need help, please do not hesitate to contact us.
And we replied:
Hello,
bird.trom.tf hosts Nitter, a private Twitter front-end, meaning it is simply a proxy to access Twitter assets and user generated content without tracking from Twitter. Thus, all content is proxied from Twitter and is not stored on our servers and if Twitter chooses to remove an asset, it will no longer appear on our site.
Our bird.trom.tf (Nitter) is hosted in the European Union, so the European Union's laws apply. Under the directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the harmonization of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society, "temporary acts of reproduction referred to in Article 2, which are transient or incidental [and] an integral and essential part of a technological process and whose sole purpose is to enable: a transmission in a network between third parties by an intermediary" is allowed, and legal.
As such, all takedown requests must be sent to Twitter, as we don't have any control on the data that they have on their servers.
I am waiting for your response.
Cheers!
An hour later, no reply. We emailed again:
Please reply today so we can settle this. If you want you can even call me. My phone number is in my account details. I would be illegal under the EU law to remove my server because of a legal service. A proxy one that does not store any data on your servers.
I am waiting for your reply!
2 hours later, no reply, we emailed them again:
I could also seek the advice and involvement of the Electronic Frontier Foundation about this case, because if you decide to remove our server for something that is legally protected, then the precedent is dangerous and needs to be addressed.
I have contacted you a few hours ago and you did not reply, yet you gave me 12h to solve this issue and/or to contact you, which I have done.
So please reply to me and please do not remove the server.
Two more hours later, no reply. Being concerned that they will remove our entire server we decided to make that Nitter link not accessible via Nginx. That's the best we could do. We were forced to do that because no one at Contabo would even engage with us over this. We had no options. It was a mafia style "non-discussion", "do as I told you" approach by the Contabo company.
We emailed:
The URL bird.trom.tf/BancoPacificoEC is now gone. This is an illegal request and I felt bullied into removing a link that did not host anything phishing related and no content at all. This is not ok and I will contact several organizations to help me with this abuse.
You should understand that what the complaint requested was an illegal request, but since I was threatened with the closure of my entire server in less than 12h, and thus over 20 websites hosted there, I was forced to remove that URL.
Now that the URL is gone, you can close this case. I will contact you soon in regards to this decission.
And emailed again:
Tomorrow I will not be home for most of the day, and now that the link has be removed (unfairly) you have no reason to delete our server. I hope you are reasonable people and act the same. And not forget that I've been forced to remove a link that was neither phishing, nor did it store any content. It was a proxy link from a very popular proxy service called Nitter.
They replied:
Dear ****,
Thank you very much for your response.
The complaint seems to be solved; thus, we have closed this case and no further steps are requested from your side at the moment. If we should receive further complaints about your used services, we will contact you again.
Thank you for your cooperation.
Fuck them! "thank you for your cooperation"....motherfuckers. There was no cooperation. It was them forcing me to remove a URL that was not a phishing URL as it was claimed to be, nor did it store any content.
I replied:
Dear Contabo,
This was far from "cooperation", I was forced by you to remove a link that was not phishing, nor did it contain any content. You refused to reply to any of my arguments or look into this.
I am terribly disappointed in you, and I will stop recommending Contabo to anyone.
I will do my best to forward this case to different organizations that could help me pierce through your silence, because you have been bullied by whatever company contacted you, to remove a legal link, and thus abuse people like me who are paying for your service.
Do you have any comments in regards to your decision to force me to remove that URL?
And now I will try to contact EFF or other similar organizations about this issue. If anyone can help, please let me know. If this becomes the norm, then any link from any of our website, can be subject to removal.
This is unacceptable.
UPDATE.
25.08.22
The company:
Thank you for your response.
There are new changes in Germany regarding copyright violations that forced us to remove all domains from our network that are providing protected contents.
Either you provide for us and every visitor the declaration of consent of the right holder to each individual product or its confirmation that you are the right holder. Otherwise, we will be forced to remove this website. This comes also in action for redirections, quotes and shared posts.
We know that this is strict, but we are bound by the law and hope for your understanding.
Us:
Would would be kind to tell me what set of laws we are talking about? This is extremely strict. Sounds like you are not allowed to host anything but your own personal photos for example.
Second, are these laws only applying for the servers hosted in Germany by Contabo? Would it be better to migrate to a different region?
Them:
Thank you for your e-mail.
Yes, the German copyright law is really very strict, and affects all companies based in Germany, including in our case our data centers in other countries.
The copyright law states that content may only be uploaded if its creator or owner has explicitly confirmed this.
Us:
Hi,
I felt like I was given no chance to defend myself when you contacted me. And I contacted others for legal advice and I was given some, but you had ignored it. You did not address it at all. I showed you that proxy services are legal in all of the EU "Under the directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001". So how am I going to know if what you did was legal or not if I am not provided any details about your decision?
Do you understand my frustration?
Right now, based on my experience with Contabo, you guys can any day ask me to remove any link at your will, and I cannot do a thing about it. This is truly disturbing to me.
Now can you please take your time and explain to me under what exact law does it say it is illegal in Germany to host a proxy service that uses the official API of Twitter, which allows exactly for what we are doing with bird.trom.tf (Nitter).
Please take your time and explain to me. I think it is fair towards me to have an explanation of this.
Thanks
Them:
we don't have to have a legal debate, because I don't think there's a lawyer sitting on either side right now. It is also completely irrelevant: We don't want our network to be affected, by repeated complaints. We are allowed to protect our reputation, and that is what we are doing here. Besides, it's perfectly clear that you can't use someone else's copyright.
It is clear by now that they just bend to whoever contacts them with an abuse report. They do not want or have the resources to do anything more than bully their "clients" into taking down whatever it is requested. Not surprised...
Rokosun
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