admin 
lowly sysadmins ...loading the floppies 💾 to make this and 📼 https://kolektiva.media run on the information super highway ![]()
Please use #kolektivamod for moderation requests.
🚨 Kolektiva.social SECURITY ALERT 🚨
This is an alert for Kolektiva.social users. Please read this post in its entirety!
In mid-May 2023, the home of one of Kolektiva.social's admins was raided, and all their electronics were seized by the FBI. The raid was part of an investigation into a local protest. Kolektiva was neither a subject nor target of this investigation. Today, that admin was charged in relation to their alleged participation in this protest.
Unfortunately, at the time of the raid, our admin was troubleshooting an issue and working with a backup copy of the Kolektiva.social database. This backup, dated from the first week of May 2023, was in an *unencrypted* state when the raid occurred and it was seized, along with everything else.
The database is the heart of a Mastodon server. A database copy such as the one seized may include any of the following user data, in this case up to date as of early May 2023:
- User account information like the e-mail address associated with your account, your followers and follows, etc.
- All your posts: public, unlisted, followers-only, *and direct ("DMs")*.
- Possibly IP addresses associated with your account - IP addresses on Kolektiva.social are logged for 3 days and then deleted, so IP addresses from any logins in the 3 days prior to the database backup date would be included.
- A hashed ("encrypted") version of your password.
🚨 👉 As a precaution we highly recommend that all users on Kolektiva.social *change their password immediately* to a new, unique, and strong password.
We sincerely apologize to all our users and regret this breach. In hindsight, it was obviously a mistake to leave a copy of the database in an unencrypted state. Unfortunately, what would otherwise have been a small mistake happened to coincide with a raid, due to bad luck and spectacularly bad timing.
We understand that our users and other people on the Fediverse will have a lot of questions. We will try to answer them as best we can, but please be patient and bear in mind that we may be overwhelmed with messages, and may be delayed in responding or unable to provide answers to certain questions for legal or technical reasons. As a security culture reminder, it can be extremely harmful to the individuals charged and to our community to openly speculate on the Internet about alleged criminal activity or about what law enforcement may be able to do with seized data. Our present awareness is that the seized Kolektiva data is unrelated to the federal investigation and prosecution and we are exploring legal avenues to have the seized data returned and copies destroyed.
Thank you for your understanding and solidarity
👇 Please see our replies to this post for additional information (1/?) 👇
After a long and Kafkaesque ordeal to set up a new bank account, we're happy to announce that we're once again in a position to accept donations!
https://kolektiva.info/donate/
A huge thanks to everyone who has reached out to ask how they could financially support us over the past year or so.
Thankfully, we had a bit of a nest egg that the project was able to survive off during that time. But we are definitely in need of regular financial support to help keep the project going, and to realize our future goals. So if you are in a position to do so, please consider signing up as a monthly sustainer, support independent anarchist infrastructure, and help grow Kolektiva.
Users may have noticed that our servers were down temporarily this morning. Our tech team is still investigating, but for now it appears to have been a localized network outage, and not related to our servers specifically. We will update if we learn anything different.
📣 Maintenance 📣
Sadly, we don't have the time to do the maintenance late during the evening, so we're gonna finish the server upgrade we start a couple of days ago.
This should involved a reboot (some minutes of downtime), but otherwise there should not have any major outage out of that.
If everything goes as planned, we don't expect more than an hour of maintenance: 16:45 - 17:45 UTC.
Just a quick update to let our users know that we've enabled Authorized Fetch on Kolektiva.social.
We've taken this small step to help protect our users' data from the coming assimilation of the Fediverse by the surveillance capitalists at Meta/Threads. We will continue to do what we can to prepare for this eventuality, and are happy to hear from other server admins who are taking/recommending additional measures.
If you notice any performance issues, please tag this account and a member of our mod team (where you're more likely to get a quick response).
For more information:
https://fedi.tips/authorized-fetch/
🖤 Kolektiva Loves PeerTube 🖤
PeerTube is one of Kolektiva's core services, running at kolektiva.media. It is a free and open source alternative to YouTube, developed by the non-profit organization @Framasoft@framapiaf.org During the end of the year, Framasoft is raising money to finance the future development of Peertube. You can check out the roadmap here: https://joinpeertube.org/news/peertube-future-2024.
PeerTube allows Kolektiva to autonomously distribute video content with the kind of smooth and accessible interface that users expect. If you have some money left this year, you should consider making a donation to fund the future of this important platform: https://framasoft.org/en/#support. If you don't have money to give, we completely understand and we ask instead that you share this post and also visit Framasoft's website (https://framasoft.org/en/) to discover all their free services. We also encourage you to talk about them with your friends and comrades, so more people use these privacy-focused alternatives to the corporate services that only want to make money out of your data.
- Kolektiva's tech collective
We are running an upgrade that requires a reboot. There will be brief downtime in the next hour.
📣 MASTODON UPDATE 📣
We're going to do the migration to mastodon 4.3.0.
Normally, there should not be any issue, let's hope that contrary to the last time there won't be any issue.
📢 Server upgrade 📢
Hello everyone, we're gonna upgrade the mastodon server operating system.
We'll have to reboot the server, and there might be some mastodon downtime due to database upgrade, but that shouldn't be long unless with hit an issue.
@archiesea@kolektiva.social @Framasoft@framapiaf.org There's a couple of reasons for that:
1) when kolektiva first start, the goal was to have an alternative platform for anarchist media collectives that were slowly but surely getting banned and shadow banned from the corporate social media platforms, not necessarily an open platform;
2) when the mastodon instance was launched, people didn't see the need to open kolektiva.media (peertube) registration since you're able to subscribe to an account or channels from mastodon and see the new videos in your timeline;
3) we're pretty tight in terms of storage on the server right now, so even if you don't plan to upload anything, if we open registration and people start to post videos a lot, we're gonna end up with serious issues that won't be easy to manage.
I'd probably be cool to have a more open peertube instance, but we would've to do some radical change on our instance to make it possible. It's not impossible, but it'd need some planning, time, and money.
@flama@mastodon.cr @moderation@kolektiva.social @kolektiva
Hmm.... did you try setting it up in a browser, or was it an app? And who is your email with?
It's possible that it's on a blacklist with our email provider, Riseup... but most other people right now are signing up fine, so I would also suggest maybe trying it on a different browser... and if it's still not working, then try it with a different email maybe?
Also, what username did you choose? We can check on our end to see if we received the request.