Caitlin Johnstone: Plutocrats have put a lot of energy into influencing government policy in order to create legislation which ensures the continued growth of their wealth and power. A lot of maneuvering has had to happen over the course of many years to create a political system wherein government bribery is legal in the form of campaign finance and corporate lobbying, wherein deregulation of corporations is the norm, wherein tax loopholes are abundant and tax burdens are shifted to the middle class, wherein money hemorrhages upward to the wealthiest of the wealthy while ordinary people grow poorer and poorer. What incentive would these powerful oligarchs have to risk upsetting that delicate balancing act by helping to circulate ideas which challenge the very governmental system they've worked so hard to manipulate to their extreme advantage? How hard would it be to simply decline to give anti-establishment voices a platform, and platform establishment loyalists instead? How easy would it be for a wealthy media owner or influential investor to ensure that only establishment loyalists are given the job of hiring and promoting editors and reporters in a mainstream media outlet? https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8216
Jay Rosen: What doesn't get considered is that there could be anything radically wrong with Washington, that the entire institution could be broken, that there are new rules necessary. That idea, that the institutions of Washington have failed and need to be changed, doesn't really occur to the mainstream press, because they're one of those institutions. And they're one of the ones that failed. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8217
Noam Chomsky: The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd. And it's the responsible men who have to make decisions and to protect society from the trampling and rage of the bewildered herd. Now since it's a democracy they - the herd, that is - are permitted occasionally to lend their weight to one or another member of the responsible class. That's called an election. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote8218
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So the temporary system had some sort of failure, I'm not even 100% sure what caused it to be honest. It went down sometime yesterday and some of the virtual drives got corrupted, which caught the database and the virtual gateway device.
I was able to restore the system... most of the way. Thankfully there are backups of the database, but some of them were also flawed as well, the most recent intact one was from 5/16, so 5 days were lost.
To be clear, this problem was exacerbated by the fact that there's not as much redundancy in the temporary setup (sadly it looks like it'll be a few more months before I have a place of my own and can spin up my own hardware again). But I'm going to still look at how I might get those in better shape.
As far as how long it took: I had a busy day yesterday and didn't see that the server was down until I was too exhausted to do anything about it, so it had to wait until I got off work today... each attempt at restoring the database takes around an hour, so that took *a while* to get restored.
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Image Upload Trouble
If y'all have had issues uploading images... sorry about that.
I missed a setting when re-configuring the server after transfer to it's current environment and it's fixed now.
Longer Explanation: there are two servers involved, a reverse proxy and then the actual Friendica server. The Friendica server accepted uploads up to 100MB... the proxy didn't have that setting... so it would just go for a bit, then timeout. Added that setting to the proxy and all solved.
Server Migration Complete
Thank you for your patience!
The server has been migrated to a new dedicated remote server (hosted with OVH) and to the newest version of Friendica (2024.03, previously it was 2023.12).
Things should stabilize mostly for the time being, but I will be on the lookout for bugs.
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