If it’s not connected to the internet, that certainly does take away a significant cause of problems. Good luck

In theory if there are no security holes, a user account can only mess up its own account.

Note that what steps you want to take will really depend on who these users are and what you want to achieve. There’s a vast chasm between allowing in, say, friends or colleagues, vs. letting random people on the internet access it. The latter will mean someone will intentionally look for exploits, which means e.g. regularly applying security updates becomes far more pressing.

If you are letting in random strangers, I’d look into only giving them access within a separate container or ideally virtual machine per user as an extra precaution unless what you’re making available is very stripped down.

It feels like most Western CCP cheerleaders are basically cheering on a pre-Deng version of the CCP and haven’t quite noticed that the CCP of today would totally purge anyone pushing the pre-Deng/pre-1978 views of the CCP.

Just a few years back, Vernor Vinge’s scifi novels still seemed reasonably futuristic in dealing with the issue of fakes well by including several bits where the resolution of imagery was a factor in being able to analyze with sufficient certainty that you were talking to the right person, and now that notion already seems dated, and certainly not enough for a setting far into the future.

(at least they don’t still seem as dated as Johnny Mnemonic’s plot of erasing a chunk of your memories to transport an amount of data that would be easier and less painful to fit in your head by stuffing a microsd card up your nose)

To me Crystal is too often different from Ruby for the sake of being different in ways that just makes it infuriating to work with because the effort of porting code to it is much higher than necessary, and the main advantage it offer is being compiled. That’s just simply not enough for me to consider switching.

Ruby.

My desktop manager is Ruby. My text-editor is written in Ruby. I’m about to switch to a terminal written in Ruby, and a shell written in Ruby.

It’s stupid that it’s not there, though, and I suspect it will get fixed at some point. Basically, some concerns were raised about people using it to doctor timelines (but they can already do that by setting up a single-person instance and messing with the database), and the new instance can validate the signatures of the posts anyway, so they’re no less secure than posts from other accounts received via federation. If anyone is really concerned they could slap an “imported from …” banner on old/migrated posts so people are aware they were not originally posted there.

It’s funny, because one of Marx best known works contains a diatribe against people carelessly talking about “full share of the fruits of their labor” and insultingly described the notion as Lasallean (see Critique of the Gotha Programme, chapter 1, where he utterly savages what became the German SPD over this).

He thought it was utter bullshit to talk about that in an organised society, because in practice in a functioning society there are in fact all kinds of necessary deductions and redistribution necessary in order to ensure the needs of everyone is met.

E.g. healthcare, funds for those unable to work, funding of societal needs such as schools etc.

Even that, he describes as constrained by “bourgeois limitation”, pointing out that"

“Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.”

The notion of “full share of the fruits of their labor” is not a socialist one at all.

On the contrary, the main socialist slogan used to be “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” which goes directly counter to the notion of giving everyone the full share of the fruits of their labour.

Sadly, while you can export everything, you can’t import posts in Mastodon without having direct access to the database and poking about.

You can import following lists, bookmarks, blocks and mutes, though.