otter

A major earthquake of magnitude 7.6 has hit Japan's north-eastern region.

The quake occurred at 23:15 (14:15 GMT) at a depth of 50km (31 miles), about 80km off the coast of the Aomori region, the Japan Meteorological Agency said,

It prompted tsunami warnings which have now been downgraded to advisories, while waves of 40cm (16in) were seen in some places.

Local media reports that some people in the region have been injured, while trains have been suspended as a precaution.

starting in late March 2026, there will be a new limit of 5 high-traffic communities per moderator. Only communities with greater than 100k weekly visitors count toward this limit, and there are no limits on communities under that amount.

For those who are impacted (less than 0.1% of active mods), we’re rolling out in several phases over 6 months to ensure mods have sufficient time to prepare. We notified all impacted moderators last month, and you can also check your status anytime here.

More details in the thread.

We could also consider policies around this on an instance level. I don't think it's that big of a problem yet, and "X communities with >Y users" might not be the best metric for us, but it's worth discussing

If anyone has an article with more technical details on what the solar radiation did, and how they're going to patch it, I'd like to read about it :)

Airbus said it discovered the issue after an investigation into an incident in which a plane flying between the US and Mexico suddenly lost altitude in October.

The JetBlue Airways flight made an emergency landing in Florida after at least 15 people were injured.

The problem identified with A320 aircrafts relates to a piece of computing software which calculates a plane's elevation.

Airbus discovered that, at high altitudes, its data could be corrupted by intense radiation released periodically by the Sun.

The A320 family are what is known as "fly by wire" planes. This means there is no direct mechanical link between the controls in the cockpit and the parts of the aircraft that actually govern flight, with the pilot's actions processed by a computer.

There was an outage for a few hours today:

https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/

I remember signing up for the newsletter for this a while ago. They've come a good way since then, and I appreciate how much thought and planning they've put into this. There's value to having a clear road map of how they intend to put it all together.

This page seems to have the most information: indiegogo.com/en/projects/bonfire/community

I've pulled out the parts I thought were relevant:

Welcome to the open social web: a growing constellation of people and interconnected apps reclaiming the web.

But most people aren’t here yet. They’re trapped in mainstream social media platforms controlled by billionaires, where [...]

The solution isn’t another winner‑takes‑all platform, but a resilient, diverse web of interoperable services built on open protocols like ActivityPub, with bridges to other networks (AT Protocol/Bluesky) where useful. [...]

After several years of tireless work, we’ve just launched Bonfire Social 1.0, built on our modular toolkit that's fully customisable and extensible by design, which powers federated spaces that connect with Mastodon and the wider fediverse, balancing local autonomy with global conversation.

Then about the campaign:

This campaign aims to strengthen what we've built and unlock what comes next: federated groups, events, and governance tools; shared moderation and end‑to‑end encryption; mutual aid networks; Bluesky interconnection and mobile applications; living memory and Gaia.

The code is a public good (no investors, no ads), so rewards honour the craft and invite participation.

They then list out their plans for each step, as well as who they are collaborating with already:

For example, for federated events:

co‑created with LAUTI, interoperable with Mobilizon, Gancio, and Gathio. Follow groups and places and make event discovery and participation spread across the fediverse

For E2E Encryption:

Standards‑based MLS encryption for DMs and group chats, developed in partnership with the Social Web Foundation and another federated plaform, with usable key management and an interoperability path for the wider fediverse.

Messages are encrypted on devices and readable only by intended recipients—even by instance operators. We’ll focus on usable, federated key management and a path toward interop across the fediverse, setting a stronger baseline for privacy, especially for at‑risk communities.

Mutual Aid:

Local gifting and mutual aid: location-based offers/requests and resource matching, co‑designed with Mutual Aid Networks and local BuyNothing communities to strengthen solidarity and local resilience.

BuyNothing‑style gifting and mutual aid features support everyday sharing and crisis response: offers, requests, matching, and interoperable accounting with ValueFlows.

We’ll work with gifting and mutual aid communities to migrate from closed platforms, and explore bridges to connect existing networks (e.g., TrashNothing) where useful, so care and resources can flow without surveillance or lock‑in.

Gaia:

Environmental sensor and open data can appear in feeds as stories, visuals, and alerts. Co‑created with ecologists, artists, and sensor networks to turn data into dialogue and stewardship, taking Citizen Science to a whole new level.

Streams of environmental data, such as sensors, citizen science, open datasets can become understandable and actionable signals. Communities can contribute local data, listen with place, and turn awareness into care. The network of life is already federated, Gaia helps us listen and respond together.

We received a message noting that the previous mod has not been active in some time, and that there is interest in building up this community. The admin team is hoping to add a few mods to the community during this process.

If you are interested in moderating this community, please reply in this thread.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/18547034

In the past, if you broke or lost your phone, your Signal message history was gone. This has been a challenge for people whose most important conversations happen on Signal. Think family photos, sweet messages, important documents, or anything else you don’t want to lose forever. This explains why the most common feature request has been backups; a way for people to get Signal messages back even if their phone is lost or damaged.

After careful design and development, we are now starting to roll out secure backups, an opt-in feature. This first phase is available in the latest beta release for Android. This will let us further test this feature in a limited setting, before it rolls out to iOS and Desktop in the near future.

Here, we’ll outline the basics of secure backups and provide a high-level overview about how they work and how we built a system that allows you to recover your Signal conversations while maintaining the highest bar for privacy and security.

Secure Backups 101

Secure backups let you save an archive of your Signal conversations in a privacy-preserving form, refreshed every day; giving you the ability to restore your chats even if you lose access to your phone. Signal’s secure backups are opt-in and, of course, end-to-end encrypted. So if you don’t want to create a secure backup archive of your Signal messages and media, you never have to use the feature.

If you do decide to opt in to secure backups, you’ll be able to securely back up all of your text messages and the last 45 days’ worth of media for free.

If you want to back up your media history beyond 45 days, as well as your message history, we also offer a paid subscription plan for US$1.99 per month.

This is the first time we’ve offered a paid feature. The reason we’re doing this is simple: media requires a lot of storage, and storing and transferring large amounts of data is expensive. As a nonprofit that refuses to collect or sell your data, Signal needs to cover those costs differently than other tech organizations that offer similar products but support themselves by selling ads and monetizing data.

Anatomy of Secure Backups: Privacy First, Always

At Signal, our commitment to privacy informs which features we build and the ways that we build them.

Using the same zero-knowledge technology that enables Signal groups to work without revealing intimate metadata, backup archives are stored without a direct link to a specific backup payment or Signal user account.

At the core of secure backups is a 64-character recovery key that is generated on your device. This key is yours and yours alone; it is never shared with Signal’s servers. Your recovery key is the only way to “unlock” your backup when you need to restore access to your messages. Losing it means losing access to your backup permanently, and Signal cannot help you recover it. You can generate a new key if you choose. We recommend storing this key securely (writing it down in a notebook or a secure password manager, for example).

These choices are part and parcel of Signal’s guiding mission to collect as close to no data as possible, and to make sure that any information that is required to make Signal robust and usable cannot be tied back to the people who depend on Signal. This is why wherever there’s a choice between security and any other objective, we’ve prioritized security.

Enabling Secure Backups

If you want to opt in to secure backups, you can do so from your Signal Settings menu. For now, only people running the latest beta version of Signal on Android will be able to opt in. But soon, we’ll be rolling this feature out across all platforms.

Once you’ve enabled secure backups, your device will automatically create a fresh secure backup archive every day, replacing the previous day’s archive. Only you can decrypt your backup archive, which will allow you to restore your message database (excluding view-once messages and messages scheduled to disappear within the next 24 hours). Because your secure backup archive is refreshed daily, anything you deleted in the past 24 hours, or any messages set to disappear are removed from the latest daily secure backup archive, as you intended.

Backing up, moving forward

We’re excited to introduce secure backups, making sure you can retain access to your Signal messages even when your phone is lost or destroyed. But secure backups aren’t the end of the road.

The technology that underpins this initial version of secure backups will also serve as the foundation for more secure backup options in the near future. Our future plans include letting you save a secure backup archive to the location of your choosing, alongside features that let you transfer your encrypted message history between Android, iOS, and Desktop devices.

Secure backups are available in today’s Android beta release. A full public release, along with iOS and Desktop support, is coming soon.

A few months ago, we posted a discussion thread about lemmit.online, which resulted in the decision to defederate from it:

https://lemmy.ca/post/38374922

The reasons were given as follows:

It feels actively harmful to lemmy, since so many of the posts it brings over are questions that the original poster will never see. It encourages a conversation that will never happen, so if someone does reply they’re going to feel disengaged.

The bot rarely gets any upvotes or engagement, and I suspect a majority of people (like myself) have just blocked it.

These reasons also apply to lululemmy.com, and so we just defederated from it as well. Same as before, if you were using it and miss it, let us know and we can reconsider.

Would you like some pie? Check it out here: https://piefed.ca/

What is PieFed

PieFed follows a similar format as Lemmy and Mbin. Those that are familiar with Lemmy will find it very similar, with some additional features including topic lists, optional private voting, new mod and admin tools, crosspost de-duplication, community wikis, etc. Thanks to how the fediverse works, you can use either lemmy.ca or piefed.ca to interact freely!

We will put together some guides on our non-profit's website at some point. In the meantime, we have created !newtopiefed@piefed.ca for us to learn from each other. There is also the official !piefed_help@piefed.social community which has a similar purpose.

We have done some testing and we are learning as we go, but please bear with us while this new platform gets going 🙂

Other Links & FAQ

• lemmy.ca is not migrating to PieFed. We will run both instances at the same time. You can use whichever one you prefer.
• Learn about the differences between PieFed & Lemmy: https://join.piefed.social/features/
• A tour of the community moderation features in PieFed: https://piefed.social/post/844065
• One of the first mobile apps to implement support for PieFed, with more to come: https://interstellar.jwr.one/