Monica

A few weeks ago I created an account on Mastodon and have been trying it out as an alternative to Twitter (and I suppose Facebook, which I don't use). I'm not leaving Dreamwidth, my friends here, and DW's support for longer-form posts; DW and "social platforms" are good at different things.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the part of the Mastodon community (-ies) that I've encountered so far feels to me like the earlier days of the Internet. It feels more friendly, helpful, and supportive than even pre-Musk Twitter (driven by algorithms and ad sales). It kind of reminds me of some of the more social Usenet newgroups of yore, like the Rialto and alt.callahans.

It's different, and different takes time to get used to, and different is sometimes better and sometimes worse. And getting set up isn't going to be as easy as going to Twitter or Facebook and clicking "sign up".

barriers to entry

I actually looked at Mastodon back in the spring, when the Twitter thing was starting to happen, but I bounced. You see, Mastodon isn't a service, like Twitter or Facebook is; it's a federated platform. The best analogy I've seen to setting yourself up on Mastodon is getting an email address. You can get email services from lots of places and they all inter-operate. Choose Gmail or outlook.com or your ISP's bundled account or your own server or anything else; no matter what you choose, you'll be able to send and receive email. Email providers aren't all the same and you might find your choices have consequences -- Gmail silently nukes certain messages and you'll never know, and aol.com is oft seen as a bad neighborhood. You choose an email provider, follow its rules, and deal with its issues -- and if you decide to move later, with some disruption you can. Your choice matters some, but it's not permanent.

Mastodon servers are like that. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of Mastodon servers out there, and there are lists of recommended servers that you can find with a search for something like "find mastodon server", and from the outside it can be overwhelming. Back in the spring I saw that I had to Make Decisions first, and I didn't know enough to make decisions, and I hadn't seen the email analogy, and I was only casually looking and wasn't invested...and I walked away.

All of that is true today, too, except that more of my friends were moving there so I had a reason to dig a little deeper.

I found one of those pages of "50 servers you might consider" or some such, many of which are aligned to particular interests like Linux or open-source software or furries or art, and started browsing things I wouldn't mind being affiliated with. (Your Mastodon server, like your email provider, shows up in your "address", so there's an appearance aspect to it.) Servers can have their own moderation rules and terms of service and those are things I care about, so I read those pages on short-list candidates, eliminating some by what I found there. I identified a server that aligned well with my interests, my views on moderation, and the expected local conversation (more about that in a bit), and applied for an account.

Yeah, "applied" in this case. Some servers are totally open -- anyone can create an account. Some were but then Twitter started to implode and servers that had had 5000 people were seeing tens of thousands of new accounts and buckling under the load, so they went to a wait-list model. The server I joined asked for a short "why do you want to join this server?" message.

There are some huge, general-purpose, open servers. I recommend against trying to join them now. Across the network of all public Mastodon servers, there were something like a million new accounts in the first week of the Musk era. These servers aren't usually being run by well-funded megacorps but by mostly volunteers trying to keep up with demand.

the fediverse

Mastodon isn't a single site or a single thing. It'd decentralized and distributed. "Mastodon" is the name of the software. Strictly speaking, when you join a Mastodon server you are joining a server that is part of "the fediverse" -- "fed" like in "federated". People talk about being "on Mastodon", and what they mean is "on one of these servers", and sometimes a well-meaning person tries to correct your terminology, and I want to give y'all a heads-up.

The fediverse has other "things" besides Mastodon. There's a whole big set of open-source projects for sharing different kinds of things across a network, with an interface called ActivityPub at the center of it. I don't know very much about that stuff yet.

So, technically: there is the fediverse, and Mastodon servers are part of it, and so are other things. But there's no mastodon.com that runs it all, like twitter.com or facebook.com. Remember: like email, not like corporate social media.

(There is a mastodon.com. Of course there is; every URL you can imagine that consists of a single English word is claimed by someone. This one is a forestry site.)

sounds like a lot of work; how's this better than Twitter?

Still with me?

On the surface Mastodon looks kind of like Twitter, federation aside. You can see short posts from other people in a feed, and you can interact with them (liking them, replying to them, etc). There's a big difference, though, and I think it's an important difference that helps with constructive discourse instead of amplifying the loudest people.

Twitter creates, and Google+ after the early days created, a "feed" for you, curated by an algorithm. I don't know how G+'s worked; on Twitter, a post (tweet) is more likely to show up in your feed if it's posted by someone with a lot of reach (the reach get reacher), or if it has a lot of likes (encourages socks, bots, and echo chambers), or if it's somehow connected to someone you follow. That last seems to be the least important, anecdotally. I almost never use my Twitter feed because it's full of stuff I don't care about. In Musk's Twitter, rumor has it that paid members also get substantial priority.

Mastodon gives you multiple feeds (I'll get back to that), and the "algorithm" is "reverse chronological", like it is here on DW and probably on every blogging site you've ever used. You see stuff as it was posted, not something yanked out of its context from three days ago and pushed at you now, and not yanked out of its context of all the other conversation happening around it. Nothing has priority; you get what you asked for, in order. I've found the things I read and interact with here on DW to be much more thoughtful, nuanced, and civil than what I see on Twitter (granted post length is a factor too), and so far that's what I'm seeing on Mastodon too. (BTW, posts on Mastodon are by default 500 characters, larger than Twitter, and it's a server setting. I've seen one server that lets you use 5000 characters so long as you put most of it behind a cut tag.)

Mastodon also gives you multiple feed options, so you can choose the size of your fire hose. You can see just posts from (or boosted) by the people you follow, or just posts from your local server (regardless of who you follow), or a "federated" view that reaches out to other servers and does, um, something based on the people you follow and their connections. I haven't explored that one much yet. It's big. But it's still reverse chronological, no prioritization, no buying or shouting your way into top position.

I think that local feed will end up being pretty important. If you choose a server that aligns with some of your interests, then that "local" view can connect you with people who share those interests. Because people are usually multi-faceted and the instance is a home, not a topic restriction, you'll see a variety of content from the people there. It's not like Usenet newsgroups or Codidact communities where you can only talk about this thing here and not that thing, but there's a rough sort based on some shared interest, if you want to use that. (Of course, if you want to create multiple accounts on multiple servers, for example to separate personal and professional content, you can do that too.)

I'm being an armchair sociologist here with too few observations and no data, but I think this "local community of multi-faceted people" aspect will act somewhat like physical neighborhoods (back when we socialized with our neighbors, but maybe your barony or congregation is a model too) or like the more social Usenet groups. Because these online neighborhoods aren't bounded by geography or (probably) by culture, the people I see on that local feed are more heterogeneous, more diverse, more "like me in some ways, very unlike me in others". I hope easy interaction with that community will help build connections and resist polarization. I'm game to try the experiment, at least. On Twitter, only the loudest (and probably most extreme) "people not like me" would make it to the feed, the feed that was overrun with topics I don't care about from people I don't know so I never looked at it anyway -- but if I did look, I wouldn't find the "regular people", only the people with big fan followings.

(Aside: a week or so ago I came across a server for my city. So physical neighborhoods might be represented too.)

boosts and retweets

On Twitter, you can "retweet" something, which means "show this to my followers". On Twitter you can also retweet and add your own message. If you've seen tweets that embed other tweets, that's what's happening. So you might see Musk's latest policy flip-flop and retweet to your followers, adding a snarky comment of your own, and your retweet will be its own tweet, not part of the thread of replies to the original tweet.

On Mastodon you can "boost" something, which is like that first kind of retweet. I saw something that I wanted to add my own message to (further support in my case, not snark), and I couldn't figure out how to do it -- the "boost" button doesn't have an option for adding a comment. On investigation, I learned that this was an intentional design choice.

My initial reaction was "huh, weird". Then I thought "ok, maybe if you can't easily snipe at people you'll be less likely to snipe, so maybe that improves the climate?" and that sounded like a good idea. But since then I've seen more cases where it would have been helpful to either add something (as the booster) or comment to the booster not the original poster (as a reader). So I'm not sure how I feel about this now.

You can always do this manually, of course -- you can link to anything, after all. You won't get the fancy rendering, that thing that looks like an embedded tweet on Twitter. But if you decide to just boost something, instead of creating your own post, then people who want to respond to you can't. Like, if you didn't know that that thing you boosted has been debunked or has more context or something like that... no easy way to do that.

mindset

Mastodon, and the fediverse in general, exudes a scrappy "do more for yourself" mindset. There's no single entity making decisions for you -- what you see, how it's moderated, how the software works, etc. Servers are run by ordinary people who make those decisions for their servers only. Norms can vary. I expect that the most successful servers operate by some form of consensus, either up front or emergent (as people opt in or out). Servers can block other servers, so there's some level of shared baseline to operate in polite society. You can set up your own neo-Nazi server if you want to, but you might find that a lot of people don't want to talk with you.

I've seen the fediverse compared to anarchy (you and those with shared goals can do whatever you want), and I've also seen it compared to fiefdoms (somebody controls your server and it's probably not you). I don't think it's a fiefdom in the way that Twitter is; first, you can move to a different server, and second, that you can set up your own server for you and your friends mitigates if you don't like any of the options. A serf can't just say "well I'll take that land over there and do my own thing", because all land is ultimately owned by someone. On the Internet, you can buy a domain and set up shop -- the space isn't wholly owned. But whether you're a serf or an Internet denizen unhappy with the existing servers, you have to do work -- setting up your own place isn't free. And that effort can be a substantial barrier, too. So it's not a complete mitigation for networks with problematic owners, but I think we'll be better off on the fediverse than on Twitter or Facebook, which feels like an even bigger fiefdom to me. Time will tell.

John Bull wrote a post (in tweet-sized pieces, naturally) that rings true for me, and he gave a name for the phenomenon we're seeing with Twitter, saw with LiveJournal, and partially saw with Stack Overflow. The thread starts here on Twitter and here on Mastodon (the Fediverse). Selected quotes:

One of the things I occasionally get paid to do by companies/execs is to tell them why everything seemed to SUDDENLY go wrong, and subs/readers dropped like a stone. So, with everything going on at Twitter rn, time for a thread about the Trust Thermocline.

So: what's a thermocline?

Well large bodies of water are made of layers of differing temperatures. Like a layer cake. The top bit is where all the the waves happen and has a gradually decreasing temperature. Then SUDDENLY there's a point where it gets super-cold.

The Trust Thermocline is something that, over (many) years of digital, I have seen both digital and regular content publishers hit time and time again. Despite warnings (at least when I've worked there). And it has a similar effect. You have lots of users then suddenly... nope. [...]

But with a lot of CONTENT products (inc social media) that's not actually how it works. Because it doesn't account for sunk-cost lock-in.

Users and readers will stick to what they know, and use, well beyond the point where they START to lose trust in it. And you won't see that.

But they'll only MOVE when they hit the Trust Thermocline. The point where their lack of trust in the product to meet their needs, and the emotional investment they'd made in it, have finally been outweighed by the physical and emotional effort required to abandon it. [...]

Virtually the only way to avoid catastrophic drop-off from breaching the Trust Thermocline is NOT TO BREACH IT.

I can count on one hand the times I've witnessed a company come back from it. And even they never reached previous heights.

Every now and then I remember to look at my web site's traffic. Every month my site produces a few hundred "URL not found" errors, and almost all of them are related to Wordpress -- wp-login.php, xmlrpc.php, and wlwmanifest.xml (tried at a bunch of entry points, each exactly 30 times in the last 30 days, presumably a daily probe).

I don't run Wordpress -- never have. But I guess it's popular enough, and has bugs or security holes, that people find it worthwhile to send their bots to look for it on every web site they can find?

This is oddly fascinating, even though I don't understand all of it. If I understand correctly:

A "short" is a bet that a stock price will fall: you promise to sell it on a certain date at a certain price, but you don't actually own the shares. On that day, the idea goes, you'll buy the shares at the lower price you expect and then turn around and fulfill your contract, pocketing the difference. I don't know if regular folks like you and me can do that, or if only investment funds and professional stock-market people can. There are some rules that are different for the big players and the little folks; I don't know if this is one of them.

So... some big Wall Street hedge funds (one often mentioned is Melvin Capital) placed vast quantities of shorts on a gaming-gear company that isn't doing well (GameStop). A bunch of people on Reddit observed this and said to Wall Street: hold my beer.

They bought the stock. Hundreds of thousands of people on Reddit bought the stock. At that scale, any individual participant doesn't have to buy a lot; you could play this game for $20 back when it started. And it's not like you can spend that $20 going out to a movie right now, so there was probably an untapped market of bored people looking for fun.

Did I mention that this subreddit bills itself as "like 4Chan for investers"? And did I mention that Elon Musk tweeted about it to his 42 million followers? That subreddit has way more than "hundreds of thousands" of subscribers now.

What happens when lots of shares of a stock start getting bought? The price goes up. The price for GameStop shot up from less than $20 to, at one point, $347. And I think it was higher; I was only able to find daily closing prices, and the hour-by-hour swings have reportedly been wild. There's some background information on CNet.

The stock price, of course, won't stay high. It's a ridiculous price for that company, and eventually the market will bring it back down. But in the meantime, those hedge funds holding shorts have lost billions of dollars -- remember, they still have to buy the stock on "short day", at whatever price is then current, and then sell it for $10 or whatever the bet was.

The Redditors and crew, meanwhile, have turned their sights to other stocks; Blackberry and AMC have been mentioned as other companies in trouble that investors have considered prime candidates for shorts. Stock exchanges and Robinhood have stopped trading at times or restricted purchases.

By the way, the people rallying against Wall Street have a song -- a sea shanty:

I don't know what a "tendieman" is (Google has been unhelpful), though I assume it has to do with tendering, in this case selling at the right time. Ryan Cohen is a major investor in GameStop who's recently been investing more and trying to change the company's business strategy, though I can't tell if he has an actual position there. (The song implies he's on the board.)

As far as I know, the people organizing on Reddit and wherever else aren't doing anything illegal. They're not insider traders with privileged information -- quite the opposite. They're just...massively trolling big investors who traditionally make a lot of money with these kinds of bets. Some of them seem to be in it for the laughs; some are trying to make money riding this (but a lot of them will probably lose money, including anybody who tries to join in now). The line between a movement and a mob can be fuzzy; I'm not sure which this is. I wonder what the other damages are going to be. They're pitching this as little people versus big investors, but will little people with modest retirement funds end up taking some of that damage in those funds too? Or are hedge funds more esoteric and not usually part of IRAs and suchlike?

Bizarre, fascinating, and unsettling.

There's apparently another widespread Gmail outage, but this one is more harmful -- it's lying to senders about addresses being invalid (permanent error).

This might be the swift kick in the rear that I needed to figure out a different approach to email. I have a domain, so I should set up a single "collector" address there to receive everything I'm currently forwarding to Gmail (which I'll have to hunt around for; Pobox is easy but not the only one). I hadn't done that before because I thought that relying on Google (a huge, hardened service) was a safer bet than relying on my domain -- what happens if my domain gets hijacked, my hosting company compromised, etc? Rethinking that now...

Fortunately, I'm already forwarding Pobox to an address on my domain, a backup for Gmail, so I probably haven't lost anything. But I might be getting silently dropped from mailing lists I cared about. We'll see.

Ok, I think I now have everything going to one mailbox on my domain and, from there, mirrored to Gmail for now. I'd like to have all my mail in one place, but the last download of my Gmail mailbox was a 10G file in mbox format, which I don't know how to read or plug in to something else. (I mean, obviously that's a standard format, but what can I use on my Mac to read it?) I don't really want to store all that on my domain server long-term (it'd raise my storage costs), but there's probably a lot of junk in it, mixed in with the stuff I care about. I'd already done some passes to, for example, nuke years-old mailing-list threads that I don't care about now, because Google has storage limits, but that's time-consuming.

I welcome input from people who've wrangled large mailboxes, domains, and email more generally.

This is surreal. A year ago, somebody entering data on Open Street Map recorded a suburban building as being 212 stories. A backyard shed, apparently. It seems to have been an honest typo, later corrected. It happens. No big deal, right?

The error was later corrected by another openstreetmap user, BUT, in the interim, Microsoft took an export of the data and used it to build Flight Simulator 2020. The result... this incredible monolith (2/2)

• Liam O, Twitter

The original thread where people tracked it down is hilarious.

I have a lot of links I've been meaning to share accumulating in tabs, tweets, and whatnot. I'd wanted to "curate" this more, but sharing something is better than sharing nothing because I didn't get to that, so...

• Stack Exchange (aka Stack Overflow Inc) fired its two longest-serving, most-community-connected community managers. A week before, a third such had given notice, though that was not yet public when the firings happened. Here's a post on Meta.SE. Jon posted about his departure on his blog. He talked more about it in his 2019 in review. Meanwhile, firing Shog9 was egregious enough in the community's eyes that a GoFundMe campaign to help tide him over between jobs has raised $11k so far. Jon and Shog, and also ex-SO moderator George Stocker, have been writing a lot on Twitter about the company's change in direction, often in intertwined threads that are hard to link into.

• Jon on Misunderstanding Meta

• Effective apologies -- five of these six elements are core to teshuva, the Jewish understanding of repentance. (I forget who shared this where.)

• For managers: different ways of showing recognition (I saw this while in the midst of year-end reviews at work)

• Designing for people, which is timely as we work to build Codidact

• On site design in general, Alphabet of accessibility issues. Yes I experience several of these, and I'm just one person!

• Register article on GitLab and diversity

• To kill a community

• What is community anyway?

• Internal monologues or not?

• On grieving: how not to say the wrong thing. Synopsis: rings of concern, comfort in, dump out.

• siderea on the problem of punching up

• Samuel Liew's Stack Exchange timeline

I remember, when traveling in the 90s and into the 00s, looking for hotels with business centers, where I could use their computer to check my email. Technical and geek conventions that set up actual terminal rooms for this purpose were golden. (This happened even in the 80s for sufficiently-geeky contexts.) But mostly, the connected traveler was responsible for figuring it out or just doing without.

After reliance on quasi-public computers came the rise of laptop computers. I was late to this phase, only getting a laptop of my own in (I think) 2006. For the next while, I looked for hotel rooms that had ethernet ports. I took that laptop when traveling not for any work purpose but so I could access my email (and, on big vacations, upload photos somewhere so I didn't risk a single point of failure). I carried an ethernet cable for years. (I have a story from this time about having to fall back to a public computer, or rather a public computer's network connection that I probably wasn't supposed to touch, so public computers were still an occasional thing.)

A few years after the rise of hotel ethernet ports, places (hotels, restaurants, etc) started to advertise free WiFi. I still carried that ethernet cable because you could never be sure, and if there was an ethernet port I still preferred it. I only started to pay attention to public WiFi when I got a smartphone and later a tablet (which can't use ethernet). The smartphone's data plan had limits, so public WiFi seemed useful if I wasn't doing anything that required extra care. (Surfing yes, online banking no -- that kind of thing.)

I used a hotel's WiFi as recently as January, when I found evidence of some unwelcome probes that I couldn't explain any other way. After that I realized that for practical purposes I have unlimited data (it gets slower after 2GB/month but I rarely exceed that). At Origins a couple weeks ago, I dutifully took the piece of paper the hotel desk gave us with the WiFi access information, dropped it on a table in the room, and never touched it again, preferring to use my phone to create a hotspot so I could use my tablet. Much safer.

I'm back to arranging my own access and not looking for public accommodations. I feel like I've gone in a circle.

I don't know a lot about the nuts and bolts of responsive design (the "how", I mean), but Stack Exchange is moving toward it so I'm starting to pay attention.

Meanwhile, my ancient tablet seems to be in its death throes, so I've started to look around at what's out there these days, and I realized something. I'm looking at some 10" tablets with resolutions like 2048x1536. My 30-inch monitor at work is something like 2500px wide. These are, of course, not even remotely the same size pixels. Pixels have always varied with the size of the monitor, of course, but a ~10" tablet used to be in the range of 1024 or 1280 wide (landscape), not twice that.

I've seen discussions of SE's upcoming responsive design that say things like "and at widths under 900px it does this" and "the max width for the content area is (some number of pixels)".

How does this work? How can I see reasonable "real-world" sizing of things on both my big monitor and my tablet when designers are measuring things in pixels and tablets are doing crazy-dense things with pixels these days? I guess the same can be said of 4k displays (which I don't have). Do these ultra-dense devices somehow tell the browser "no, really, treat me as half that for layout purposes"? On a tablet will I need to have tons of zoom -- but still struggle to see the actual application's controls, because those don't zoom when you make content bigger?

I must be missing something obvious. Anybody want to enlighten me?

The New York Attorney General is investigating fraud aimed at FCC commenting. The FCC refused to cooperate. According to this post, tens of thousands of New Yorkers, and many more people elsewhere in the US, had their names falsely and illegally used in fake feedback on net neutrality.

Successfully investigating this sort of illegal conduct requires the participation of the agency whose system was attacked. So in June 2017, we contacted the FCC to request certain records related to its public comment system that were necessary to investigate which bad actor or actors were behind the misconduct. We made our request for logs and other records at least 9 times over 5 months: in June, July, August, September, October (three times), and November.

We reached out for assistance to multiple top FCC officials, including you [Chairman Pai], three successive acting FCC General Counsels, and the FCC’s Inspector General. We offered to keep the requested records confidential, as we had done when my office and the FCC shared information and documents as part of past investigative work.

Yet we have received no substantive response to our investigative requests. None.

Net neutrality is important. The integrity of the public record is even more important, as it is used to support policy changes (not just this one). And right now it looks like we've lost both.

You can use this site to look for fake comments using your name and, if you find them, file a complaint. With, um, somebody -- I didn't find any under my name, so I haven't gone down that path.

I found out today, via a notice provided by one of my add-ons (Stylish), that the next version of Firefox (57) is going to break most add-ons, which they are now designating "legacy". Firefox, like Chrome, automatically updates itself (I'm not sure that can be turned off any more), and these changes are coming "in November". I found this blog post from Mozilla from August, but I never received any sort of notification as a user and I don't make a habit of seeking out blog posts from vendors of software I use.

Why the hell didn't I get some sort of notification from Firefox? Is this news to you, too?

So now, the hunt for replacements commences. Gee thanks, guys.

Here's what I've found so far, untested unless otherwise noted:

• Stylish replacement (notice pushed by Stylish, apparently): Stylus. Listed as beta. I don't know whether styles will just work (after being manually imported, it appears) or if changes will be needed. ETA: I needed to rework one style, which had several blocks applying to different sets of (related) sites. I had to break that up. The style I was using to make tooltips bigger doesn't work (not supported by Mozilla's new API), but I found a workaround. The day after I got all this migrated to Stylus, I got a Stylish update -- but it couldn't read my existing scripts either, so I would have had to migrate to it in exactly the same way I'd just migrated to Stylus. (The UI was even the same.) So I punted that; I've already got Stylus working.

• Greasemonkey: Google led me to ViolentMonkey. Ditto about not knowing if things just work or require adjustments. ETA: ViolentMonkey is slow and times out about a third of the time for me, but TamperMonkey (which I already know from Chrome) exists and works fine. I had to manually add each of my scripts (to either), but I didn't need to modify them.

• NoScript: it looks like they're migrating, but I don't know if I'll have to do anything. ETA:* Seems to be broken in 57; supposedly they're working on it.

• Session Manager: is this built into Firefox now? It's very important that when I restart Firefox, I get the tabs and windows I had before. Can anybody who doesn't use an add-on for that confirm whether that works out of the box now?

• AdBlock Plus: this is my one extension not listed as legacy, so I assume it will keep working.

• Classic Theme Restorer: um, I found this github repository; haven't waded too far into the readme yet. ETA: this page explains how to move the tabs below the URL/extensions bar where they belong. The other look&feel stuff it did isn't as critical. (One could make a good argument that the URL bar belongs below the tabs, but all the other stuff the browser puts in that horizontal slice is more global, and having those reversed confuses me.)

Yesterday Cloudflare, a service that increases reliability (and speed?) of web sites, shut down the Daily Stormer web site. Daily Stormer, if you haven't heard, is the site for the a hate group with broad impact in the US, most recently in the violence and murder in Charlottsville.

Their CEO's blog post announcing the termination isn't just a "they're evil and they're gone" announcement like you sometimes see. It's a thoughtful post that explains the dilemmas faced by the organizations that, by and large, make the Internet work, and what dangers this decision opens up.

Our team has been thorough and have had thoughtful discussions for years about what the right policy was on censoring. Like a lot of people, we’ve felt angry at these hateful people for a long time but we have followed the law and remained content neutral as a network. We could not remain neutral after these claims of secret support by Cloudflare.

Now, having made that decision, let me explain why it's so dangerous.

[...] Someone on our team asked after I announced we were going to terminate the Daily Stormer: "Is this the day the Internet dies?" He was half joking, but only half. He's no fan of the Daily Stormer or sites like it. But he does realize the risks of a company like Cloudflare getting into content policing.

I also found this tidbit interesting:

In fact, in the case of the Daily Stormer, the initial requests we received to terminate their service came from hackers who literally said: "Get out of the way so we can DDoS this site off the Internet."

After finding that post I found this post on Gizmodo that, among things, quotes from internal email he sent.

This was my decision. Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. My rationale for making this decision was simple: the people behind the Daily Stormer are assholes and I’d had enough.

Let me be clear: this was an arbitrary decision. It was different than what I’d talked talked with our senior team about yesterday. I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet. I called our legal team and told them what we were going to do. I called our Trust & Safety team and had them stop the service. It was a decision I could make because I’m the CEO of a major Internet infrastructure company. [...] No one should have that power.

I don't have a coherent opinion yet. On the one hand, policing content is a dangerous game and why I support net neutrality. On the other hand, private companies (and individuals) should be free to act (legally) in their own interests; companies have been refusing service to unacceptable customers on a case-by-case basis for years. On the third hand, there are differences between competitive markets and monopoly markets. (Within monopolies there are government-sponsored ones and we're-big-and-drove-everybody-out ones too.) Balancing all of that is hard.

We've all seen text on the web that looks almost like ASCII, but it's really very-similar characters from other alphabets like Cyrillic, right? These can appear in domain names too, and your browser will helpfully display them in Unicode.

So, yeah, that can be exploited. It's called a homograph attack.

Browsers display a URL with some special characters in its uglier, non-translated form, so you can tell. But there's a bug or feature, depending on whom you ask, that if the domain consists entirely of special characters from a single language, it all gets translated. You can see how that would be helpful to Internet users in Russia or Israel or China, but for those who surf using the Roman alphabet, it's a risk that even careful security-minded people can miss.

Chrome version 58 reportedly fixes the problem. Firefox isn't going to fix it, but there's an about:config setting you can change (set network.IDN_show_punycode to true).

This post from Ars Technica explains the problem in more detail.