503Junk.House is a fediverse instance for a small community of Portland area anarchist adjacent people.

503junk.house

About

503junk.house is a small Mastodon (Hometown) instance for anarchist-adjacent people in or around Portland, OR. The goal is to have a small community which is built over time both online and offline.

Why the name?

The local area code is 503 (there is also a newer 971, but we went with 503). We also wanted to model our community off of 483punk.house, but with less of a focus on the local punk scene (though that is welcome too!). So junk house was a funny play on words. Put it all together and you have 503junk.house

Features

• Mastodon style fediverse microblogging
• 1312 character limit
• Locals-only posts to share with just 503junk.house community
• Exclusive lists to follow people on the list but not on your home timeline
• Other Hometown customizaitons
• TBD in-person potlucks and other events
• More to come!

How to join

You can go to the homepage and apply to register. There are requirements to join:

• Have a current member vouch for you (this may be waived in order to increase diversity on the instance)
• Be connected to Portland and willing to visit for an in-person event from time to time (like a summer BBQ or something)
• Agree to server rules
• Contribute to the community in some way (from spreading the word, adding emojos, moderating, organizing in-person events, etc)

OPSEC

• IPs are retained for 1 week
• Backups are retained for 1 week
• All things posted on mastodon should be consider insecure and public (use encrypted apps for sensitive content or better yet only relay it in-person)
• You may use Tor or a VPN to access your account, but with these shared IPs your access may be temporarily disabled if we experience attacks.

Policy and Governance

We want to remain small enough that we can talk to each other. We each have roles to play. Within 30 days we will ask you to assign yourself a community role, and if everyone consents then you will be given the privileges you need to fulfill that role (if any). You can also shift roles at a later time if you want, and the whole process will be ad-hoc.

For moderation, those assigned the privileges of moderating will be empowered to moderate without gaining permission first in order to quickly respond to threats. Moderation actions may be reversed after the community discusses the action. Moderation actions are logged for community auditing.

Cost

The service is free. It's a gift. The operating costs to the community do exist though and cost about $80 a month (link to budget spreadsheet forthcoming). Soon there will be a way to donate and give back if you desire to do so, but it's not required.

Architecture

Our servers run on Linode located in their California datacenter. The main server, opossum, is a 4GB VPS. We also have a secondary search server, rat, that is a 2GB VPS. Linode server backups are enabled on opossum. There are two 150GB data stores attached to opossum. The first data store holds the database and the media we upload. The second datastore is used for encrypted backups of the first data store. Firewalls are in place for all servers and unneeded ports are restricted. Remote administration connections require ssh keys to access. Mailgun is used to send server emails.

Backups

Linode backups are made once a day at 4am.

Full backups are made on the first of the month using duplicity. Then daily incremental backups are made at 3am.

At 5am, the encrypted backups are synced offsite to the administrators home computer.

1. No racism, misogyny, homo/transphobia, ableism or other oppressive behaviour.
2. No right wing bullshit and no authoritarian left wing apologetics.
3. No harassment.
4. No electoral propaganda/campaigning.
5. No misinformation or conspiracy theories.
6. No promotion of capitalism, meritocracy or a commercial enterprise.
7. No spam.
8. No sexualized images without consent.

1. blackqueer.life: suspension
2. mastodon.art: suspension
3. nothing.tacowolf.net: suspension
4. solarpunk.moe: suspension