What's one of the silliest domain names you own? Mine is legit-elephant.lol and there's an entire story behind it. Some of you were even here for this!
C'mere and sit down, I'll tell you the story of the fateful night in the fediverse where Elon Musk flipped his lid and the entire fediverse flipped a middle finger to him.
The story begins during the winter holidays of 2022, back when hachyderm lived on Kris Nova's servers
Twitter was on fire, people were leaving in droves, and a plucky little mastodon server called hachyderm.io had recently had a surge of people on it.
I was one of the infrastructure people keeping it up and running with kris nova (and a crew of others).
At some point, twitter decided to try and completely block every fediverse url from working and was instantly banning anyone who posted a link to a mastodon account or mastodon instance.
The first workaround was pretty hilarious: just blocking twitter's bot with a 404 (entirely via useragent querying in nginx!) was sufficient because twitter was doing a lookup on every domain before blocking it.
It's been amusing to see that twitter hasn't gotten any better recently at Engineering Fixes To Problems That Don't Exist™
Anyways, a few hours later, that stopped working, and more clever workarounds were needed. It was determined that twitter's bot couldn't handle client side javascript, and so we launched a hilariously nefarious plan:
I wrote the client side javascript required to take a blank html page and turn it into redirection anywhere in the fediverse, entirely based on URL parameters. Then I shoved that into nginx.
But naturally, what better way to Shove It To The Man™ than to use a domain name that mocked them the entire time that it worked? Enter: legit-elephant.lol
Get it? Because mastodon, and elephants? This is also where hachyderm gets its name: a blend of hacking + pachyderm.
A little while after I deployed that, enough people were using it and things like it that twitter stopped doing that nonsense. It was entirely ineffective, and we won. I've never used legit-elephant.lol since.
@hazelweakly I no longer own it, but for a while in the early 2000s I had thatscrap.net, which hosted forum software on a spare PC in my basement. This was because my wife one day mused that there should be a site called “That’s Crap” where she could post examples of bullshit she encountered (e.g. websites with completely unnecessarily awkward UX).
@hazelweakly I used to have variations of votes4sale_com. The idea was to put it up before a presidential election with bar graphs representing the "Votes 4 Sale Polling Results". You could add individual votes for your candidate by clicking as much as you want. Or, you could pay $1 for a thousand votes
@hazelweakly That is so delightful! 10/10, no notes.
My silliest have much more tame backgrounds: yakshaving.tech hosts Factorio servers when I get the itch, and satisfactory.engineering was going to be a tongue in cheek Very Serious Website for a software consultancy that makes attainable promises. "Satisfactory Engineering: we aim to meet expectations, within a reasonable time frame."
Alas I then moved countries, and Engineers Canada has zero sense of humor when it comes to the E-word :(
@hazelweakly I remember this! Wasn’t this when Elon Musk tried to block all outgoing links to Mastodon servers on Twitter, and you spun up a redirection service?
@OddDev@digichelle they couldn't execute the client side JavaScript, so yeah. And checking client side JavaScript is orders of magnitude more expensive then just resolving a URL, so there was no way to address it feasibly :)
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