*banned 4 MarkDown love* @design_RG@qoto.org

@hansw Saw this, nice news !!!

@blank71 Welcome, new friend. 😄

@lucifargundam

Thank you !! 😃

@hansw@mastodon.social @freemo

@hansw@mastodon.social @freemo
Thank you Hans. I am doing some preliminary research, before I can prepare a public post suggesting it, or contact them privately but with a well laid question or suggestion.

Have some reading to do before I reach either point. Thanks for the input, you two!

@freemo @hansw@mastodon.social

Wonderful, thanks Freemo. The Data Portability is key to ask for a personal backup. I had a feeling it might be the case, or Facebook and company wouldn’t be offering it.

I really like the app, and they did wonderful work creating and developing it. In the future, if we could have it a bit open sourced, allowing third party clients, it would be great.

There’s one unofficial client, which a Chinese young programmer developed on his own - simply by monitoring the API calls and responses between the official client and their servers.

The API i closed, no details ever published. Yet, he built a working client, web based, and added extra functions which the official, company provided app, does not include.

E.g. :

• Exporting of all of a user’s letters with a certain penpal. This is exported in plain text format, when required.

• Statistics like total letters written, how many sent, how many received. Word count for each letter, average and total word count for all letters.

And more. There’s some risk on using this rogue client, from an unknown person (who could be copying or saving access tokens, user data).

But it is a great result, specially considering it’s done solo and without any inside API info or manual.

@hansw@mastodon.social

A question for you, or anyone in the European Union, familiar with GDPR regulations.

I use an app that is based in Hong Kong, and is unique on what it offers (a pen pal application, nothing comparable out there that I know of).

Problem :

• they are a small team, and very responsive, creative and competent.
• but all of our data (the personal letters we write to penpals, in private and possibly with much personal info) is stored un-encrypted.
• PRC has some pretty strict legislation, and it’s possible Intelligence agencies could demand a China based company to disclose any info in their systems.

And the question ;

• Does the GDPR regulation mandate that a user’s data should be available for them to download on demand? (Facebook, and others offer this; I imagine it is probably mandated)

I would like to see if we could have a legal base, at least in some jurisdictions, to approach the team and ask them to offer the same personal data backup for download. Which currently, they don’t offer.

If European legislation backs this, we would have a big start.

Ideal would be for all data to be end to end encrypted, like WhatsApp offers, for example. We don’t have that yet; although it might be legitimate to ask.

Maybe @freemo might know something about this also?

@freemo Oooh, if you got under FDA regulations for prescription medicines it would be a nightmare.

Maybe operate as a process and sell the finished oil. Based in Canada or another jurisdiction that allows for this without much lawyering.

@freemo Maybe it’s accepted as a common fact and a good thing, lol. 😆

@hansw@mastodon.social @freemo

Found the nice toot and thread I mentioned. HERE.

@hansw@mastodon.social @freemo That’s good, I hope things keep improving.

Usually we never appreciate being healthy and getting up and going everyday - until something is not right and it’s not so easy to do it, or hard, or all around impossible.

Makes one slow down a bit and appreciate the small good things, moments. A sunny day, a nice song. A short walk or bike ride.

@freemo I think you forgot but we had a nice discussion about oil extraction a few months ago. SaladBarBreath from Todon was involved on it too.

@hansw@mastodon.social
Sorry to read that, Hans.

Hope things improve for you.

@freemo

@freemo @hansw@mastodon.social

I imagine a tool that allows a user to explore their backup archive like a small database would be good.

Similar display to how Pinafore displays toots, for example. That I could open my profile and see the Toots, just like if I visited the profile in the live instance.

Searching for keywords, displaying results and allowing viewing the toot.

At that point, maybe the tool could copy or save the toot to a text file (just plain text, or maybe markdown if included; plus any attached media, exported in the same format as store in the archive.) The mastodon headers, etc not necessary.

With that exported text, a new post could be made in a live new account, somewhere – in a manual mode. I would love to be able to access that large backup archive this way as I have lots of content rich posts.

This would be a Life Saver for everyone, as we do know instances do implode and disappear all the time.

To do a full import of original contents from the archive into a new live instance involves a myriad complications; which is why we don’t have that so far, and maybe won’t ever.

There’s info all over the fediverse, pointers, links, timestamps, etc - I wouldn’t imagine a backup export could be imported into a new account and post in it with the original content and original timestamps – that would not be real, and really weird, I feel.

Thank you all for reading this and considering the request.

@cy @Gargron @olamundo

@freemo

If someone could take a shot at creating a JSON viewer, with the proper intelligence to handle the mastodon exported archive, it would already be a HUGE improvement.

Currently, there’s no tool that I know of – and I have posted a detailed Blog on this, and asked friends in various instances.

Got a few pointers but the only viewer I could use was not intended for this and a bit cumbersome.

We are potentially looking at large amounts of personal data; 7000 plus toots, thousands of images in my 450 MB archive, from this account here at Qoto.

Importing the data into a new instance has big difficulties as it will be propagating to other instances, etc. So this is a difficult and critical job.

But an archive handler which can navigate the saved data would advance things a lot and not pose this type of problem. We would be very grateful to anyone who took that project on.

@cy @Gargron @olamundo

@Phaedrus LOLL… Thannks, good chuckle here1!

@cy

They… that… they didn’t just delete his account. They impersonated him, spamming other instances with fake Delete messages, to trick them into helping retroactively censor him, regardless of their ToSes. Because he may have spoken with someone who was likely to be a wingnut.

Very true – that is one angle I hadn’t thought about. In fact, the account deletion at the one instance, a huge Abuse of Power considering the circumstances (honestly and clearly documented in the blog post, linked above in a previous comment), that also meant a deletion of the user account content EVERYWHERE.

I have read and thought about the way Hubzilla does things, and it seems a lot better. There, we can pack up at move, with ALL our content preserved, intact.

Which is impossible in Mastodon. The only tool offered is a backup archive creation. This archive, with all toots, images etc, currently cannot be imported in any other instance; and there’s no software to view it, to retrieve a toot’s text or the attached media, etc.

Not only the @admin did this, surprising since their is supposed to be a Left wing instance, (which I am aligned with).

I had the displeasure to see a good friend lose completely his account and all data from mastodon.social - and no appeal was possible or got any results.

No abuse from this user either. We need smaller instances and closer control of our data, plus portability.

@Gargron

@freemo @olamundo

@torresjrjr not likely, as the State there has active surveillance and censorship. So it wouldn’t happen unless they decided to allow it.