Hive Temporarily Forced Offline

With people looking for Twitter alternatives, because... you know why, there have been many giving Mastodon and others a try. One that has come up is called Hive, a social network I'd never even heard of a month ago. The influx of people has been so massive though that this 2-person company is feeling the crunch. So much so, they were forced to offline the entire service to fix security issues. Sarah Perez at TechCrunch has more.

The company has now taken the fairly radical step of fully shutting down its servers for a couple of days in response to concerns raised by security researchers who discovered a number of critical vulnerabilities on Hive, several of which they say remain unfixed. The issues they found would allow attackers access to all data, including private posts and messages, shared media and even deleted direct messages, as well as the ability to edit other people’s Hive posts.

TechCrunch

I don't really know how Hive has built up enough word-of-mouth awareness to get people to join in search of a Twitter alternative, but they've certainly achieved massive growth. Business Insider pins their user base at 2 million people. That's a huge jump in people using a service.

While it can be difficult to run a startup with only a pair of people and work through the issues that come up, it does give me pause to see people running from Twitter due to one person's eccentric behavior to join another platform run by one person who we know nothing about.

While Mastodon is likely not for everyone, the fact that one person doesn't own it and it harkens back to the early days of the internet with its decentralized architecture means there is more control over how you want to use it and who to block out.