Rollerblading, programming, writing, documentaries, travel, motorbikes… That’s it!
Preferably otl@apubtest2.srcbeat.com
This account is here to interact with bits of the Fediverse which don’t play nicely with my weird ActivityPub-email system.
Ha nice analogy. Might steal it if that’s ok! :)
Reminds me of a place I used to work at. Small place; 10 people. I started as a sysadmin but later started programming. They encouraged me; “yes we suck at this we need help!” so I kept going. But as the work became more involved and I needed a bit of co-operation from their side, it was torture. They didn’t “suck” at it, they just didn’t respect or bother themselves with that kind of work.
Dev publishes unreadable website:
“Some developers are bad at CSS and design/CSS (like me)”
Implying some innate incapacity.
Same dev:
“Or these people could learn Rust and contribute to the existing project.”
https://lemmy.ml/comment/8855579
Man I just don’t get it. There’s a kind of wilful ignorance here or something? It’s jarring. All due respect for what’s been made but this attitude… I’m not offended or have disdain, just dumbfounded at the messaging.
@Zaktor There is some influence. Two things that come to mind:
* default post length limit (500 characters)
* how the server renders “Page” ActivityPub objects (e.g. Lemmy posts)
For example, many comments made in this thread could not be made from a Mastodon server. All Lemmy posts show as just a title and link with a blank body. These application behaviours have a direct influence on what types of conversations take place by people from Mastodon servers.
> Why is Mastodon being treated as a monolithic entity?
Oh the usual: makes a batter headline.
I guess I’m spreading toxicity by replying to a post from a Mastodon app…? Or something?
@onlinepersona @fediverse Haha good question! They’re light on details (“we moved to Wordpress”)
and after testing it seems like it’s not even working :(
WordPress has an ActivityPub plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/
Here’s a wordpress blog that is available via activitypub: https://solarbird.net/blog
We can address it like so: @solarbird.net
We can’t see the posts on Lemmy (doesn’t support ad-hoc fetching of ActivityPub Notes)
but in a Mastodon web UI: https://solarbird.net/blog/2024/02/27/kosa-again-yes-again/
RSS is kinda different. Subscribing is really just polling a file. ActivityPub messages are primarily sent around by first requesting a server to send messages to you. It’s a pull versus push thing.
I love RSS because it’s so simple. It actually goes a long way in the fediverse where most activity, which is read-only. Only a small percentage of users ever comment/post stuff.
@electricprism @fediverse
@jimmy90 @zeppo For sure. One major lesson off the top of my head is with ActivityPub is how errors are presented. I’ve written software to fiddle around with ActivityPub and found servers have terrible - if any - error messages. SMTP provides a bunch of standardised status codes that servers can give back to you, along with diagnostic info. In theory this is possible with apub but in practice it is not addressed at all.
@towerful I mainly program in Go, so when I see all that extra software I notice how much easier it is when I get to just rely on the Go runtime. It does a lot of the heavy lifting done here, but the resulting code is not as clean. Actually just today I read through Mastodon’s code to track down a bug in my in-progress ActivityPub service (in Go) and found the Ruby really easy to navigate!
@SpaceNoodle I’ll always be sad how GitHub helped popularise centralised workflows. Such an amazing opportunity for a big cultural shift, but it didn’t go anyway as far as it could have.
@pkill Yeah seems that way, judging by their scaling up documentation: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/scaling/
Although hey, it all depends on a whole bunch of stuff written in super optimised (and kinda scary) C !
Mastodon is written in Ruby. Nowhere near as big as Facebook or the ML field, but hey, it’s important to a couple of us at least :)
I get where you’re coming from. But not everyone who falls for this stuff is “stupid”. Some are just vulnerable - maybe just temporarily - and once you’re in, it’s an awful slippery slope.
I don’t know how many are just vulnerable and how many are good Darwin award nominees.
Absolutely!
Although… snail mail is also legislated to be secure. It’s not used as often because there is a more convenient, better(?) alternative: fax. I wish some funding for so-called “AI” projects could be used to develop even more convenient/better alternatives to fax. There are messaging protocols but they seemed crazy.
Payment systems are crazy too. Stripe did all the boring work and now there is a convenient interface for payment processing: Stripe’s HTTP API.
Might be closer than you think. The White House is just using Instagram right now: https://www.whitehouse.gov
(See section “featured media”)
Super interesting story - thanks for sharing. Helps getting perspective:
> the data centres proposed by Conifex would have consumed 2.5 million
> megawatt-hours of electricity a year. That’s enough to power and heat
> more than 570,000 apartments
A link to the video could be shared via ActivityPub.
The video would be loaded over HTTPS; we can verify that the video is from the white house, and that it hasn’t been modified in-transit.
A big issue is that places don’t want to share a link to an independently verifiable video, they want you to load a copy of it from their website/app. This way we build trust with the brand (e.g. New York Times), and spend more time looking at ads or subscribe.
@stockRot @technology
Fax machines are still used in healthcare!
There is an overwhelming amount of healthcare admin where software could help.
Computers are designed for messaging, data manipulation, deduplication… stuff that people are drowning in because the existing software sucks or doesn’t exist.
Yet we see pie-in-the-sky “AI” (LLMs? who knows?) projects being funded.
(I worked as a manager at an Australian general practice. Assuming the US is similar? )
@skullgiver Oh wow thanks! :) One program syncs my home Mastodon timeline, with all replies, to a Maildir. Dovecot serves that over IMAP. Sending involves a custom SMTP server which reads the mail message and creates a post from it.
For Mastodon it was all about converting statuses (toots? Posts?) into RFC 5322 messages. Using the status’ ID as Message-Id
in the message header is handy. Mail clients do the heavy lifting of rendering threads thankfully!
@ripcord @LWD @loxo @Bizarroland Some will report that they don’t work in Firefox (or whatever User Agent it receives), but actually work just fine. In my regular browsing I guess I see this once every couple of months (Firefox on OpenBSD).
This is not about software licensing nor the spirit of FOSS.
There’s some inconsistent messaging that’s genuinely confusing me. I’ve shared an anecdote below (from a time when I was developing open source software) in the interest of generating discussion to clear it up for me and perhaps others, too. I don’t mean to imply I know what is happening right here.
@pop @fediverse