Notices by Darius Kazemi (darius@friend.camp)

@evan great question. I think: build resources for groups that want to govern (like the IFTAS library does for moderation), build tools for governance (third party and supporting PRs to major software, again kinda like IFTAS here), and advocate as necessary in standards groups for the needs of groups that want to self govern (just like.... okay these parentheticals are getting repetitive)

@evan missed the poll but my answer is there should not be an organization to govern the fediverse; there should however be at least one organization to enable many forms of governance in the fediverse

Starbucks has proven to me this morning that if you use burnt coffee beans it is in fact possible to burn cold brew

"People don't want to believe what the country actually is, because if they believe it, they're going to have confront what's in them."

https://mas.to/@BlackAzizAnansi/113456424992022986

@clarity damn I feel like “She starts rambling about something something destiny whatever, but you struggle to pay attention to any of it” is advice I could have used as a teenage GM

@pfefferle @kostyn @matt So I looked into it -- the issue is with rendering articles that have inline images. I've fixed it in dev, and I could issue a patch, but also I need to put out a new Hometown version soon anyway, PLUS I kind of want to revamp how Hometown does Article support anyway....

This is to say, sorry it doesn't work, if it's ok for you all to hold on for a week I should have some solution to this out there via either a hotfix or a full new release (or both).

@pfefferle @kostyn wait what? Hometown is specifically written to render Article objects from services like write.as

Hi Fediverse denizens. I've been working on a project I hope will help Fediverse devs make software that federates across ALL services, not just Mastodon-plus-a-few-others.

It's called the Fediverse Schema Observatory and before launching it, I am opening up a public comment period re: safety and privacy.

This post lays out what the software does, what data it records, and why I think it's safe to deploy:

https://asml.cyber.harvard.edu/fediverseobservatory/

Please give feedback here or at the email in the post!

Me at age 13 in 1996: wow this Clerks movie is funny. I love the star wars monologue

Evil genie: so what I'm hearing is you wish for variants of that monologue to become the dominant form of mainstream cultural commentary

Me: uhhhhhhhhhh

@erincandescent @julian @evan it does mention the @context name collision which is imo a real point of confusion

@trwnh @erincandescent fwiw I'm 100% on board for following Collections exposed as streams. It seems to me the reasonable solution to the as:Listen-spamming issue here. If you subscribed explicitly to get as:Listen then it is completely reasonable to expect your client to know how to handle it in a way that is not annoying to the end user

Damn... Fedify is really good. It seems like the ActivityPub library I always wanted for Node applications (rather than a reference server like the one I created for ExpressJS).

I love that it's built so you can take an existing app and quickly drop in the federation features you need (like oh okay I need my application to Follow/Accept/Reject/Undo and have the ability to Create an Article but that's it, cool, Fedify has me covered)

https://fedify.dev/tutorial/basics

@blaine every morning I ask myself: "Am I going to do something today that Oracle's legal team won't like?" and if the answer is no I have already failed

I won't be actually LAUNCHING this tool until I've found out how you all would feel about it being opt-out vs opt-in. I will provide a longer blog post for you all to read with details, but in short:

It would be really helpful for general interop on the fedi if this were opt-out. But if people are generally freaked out by having technical details about software data formats being opt-out... I'll make it opt-in.

Quick explanation of the data scrubbing in the attached images

@tchambers never heard of it!

@evan still figuring it out. Right now I am subscribing to a public relay as that is the most software-neutral source I could think of, but I am looking at other ingestion methods too. Importantly I want to ingest AP only... I'm not going to hit proprietary API endpoints like most scrapers do

@evan yeah. on browserpub I can say "hey help me take a look at these particular messages I know about". This observatory will surface information about stuff floating around the fedi that I don't even know about. For example I am already learning about server software I've never even heard of, and I would not have put that into browser.pub because I wouldn't have known it existed

Excited to announce that I will be at #fediforum today speed demo-ing my latest project: an ActivityPub data observatory!

This observatory does not collect any user data or metadata. Instead I am looking at the *shape* (aka schema) of data being sent around the fediverse. This will let software devs ask questions like "How is a Mastodon 4.2.0 image post formatted differently from a Misskey 2024.7.0 image post?"

And we'll get real answers based on data rather than on poor documentation.

A friend is raising money to help a Black trans person manage their chronic illness. I know they'd really appreciate any donations:

https://gofund.me/86e165a3

@thisismissem @mauve so... imo the ActivityPub way of doing this is to publish your last X posts at an "outbox" endpoint specified in your profile. Then a remote server following you can parse the outbox and get some content to fill things with. I did this with some software I was building and Mastodon just... didn't grab any of the outbox posts and I was confused as to why not