Notices by Evan Prodromou (evanprodromou@evanp.me)

I have a problem with registering domains. When I have an idea for a Web site, software project, organization, or sometimes just a pun or joke, I’ll go on a domain registrar site and see what related domains are available. I’ll brainstorm a bit in the search screen to try some different options for names or top-level domains, and if I find something in my price range, I’ll buy it, even if I’m not going to use the domain right away.

This leaves me with a portfolio of unused domains that are like reminders of unfulfilled dreams. Ah yes, the Web site for the Frito pie restaurant I never made. Oh, right, I was going to start a social network for people in the Plateau de Montreal. Each year, as the renewal deadlines come up, I have to decide if I’m going to give up this little dream, or give myself another year to get started.

The fact is, I just don’t have the time or the energy to make as many social networks or Web sites or joke URLs as I’d like. I have a full-time job, a family, and existing responsibilities at the Social Web Foundation, CoSocial.ca, and the Social Web Community Group. I can’t spend money on dreams I’m not fulfilling, just because I’m afraid to let them go.

So, I’m trying to change my habits and come up with a new strategy for using domains. It’s aspirational for now, but I hope I can use it to reduce some of my personal expenses on new domains and domain renewals. I’m sharing it here with you partially in hope that it can be useful, and partially to hold myself to the strategy.

1. Register a short, personal domain name. I know, this probably doesn’t seem like a great first step, but bear with me! This domain is going to be the basis for a long term presence. Also, it’s a chance to get it out of your system, and put those domain registration superskils to use one last time. Use something that represents yourself, as a person, not a company or your personal consulting firm or design agency or whatever. I use https://evanp.me/ , which I registered a while ago specifically for this purpose.
2. Assign the root domain to a content-management system. For me, that’s this WordPress blog. Other people might want to use Drupal or Jekyll or a wiki or some other publishing system. You can even use plain old HTML, if that’s how you want to fly. The important thing is that you need to be able to create new pages on a path you like — preferably of arbitrary depth, but at least with user-defined pathnames.
3. When you want to register a domain for a new static website, make a page on the root domain instead. OK, now we’re into the part where we’re actually saving money. When you get an idea for a Web site, and you start searching for domain names, stop doing that. Instead, create a page on your personal CMS. So, for example, when I wanted to register a new domain for the ActivityPub book I wrote, I instead created a page at https://evanp.me/activitypub-book/ . This has two benefits. First, it keeps me from registering a domain for a project I’m not even going to start. Second, it keeps me from burning up all my creative energy on domain-buying, and gets me to use whatever momentum I have to write a first draft of the page I need, and possibly either share it out on my blog or on my social network presence(s). Note that using a short domain puts more emphasis on the page’s path than on the domain.
4. When you want to register a domain for a new Web service, use a subdomain of your personal domain name instead. There are a lot of Web applications and services that need specific server-side code and databases and can’t be run as a page on a WordPress site — like a Mastodon server, a MediaWiki site, or a NodeJS application I made up. A lot of people will never need to do this; as a software developer, this is something I do all the time. When I need to make a server that can’t run within WordPress, instead of registering a new domain, I create a domain name for my service that is a subdomain of my personal domain. So, if I want to set up a Mastodon server (I don’t, right now) I’d make a subdomain at social.evanp.me and use it for the server. The benefit here is that I have a domain name to start off with, and also I don’t worry about starting to use it until I actually have a server available. One particular trick that has worked well for me is to use a wildcard DNS record that points to a Kubernetes cluster ingress. I can use the ingress to route between services, without having to create or update the subdomains. It saves a couple of steps in this process.
5. If a project needs to become independent, register a domain and move to it. This is the safety valve that lets me feel OK about not using the “right” domain for a project from the outset. Of course, “needs to become independent” is a hard to specify objectively, but some good rules of thumb are whether there are enough collaborators that I don’t feel comfortable giving them an account on my personal blog, or if the people who use the service or page ask why it’s still linked to my personal domain. At the point when a domain is actually needed, I can go register it, move the service or content to use it, and then use URL redirection to move traffic from my personal site or service to an independent one.
   Having this as an option lets me worry a lot less when starting a new project. There are also so many top-level domains (TLDs) available today that I don’t feel like I have to grab a domain just so it doesn’t get squatted by others. It’s OK to use one of the less popular TLDs if the project is becoming its own thing.

So, that’s it. Have a personal domain, put a CMS behind it, use that for publishing static pages, use subdomains of it for standalone services, and register new domains only when you need to. I think this kind of strategy is inherent in the idea of having “your own domain”, and a lot of people follow it to a greater or lesser degree, but I wanted to spell it out fully to make it clear to myself how I would deal with different circumstances.

Let me know if you have other tips for reducing your domain registration spending by committing to a good personal domain.

#domains #spending

O’Reilly Media asked me to collect expressions of interest for a print version of the ActivityPub book I wrote. I’ve added a form to the ActivityPub book page at https://evanp.me/activitypub-book/#print that you can use to let me know that you’re interested.

Even if you’ve told me before in person, over email, or on the Fediverse that you’d like a print version, it would help me a lot if you could add your name to the form. It’s just for counting names and notifying people when the book comes out in print; I won’t use the email for anything else.

Thanks so much to everyone who’s shown interest so far. I hope to get a print version happening soon!

#activitypub #ActivityPubBook #PrintVersion

My book ActivityPub: Programming for the Social Web is on its way to the virtual printers tomorrow, which means it will be available for purchase from all your favourite e-book stores at various points during next week. I will be taking this opportunity to have an online reading and book-signing party. The event is on September 30, 2024 at 9PM ET. You can follow this meeting link to join.

I’ll do a reading from parts of the book (the parts that are very accessible to everyone, not the code samples!) and a Q&A. I’ll also be doing a book signing for people who have already bought the book (or who buy it during the event). How do I sign an ebook? Simple: you show me proof that you bought the book, and I’ll post a note on the fediverse with whatever text you want and tag you in. It’s an instant collectible.

I’m looking forward to having more people read the book, and I really hope it helps more people write programs for the social web. Please feel free to join!

https://evanp.me/2024/09/19/book-signing-party-30-sep-2024/

Those who have followed my health update and original posts know that I was hit by a car while crossing the street in late June. It’s now been 12 weeks, and I want to give an update on the update.

Just a couple of months ago, I was in really serious pain, with 9 rib fractures, and even with opioid painkillers taken every couple of hours, every movement was excruciating. My left wrist was in a brace and I couldn’t write or type. My face was bruised and numb, with broken bones in my jaw, cheek and eye socket.

Today, I’m mostly better. It’s astounding how resilient my body is. I have a hard time with standing and sitting, but not with the kind of blinding pain that made me want to faint. I rarely wear my brace, and I’ve started running daily.

I’m seeing an occupational therapist, a psychotherapist, and an acupuncturist for better circulation and healing.

My broken wrist is still very stiff; I can barely bend it. The orthopaedic surgeon says that I may need another surgery at some point, but I am hopeful. I can type, write, and do most household tasks. It still can’t take a lot of weight; I need to push myself up with my other hand, for example. I am not yet back to the weightroom, which is a bummer, since it was an important form of bonding with my son before the accident.

I have a hard time remembering just how scary and all-encompassing my injuries were that first weekend. I felt like my pain was everything; all I was was a pain-haver. I kind of gave up at some point even imagining what it would be like to get back to normal.

I talked to my therapist about this; I’ve kind of realised that I’m never going to go back to how I was before the accident. I’m always going to have a body that had a really violent set of injuries, forever. But that doesn’t mean it has to be worse. She said, “How do you know it isn’t better?” I’m trying to hold onto that thought.

Legal and financial issues still loom, but they feel like they’re starting to resolve. I kind of realised a while ago that the reason people get pain and suffering payments from legal settlements isn’t to compensate them for the pain they had during the accident; it’s to compensate them for the pain and complications they’re going to have for the rest of their lives. It’s a way to pre-pay for chronic, recurrent medical issues.

I’m doing some household chores, gardening, and other light hand work. I’ve been trying to do extra stints of dishwashing to make up for all the chores I skipped, but I’m literally 3 months behind, and I’m probably never going to catch back up.

Thanks to everyone who’s had kind words about my accident; it’s meant a lot. I’m probably not going to make any further updates, except in that creaky way that people with pins in their bones complain about oncoming storms. No words of wisdom to share except please be careful crossing the street.

https://evanp.me/2024/09/18/the-new-normal/

#accident

I gave a talk** at Berlin Fediday this weekend entitled A Bigger, Better Fediverse. I talked about what has been happening on the Fediverse in terms of growth, but also what’s been improving in terms of trust and safety. I also talk about why these two dimensions go hand-in-hand, and how we can’t have one without the other.

** Almost. There were technical issues, so I had to record the talk and then upload it. All the better for you!

https://evanp.me/2024/09/16/a-bigger-better-fediverse/

I’ve had a few great interviews in the last couple of weeks. I decided I wanted to track them on a media page on my own site.

I’m going to try to keep them more organized, but for now I just want to get them linked.

https://evanp.me/2024/08/27/media/

Four weeks ago today, I was hit by a truck while crossing the street in Healdsburg, CA.

I was hospitalized for a week in Santa Rosa with 9 rib fractures, a broken wrist and facial bone fractures. I learned how to walk, shower, dress and care for myself while in excruciating pain.

On release, I stayed with my generous and caring brothers and their families in the Bay Area, until doctors cleared me to fly.

I’ve been home in Montreal for almost two weeks. My wife and kids take great care of me.

My wrist is still in a brace and I can’t type well or hold anything in my left hand.

My ribs still hurt, but I’m able to get through most of my day. I’ve been gradually reducing my use of painkillers. Daily I’m taking about 25% of the dosage I took when I was released.

I’m seeing a physical therapist and a psychotherapist to work my way back to something like my normal life.

I also regularly visit a doctor and a dentist.

They say it takes at least 6 weeks to heal broken ribs. I’m hopeful.

In my life, I was overextended. I had my job at Open Earth Foundation, a grant from Summer of Protocols for adding E2EE to ActivityPub, and editing work for my book on ActivityPub for O’Reilly Media.

Everyone has been really accommodating that I had to take time off. I’ve been little by little taking on more responsibilities as I heal.

I am cooking simple meals one-handed at home. I walk 1-2 km per day for exercise, and I’ve eaten out at restaurants 3-4 times.

The next big challenge is dealing with insurance, hospital bills and lawyers as I sort out who pays for what. It is greatly complicated by the fact that I’m a Canadian who had an accident in California.

My wife has been taking good care of this part of the accident for a few weeks, but it’s becoming a bigger part of my life.

Anyway, tl;dr is that I’m getting better and better. Probably not as fast as I’d like, but steady progress. I’ve been incredibly lucky and I’m very grateful.

Thanks in particular to all the people here who’ve expressed well wishes and shared kind words. I haven’t replied directly to everyone, but please know that it meant a lot to me.

https://evanp.me/2024/07/26/health-update/

I read North Woods over the last week or so, and I really liked it. It’s a generational novel covering European settlement in an area of western Massachusetts from sometime in the late 1600s going forward a few centuries into the future. That sounds like it would be kind of superficial, but the stories of individuals are detailed. The author, Daniel Mason, takes his time to paint pictures of the characters and their surroundings fully.

There are a lot of interesting parts of how the stories intertwine. The first, about two lovers who flee a Puritan colony to live among Native Americans, is only fully explained through historical analysis and archaeological evidence discovered by characters centuries later. But the stories move forward in time, too — characters from the 1700s and 1800s influence later stories as ghosts or with the structures or objects they create.

A part that deeply struck me was the coverage of the tree epidemics that have devastated the forests of the Northern woods region of North America. Each one is detailed, from chestnut blight to emerald ash borers, with as much narrative focus as for the human characters. As someone who lives in the same ecoregion as the book is set in — although many kilometers to the north — I found that the tragedy really resonated for me.

The approach to the supernatural, to coincidence, and to history are also lovely themes. All in all, I really enjoyed this book. I found I had to pay close attention to catch the details that tied the stories together, but the focus paid off.

I listened to the audio book on Audible. It’s an ensemble cast, with multiple voices for the different stories, as well as for the interstitial poems and fragments between stories. It was natural and cohesive enough that I didn’t really notice that there were multiple voices until the closing credits.

I think the book’s broad perspective, looking forward and back, are a great eye-opener. I’d recommend this book.

https://evanp.me/2024/06/11/north-woods/

I’m excited to say that I turned in my manuscript for the ActivityPub book for O’Reilly Media today. I started working on it in September of 2023, with a lot of interim checkpoints and deadlines since. In April 2024, I finished the first draft of the manuscript. Over the month of May, I’ve been working on improvements suggested by the technical reviewers who agreed to look over the book, and from my own re-read.

In total, my TODO file for this month has about 250 changes to be made. Some are small — just changing a word or two — but one required adding a whole new chapter, and many required multi-paragraph sections.

I took the last week of May off from my work at Open Earth Foundation to concentrate on making changes. My team was really supportive, which I deeply appreciated. I went to our country house in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, and I spent the week writing, editing, drawing and thinking.

Now, the next stage of book making starts: production. The production team at O’Reilly will be copyediting, indexing, and laying out the book. Their designers will be taking my UML diagrams and turning them into professional-looking illustrations. We have two rounds of quality control on code samples and fact checking on content.

In September 2024, the final e-book will be available for sale. I’ll have a link here for the pre-sale version when it comes out. If you’re eager to read the book, I highly recommend reviewing the early release version.

Thanks so much to my friends, family and colleagues who’ve made space and time for me to do this work. It has meant a lot to me. I hope the final product helps more developers create cool projects using ActivityPub.

https://evanp.me/2024/06/03/i-turned-in-my-manuscript/

#activitypub #book

My friend Evan Henshaw-Plath wrote recently about some concerns with ActivityPub. I want to go over his concerns one by one and give some assessment of how accurate and important I think they are. Rabble’s words in italics; my responses in just normal text.

• User identities are tied to a server. This is only partially true; your user identity is tied to a domain, not a server. But most servers only handle one domain, and most people don’t move their domains between servers. We have a section on domain portability between servers on the ActivityPub Data Portability report.
  Using domains is also how much of the Internet works. Email addresses are tied to a domain; Web sites are tied to a domain. You can move the domain between different implementations transparently. It’s a really robust architecture that has stood the test of time for almost 50 years.
• Users can’t migrate between servers. Partially true. Rabble covers the essentials; you can move followers and not much else. It’s also possible to move your “stuff” between identities; that’s most of what our Data Portability task force is working on.
• On a single server, it is impossible to change your username! Somewhat true. ActivityPub identities are URLs like https://social.example/user/vtles1XgZkPUEulBsFmRX . That identity URL is immutable; you can’t change it. Some implementations include a username in that url, like https://other.example/user/evanp. With that kind of server software, it’s true, you can’t change the username.
  Also, we use a standard called Webfinger that maps an identity string like username@domain to an URL. You can read about it in the ActivityPub Webfinger report. Some servers use that string, instead of the ActivityPub ID, as the unique ID for a remote user. That’s discouraged, but if someone does that, changing your user ID will make you no longer findable for those other servers. I think as we stabilize our use of WebFinger, some of these usages are going to get better.
• Fediverse servers have total control over your account and data. True. This is the “federation” part of the fediverse. It’s how Web sites and email work. Don’t use a fediverse server without a good trust relationship with your server admin; ideally someone you have a business relationship with, or your employer, or your university. Same goes for email!
  It also means that if you control your own server, you have total control over your account and data. That’s a feature, not a bug.
  Another option is using a cooperative server, like cosocial.ca or social.coop. A cooperative is a legal structure in which members pay for and manage their own service. I think cooperatives are awesome.
• The fediverse is a network of fiefdoms, each server admin having total control over their users. This seems about the same as the previous statement, but OK. I think the key strength of the fediverse here is that we can have dozens of different models for server governance — coops, enterprises, city libraries, family servers, individual servers. That level of experimentation is a feature, not a bug. Governance is not baked into the protocol.
• Each kind of fediverse server is isolated. This one is just plain wrong. ActivityPub is based on an open data standard called Activity Streams 2.0 (AS2) which models social data. There is an extensive standard vocabulary that can represent Web content like text, images, video and audio, and the social graph, but also well-known social interactions like check-ins, events, and groups. More importantly, Activity Streams 2.0 is extensible, meaning you can add properties to existing types, or whole new types of objects or interactions. And every ActivityPub server is built to handle AS2.
  What is true is that we have had a lot of servers that only handle a subset of the AS2 vocabulary, and reject content they don’t know how to handle. This is mostly due to mimicking the siloed social networks; we’ve gotten used to thinking of different social networks for different kinds of content. I think this is changing, especially as new kinds of content hit the network. Developers are just learning how to effectively handle extension content with fallback representations. I look forward to this improving over time.
• The fediverse has no privacy; there is no system of end-to-end encrypted messaging. The first part is false; you can mark your posts as followers-only, or directed to a single person, or a group of people. Servers enforce this privacy. You can also mark that you don’t want your public posts to be indexable or your public account to be discoverable.
  However, the second part is true; we don’t have end-to-end encryption. So, if you send a private message to someone on another server, you message can be read by both your admin and their admin. It’s stored in the clear on both servers. This is also how email works, as well as most direct messages on commercial social networks. However, it’s something worth working on. I’ve sketched out an architecture for end-to-end encryption over ActivityPub, and I’ve got a proposal out to work on it for Summer of Protocols. I think it will be good to level this up!
• The fediverse has no system for micropayments. This is true. The fediverse is also first and foremost for social networking — connecting to friends, family, colleagues and neighbours. Most of these interactions are not mediated by payment; in fact, payment cheapens those interactions.
  However, there are other relationship types on the fediverse — supporting creators, journalists, or publishers. The main way to do this today is with paid subscriptions; for example, you can subscribe to evanplus@prodromou.pub to get access to premium content I publish. You have to send me US$5 out-of-band or I won’t approve the follow; that’s the state of play right now on the fediverse.
  I think in-band payments are kind of cool for this kind of work, as well as for marketplaces — buying and selling services or goods over the fediverse. I think the easiest structure is adding payment URLs like a PayPal account, or blockchain wallets like a Bitcoin Lightning address.
• Lastly, and most importantly for me, the culture of fediverse server admins and developers is vindictive. I don’t think this is the case; I love the culture of the fediverse, which is playful, conversational, and collaborative.

I think there are a plenty of good points in Rabble’s critique, but there’s one way that I think he’s extremely wrong. There is still a lot to do in the ActivityPub ecosystem, but we have the architecture and extension mechanisms to make them possible. It’s totally not required to go start a whole new social protocol to build those things in from scratch. In fact, it’s a real mistake; it’s far better to work from the existing standard and build on it. Open standards like ActivityPub have a legitimacy that ad hoc systems like Nostr can never have, and it’s the reason that there is so much interesting development going on in the ActivityPub world.

https://evanp.me/2024/04/14/responses-to-rabble-on-activitypub/

#activitypub