Notices by nex (nex@fedi.transgender.ing)

"How is blocking working for you on discord? give feedback" ironically every time I dismiss this banner it comes back on app reload. I would like to block you, discord.

If you are using #continuwuity or another conduit based matrix homeserver please read this

Earlier today a zero day vulnerability was found and exploited, destroying our community rooms. It is paramount that you update to the latest commit from our forgejo as soon as you can. A full release will be following later today. https://continuwuity.org

If you are not using continuwuity but are using conduit or a server forked from it, please keep an eye out for new fixes from your server maintainers.

Sorry this is a half assed announcement but I haven't slept in over 24 hours because this happened right as I was going to bed and I've spent all night fixing it. I'll make another post with more detail than this after some zzz

what if you wanted to load the element web app but element said "nah im gonna fetch 215 events on start up, sequentially, for literally no reason whatsoever, before rendering any of my UI"

Come to spotify! We've got all the cool things such as:

- A desktop app that somehow manages to make a modern gaming desktop feel slow
- the world's least intuitive layout
- Podcasts! Lots of podcasts! You will listen to podcasts! Wanted to listen to a playlist? No you actually wanted to listen to a podcast, our app will replace the tile you wanted to activate with a podcast.
- Lyric transcription that is either the definition of perfection, or so ass that it might as well be telling you a different song
- Increasing prices to cover our losses on podcasts
- Playlist folders! But only on desktop. On mobile you can look but can't touch.
- The least useful device transition and remote playback imaginable
- Laughable algorithm
- Sorry, this song is unavailable
- that album you listened to once 5 years ago and hated so much you only listened to three of its songs? You actually loved it and it's now in your recommendations
- Smart shuffle that actually just plays the exact same songs over and over no matter the playlist
- Shuffle that is so ass as soon as you reach >50 songs, and is generally useless below 50 songs because what are you even shuffling
- No local shuffle or loop control, each toggle is a network request. Sometimes those requests fail! And your toggle is ignored!
- Chat, for some reason?
- Audio normalisation that just makes everything sound garbage
- Local songs! So badly implemented that you'll want to just stream them anyway
- 10 GIGABYTES of cache. It's all encrypted though so fuck you anyway.
- We have proxy support but why are you using a proxy? are you a pirate? request denied.
- no two factor authentication in the big 2025
- You will not change your username. Your display name is fair game, but your username is literally carved in stone in our database tapes. Just remember cohuoz2os7xognsmcjimr8ofu, it can't be that hard wtf

before I get called a hypocrite for complaining about a service I use, I do also have navidrome locally with albums I've purchased from bandcamp. Local hosted music streaming is just as bad if not worse of an experience. I've only truly enjoyed local music when I've had a weak mobile signal or spotify's shuffle function was pissing me off that much

@jessew@mk.cpluspatch.com what

They also helpfully didn't leave a voicemail, which would still be accessible for me because iPhones do speech-to-text on visual voicemail

The irony in my GP calling me out of the blue (they have on record that A. I have severe hearing loss and B. to call my mother instead) is incredibly funny to me. can't wait for them to ring three more times before realising

@jessew@mk.cpluspatch.com eh when you're iterating not really, sometimes you just want to get a feel for the response and look at the JSON long and hard to know if it's shaped just how you want it before you sink time into writing the unit tests for it

@jessew@mk.cpluspatch.com "the tools can be better" my brother in christ there's only so many ways you can wrap cURL in colourful UIs I don't think there's an up from what we already had 😭

What's the current meta for API testing apps? Postman started sucking for some reason (it was ages ago I forgot), Insomnia also just kinda sucks

@jessew@mk.cpluspatch.com just one more api client

@jessew@mk.cpluspatch.com okay so it's literally just postman in another skin again

@jessew@mk.cpluspatch.com @luna@catgirl.center @sodiboo@gaysex.cloud You will WAIT until I stabilise the damn room support otherwise this will KEEP HAPPENING but in NEW AND UNEXPECTED WAYS that end up being EVEN WORSE. You forgot we already broke the room version that was supposed to fix everything, and to my knowledge before anyone else even managed to. SIT DOWN /lh

@sodiboo@gaysex.cloud @jessew@mk.cpluspatch.com @luna@catgirl.center oh the horrors

The long and short of it is basically that Matrix works like a graph (in the computer science sense). Each event references events before it, and also which events prior to it that allow that event to exist (such as the power levels that allow sending events, and the sender's membership that shows they're joined to a room).
This allows for complete decentralisation, as every server participating in the room has a copy of every single authorising event in the room (which they get sent when they first join the room). As new events are sent from their origin servers, every server that receives that event, runs the authorisation checks on it (by checking the event's auth events are correct) and slotting it into the graph based on the events it previously referenced. This allows every server participating in the room to both authorise their own events locally, and also independently verify that every new event sent from a remote server is correct and allowed, which prevents bogus data making its way into the graph.

This does also, in theory, allow for handling netsplits. If origin A sends a power level event, and then goes down, other servers that received the event can still send new events even without A being around, because all they need to do is reference the event A sent that says "yep you can send m.room.message".

The issue comes when there's a divergence in connectivity. For example, just earlier today, my server had been offline for over 24 hours, during which the join rules for my room had been changed by a different online server. All of the other active servers received this change and added it to their graph, but my server, being unreachable, couldn't. Then, when my server came back online, I still hadn't received that event (since I was busy processing a billion other events in catchup). I sent another auth event (simplifying it a fair bit here) which didn't reference this join rule update at all, which forked the graph. Because my server has a higher power level than the server that updated it before, that means my server has more """authority""" and my fork was """trusted""", causing effectively a rebase to what my server thought was the correct state, resulting in some people losing their memberships.

As Matrix is made to be resilient to this sort of stuff (air quotes since it's often not in practice but whatever), it has an algorithm designed to handle conflicts like this, allowing forks to be merged. In fact, the specific thing I just describe was actually fixed with the new room version, but my room was still using the previous version which was susceptible to this.
State resolution is designed to take the different forks in the graph, do a bunch of complicated ordering and checks to calculate what the resolved room state should be, and merge it all back into one consistent state to ensure that every server has the same room view.
A side effect of this is that some previously valid events might become inadvertently invalid because of such a change. I believe in the case I mentioned, I caused the state to reset back to the previous join rule, which meant memberships authorised by the new one got reverted since the new one isn't part of the graph anymore.

It's a hugely complicated thing, and I might not be explaining it fully/correctly (I'm still studying the concepts), but it's a desireable thing because it allows rooms to continue to be used even when the "original" or "authorised" or "superuser" or whatever server is unreachable. It's great for censorship evasion as it means you don't need to have direct contact with one server to federate, the mesh networking effect means everyone will eventually receive your events as long as you can contact other servers in the room. Unfortunately a side effect of that is disagreements, which need to be conflict resolved, which usually goes completely smoothly, but sometimes causes problems, especially when a server with high authority in the room conflicts with previously agreed upon graphs.

@jessew@mk.cpluspatch.com @sodiboo@gaysex.cloud @luna@catgirl.center Hey I'm a statistical outlier, I break shit so that other people don't break shit. You knew what you were signing up to 🧌

federation woof

My instance's death was... greatly exaggerated (fedi.transgender.ing returns finally)

@doti@pl.catboyindustries.co who what where'd you hear this HUH

@doti@pl.catboyindustries.co @jessew@mk.cpluspatch.com that little rat