Notices by Renaud Chaput (renchap@oisaur.com), page 2

@pfefferle yes, since a few years and the level became incredible

It’s time for the Geoguessr world cup finals! Gogo Blinky 💪

If you dont know the game, you are dropped somewhere in the world in streetview, and need to pinpoint where you are as fast as possible. The players have amazing skills and knowledge and its impressive to watch them guess their position in a few seconds based on things like bollards or foliage.

https://www.youtube.com/live/Llh4_h-vvKQ

#geoguessr

Grand Finale starts now, go Blinky, go!

#geoguessr

As this worked for the Internet Archive, let’s try another one:
I am looking first an engineering contact at Youtube to troubleshoot the issue with them no longer returning metadata when Mastodon tries to fetch the preview for a video. It comes from their side and something changed a few weeks ago, and I would like to see how this can be fixed.

Fediverse, do your magic ✨

We (the Mastodon team) are looking for a technical contact at the Internet Archive to understand why some pages have been archived. If you can introduce us to such a person (or are this person), can you DM me? 🙏

@evan is this related to our fediverse:creator tag in some ways?

We are looking for a full-time experienced iOS developer for the official Mastodon app!

You will work closely with the core team (including Eugen & me), as well as our designer, to ensure that we have the best possible experience on Apple platforms.

This is a remote position, with at least 4 working hours in common with the Paris/Berlin timezone.

We are able to open this position thanks to all of the people donating money to the project ❤️
https://mastodon.social/@MastodonEngineering/112875546269005188

Question for #ActivityPub implementors: has there been any research on how to best handle deletions (accounts and/or posts)?

At the moment, the best (and only?) way to know that an account deletion has been federated everywhere is to notify any known inbox / instance, for every account deletion.

This is very wasteful and not efficient, are there any alternatives? Has anyone worked on this?

We deployed the grouped notifications experimental feature on mastodon.online and mastodon.social, and are looking for some initial testers to gather performance information and ensure it works properly.

This feature is only available in the web UI for now (see 2nd screenshot)

There are some known issues (around keyboard navigation) and the API is not yet final.

Please open a Github issue if you find any problem with them, so we can fix it before the 4.3-beta1 release!

#mastodev #mastodon

I just realised that I forgot to post about it so… here is our Mastodon engineering summary for last month: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/07/trunk-tidbits-june-2024/

So far we are managing to keep up the rhythm with @andypiper and publish it every month, allowing you to see everything that we shipped along with a sneak peak at what is coming.

As a side note, we just merged the grouped notifications frontend code, and will deploy it on mastodon.social in the coming days for some performance testing. This has been a huge work but I already cant live without it!

This was the last blocker for the 4.3 beta 1, so expect it to land soon, ideally next week unless we find a last minute issue.

@andypiper

@sjjphd Welcome back! Dont hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or feedback

@ladyteruki I can see this being useful, but it can also take quite a lot of space. Right now its not there, but we may change it!

@BeAware This feature exists on many platforms in a non-obtrusive way. We will tune it to ensure it behaves correctly. There are no plans to add (yet another) setting for this right now.

Nice quality of life improvement added to the latest #Mastodon code: account cards on hover!

A perfect companion to the upcoming grouped notifications 😃

We need to tune the behaviour a bit, but I am already missing them when using another instance.

All of this will be in 4.3, which we plan to release soon!

#mastodev #mastoadmin

Addentum: this is also a reminder to check what browser extensions you have installed, what permissions they have, and really care about this.

I understand that some decisions by browsers to limit what extensions can do (Chrome Manifest v3 for example) can really be frustrating as they will make extensions like uBlock Origin not work as well, but also keep in mind that this is an open field for malicious actors as well.

This is very unfortunate, but will continue to happen until we figure out how to make money-makers (= companies) properly finance the OSS they are relying upon, and getting maintainers out of burnout.

And if you made it to the end, congratulations! Here is a donation link to send some money to Mastodon, which also suffers from this lack-of-money problem: https://joinmastodon.org/sponsors 7/7

Now, a few months after that, this domain is serving actively malicious Javascript into the websites using it. They inject some malware into websites, redirecting users to sport betting websites. But they could easily also siphon everything your users enter on the website, change their content… 6/7

More details here: https://sansec.io/research/polyfill-supply-chain-attack

Now, let’s guess again… What do you think happened once the service was ran by this mysterious chinese owner?
First, the service stopped working, because they switched to a new platform (hosted in China), which made some people in the community notice the change and start asking questions.
Then it spread, and everyone (including me, see https://oisaur.com/@renchap/112011210173426536) recommended you immediately stopped using it. 5/7

To get back to the initial topic, polyfill.io allowed website authors to easily load what we call “polyfills”, little bits of Javascript code implementing specific features in older browsers, so as a developer you can use these modern features without worrying about breaking older devices. And polyfill.io did it in a very nice and performant way, you only needed to add a few lines to your HTML and it worked! 4/7