Notices by Jari Pennanen (ciantic@twit.social)

#Ukraine and #OSINT community is migrating to #Bluesky

I don't know what happened in #X lately but something

#Twitter #TwitterMigration

Ordering replies in chronological order is not a good general solution, it amplifies reply-guys, and doesn't give good context for the reader.

Ideally, it should be configurable for each user, but here is a general idea, order of replies:

1. Replies from people I follow
2. Replies from people who follow me
3. Other replies without questions
4. Other replies with questions

This could be used as a basis for filtering as well, if you don't feel like answering, then hide all questions.

#Mastodon

@matt Every time I look at Threads, it's @tchambers advocating to turn it on for people. Which is good, but this is completely backward.

The whole idea seemed that Meta was building a service from the ground up for federation so that everyone who joins Threads would be automatically in. I wouldn't care if they had some other way like RSS turned on by default, but they don't. It's a silo right now. Geeks will get it, but nobody else.

Maybe they have decided to extinguish without embracing.

@simon I don't think CORS is real security, Mastodon has no CORS restrictions and things are going just fine. If you write a native app the CORS does nothing to prevent access.

I believe CORS was invented to prevent alternative web UIs for big apps (e.g. Gmail).

@youronlyone @silsinn9821 You are correct. Even *@example.com is valid.

"The userpart consists only of Unicode code points that conform to the PRECIS IdentifierClass specified in [RFC7564]."

"Code points in the range U+0021 through U+007E, i.e., the (printable) ASCII7 ("K") category defined under Section 9.11. These code points are "grandfathered" into PRECIS and thus are valid even if they would otherwise be disallowed according to the property-based rules specified in the next section."

#Mastodon decision to have a new flag for search is shooting in the foot. #Threads posts are not searchable (don't have indexing), because their engineers didn't get the memo about the new ActivityPub flag. @jessel

What I realized is that Vision Pro is unlike many other Apple products simply because of its shape and form.

For iPod, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, they've all had roughly the same shape and form from the beginning. Just slight adjustments like weight and size, corners etc. but if you put the oldest and latest side by side, you'd recognize them.

Whereas Vision Pro if it were to succeed needs to change its shape radically. It's a lot like early Mac in this regard as well.

#Apple #VisionPro

@codinghorror @thomasfuchs You should blog it! I don't think @Gargron would mind, he has already taken a lot of criticism.

Some of Mastodon's web UI deficiencies are simply the effect of "not seeing the solution after working on something for a long time", so having alternate takes could help. Mind you Mastodon is already a very old project, so the priorities aren't seen the same way as these newcomers.

More organizations providing data should learn from #Mastodon. You don't need an API key for public endpoints if you are using rate-limiting.

I'm looking at EU's Transparency Platform RESTful API and it requires me to send email to get API keys, it shouldn't be necessary, if the content is public, make it publicly available!

https://transparency.entsoe.eu/content/static_content/Static%20content/web%20api/Guide.html#_authentication_and_authorisation

#EU #Transparency #Data

I wonder if there is any good managed #WordPress? Feels like every time we migrate to one, it gets sold, get crappified, and then it can't even do basic shit like closing the site automatically when `$ wp core verify-checksums` has been showing a shit load of extra files like a892982.php for days.

If you sell managed WordPress, it should for a very minimum do automatic updates for plugins and check for viruses. I know I could roll sufficiently well on my own, but I don't run servers (anymore).

@tchambers This is a bit frightening:

"Even longtime podcast listeners, who used to prefer Apple Podcasts over YouTube by a healthy margin, are converting. The Cumulus study found that 26 percent of podcast consumers who started listening more than four years ago use YouTube the most, compared to 19 percent for Apple."

#Podcast

@GossiTheDog I'm waiting for "groups" mentioned in the roadmap also.

Potentially it could connect communities between servers like shared local timeline, but not sure how it will still function.

@rcarmo I did searches in Bluesky, this is what I noticed.

I searched "Rust" and got nothing of interest and sparse posts from Bluesky, but Mastodon gave bunch.

But with searching "Trump" you get more results in Bluesky than in Mastodon.

There is entire communities split on different apps right now.

Threads is what it is, but I hope it soonish federates.

@budgibson I'm still waiting for the day when @medium will start to compete in #ActivityPub land. Currently they are doing the bare minimum, running mostly unmodified Mastodon. But surely they know that Mastodon's defaults are not what entices their main userbase to use https://me.dm server.

There are even low-hanging fruits, like using #MastodonBirdUI for the Medium server, as that is just copy-pasting the CSS to the admin panel. But they've not done that either.

@andrew @mull To me a big part of why I probably would like to run my own instance even in Bluesky is URLs. Every content would have an URL to my server.

If you want to host your content and control how its first-party presentation is done, that's a big deal.

Also, it would allow me to use Mastodon/Takahe's long-form content and HTML formatting as a blogging platform. Send to Bluesky just a title and link. (Assuming it doesn't support long-form content.)

@aallan You have a fair first question: "So, it’s a write only platform? 🤔 All hail the algorithm."

It's their first iteration, creating purely algorithmic feed is actually technically much easier than following feed. With following feed you have to:

1. Get pub/sub working at scale
2. Have no delay in the process

With algorithmic feed, you can just randomize content.

@atomicpoet I read the same post

1.) I noticed that they plan to open a federation in the future for "all". Hopefully no allow-listing anymore after that.

2.) You can somehow use server-to-server federation, even if it's not default:

> "BGSs instead of server-to-server isn’t prescriptive. The protocol is actually explicitly designed to work both ways."

@TodePond Likes? I use them as a nod to the author, I don't care if they never went to other people.

I would like to see better boost counts, because on small servers you don't see how many people have boosted a post unless you open the post in new tab.

I understand why replies and boosts don't update, because ActivityPub is pub/sub model. If you don't follow a person, how would you get the boost count on your server?

They should add 'fetch' API if they wanted to get accurate boost counts.

@TodePond Yes that's right, it can be done in client side.

There are clients I believe that do it.

The bigger problem IMO is that you don't see all replies in other people's posts. It's the same thing, with pub/sub it doesn't send you replies when you click to open a thread, it only gives those that were sent to you by pub/sub... if you don't follow a person that's not tagged you don't see their replies as well.

@jaymcwhirter @ismh I don't think they want the moderation burden.

I'm on Leo Laporte's server, and he literally moderates it himself... He says it's easy, as he just throws anyone problematic out, but, that's still work.

Also if this keeps growing, there will be "Moderation as a Service" kind of business for a fee. They would work for small communities. Waiting a bit, and letting enthusiasts to join existing servers is probably wise.