Notices by Rolle Laukkarinen (rolle@mementomori.social), page 2

I've been having a coffee date every week with my wife for years. We're soon hitting 20 years together. It never gets old or boring, it's been an absolute blast 🫶

Even kids know what a server is, so I wonder why do some adults who hear about Mastodon not understand it.

I guess everything has just become "too easy" these days.

I've pushed a bunch of quick hotfixes for the Mastodon Bird UI nightly for v4.6.0-alpha.6-2024-04-06, with the CHANGELOG updated here (see things under [UNRELEASED]):
https://github.com/ronilaukkarinen/mastodon-bird-ui/blob/nightly/CHANGELOG.md

The new profile redesign is causing a bit of trouble. I'm fixing things on the fly as soon as I or users notice any issues.

I also pushed some fixes for the ultra-accessible variant; some font sizes were still hardcoded. It's nicer to browse for my vision-impaired spouse.

#MementoMoriSocial #MastodonBirdUI #BirdUI #MastoAdmin #a11y #Accessibiilty #UI #BuildInPublic #Mastodon

:skull360: We've successfully MEGA-upgraded our Mastodon server to v4.6.0-alpha.6+mementomods-2026-04-05, along with Mastodon Bird UI 4.0.0-alpha.6 (nightly).

This update includes today's latest daily build with 163 new commits from upstream since mementomods-2026-03-21.

What's new in Mastodon core - These are the changes Mastodon Team have introduced us in the latest nightly version we are running:

✨️ New features

- Profile redesign is now live (feature flag removed) — new layout with "Follows you" badge, split fields, rearranged number fields, featured tab, account featured tags nudge, alt text on avatars/headers
- Collections are now fully federated — remote account support, new page design, compact buttons, topic suggestions, tag linked FeaturedCollection objects over ActivityPub
- Email subscriptions on profiles — visitors can subscribe to public posts via email with MX record validation
- Profile editing — new API with character counter, field inline messages, avatar/header description uploads, visual fixes
- Support for FEP-2c59 and multiple keypairs for remote accounts
- Media description length limit increased from 1500 to 10,000 characters for remote attachments
- Improved relative time display when post time is in the future
- Disable extraneous Devise strategies option via `DISABLE_DEVISE_TWO_STRATEGIES`

🔧 Fixes & improvements

- Fix signature verification when key ID is an `acct:` URI
- Fix refreshing keys from stale actors on signature verification error
- Fix regressions in notifications caused by translation wrapper element
- Fix jump when loading more media gallery items
- Fix being unable to disable sound for quote update notification
- Fix Webfinger endpoint not handling new AP ID scheme
- Improve resilience of `tootctl maintenance fix-duplicates` command
- Improve contrast for `text-warning` and `text-success` design tokens

📦 Dependency updates

- Rails 8.1.3, Vite 8.0.3, TypeScript 6, Yarn 4.13.0, Ruby version 4.0.2
- Drop support for Ruby 3.2

🐦⬛ Mastodon Bird UI 4.0.0-alpha.6 (nightly)

- Fix translate button color not matching link color
- Fix extra border-left showing up in mobile devices
- Fix focusable background color standing out too much for account name
- Fix install script for Mastodon 2026-03-21 `common.scss` removal
- Fully modularize `_base.scss` into 40+ focused module files
- Fix Browsersync CSS hot reload by stripping CSP headers from proxied responses
- Support new profile page structure
- Remove calendar icon for "Joined" field no longer in new profile
- Style new profile page components and fix profile button colors
- Update theme tokens with latest design system tokens (upstream PR #38387)
- Remove select hack fixed in upstream
- Fix install script for new profile subdirectories

🔧 mementomods fork fixes

- Restored role badge colors lost in the profile redesign (reported upstream: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/38567)
- Fixed search reference page: migrated from removed `injectIntl` to `useIntl` hook, removed non-functional search operators

Source code: https://github.com/mementomori-social/mastodon

As always, if you notice anything unusual or buggy, please reach out to me or any of the admins. Enjoy your time here, and feel free to message me with any questions or thoughts. :bunhdheart:

If anything feels off, please let us know!

#MementoMoriSocial #Mastodon #MastoAdmin

@cwebber @mttaggart

Really good thread, and a really good blog post, or essay, I should say. I respect the honesty in it, and I understand the standpoint.

However, I want to share a genuinely different experience: using Claude Code and similar tools has actually made coding more enjoyable for me, not less. And I don’t think I’m in denial about that. I've learned a lot more over the past year through GenAI since ever before, and I've been coding for the web almost every day for nearly 30 years.

The difference might come down to how you approach it. If your relationship with the tool turns into just "tapping Y and hoping for the best", then yeah, that IS miserable. But that's not the only way to look at it.

For me, it feels more like having a really fast pair programming partner. I still make the architectural decisions, I still write specs, I still understand why things are the way they are, and I still review everything. And I still code, some. But I no longer need to power through the tedious parts, the boilerplate, the plumbing, the bits I've written hundreds of times. That frees me up to focus on what I actually enjoy: the design, the problem-solving, the features, the "what if we tried this" moments, the drafting, and the documentation.

The drinky bird pipeline is real, and it’s a valid concern but it’s not inevitable. It’s a choice. The tool doesn't make you check out, but it does make it easy to, and that’s something worth being honest about.

Where I completely agree: the systemic concerns don't go away just because individual use can be responsible. And the skill-atrophy risk is real for those still building their foundations. Not everyone is in the same position when picking up these tools.

#AI #GenAI #ClaudeCode

@stefan My verdict currently:

Compactness 👍
Logic changes and toggles 👎

I've been preferring the "show all at once with the least clicks" approach on my UI. I really don't know what was wrong with the old sidebar hashtag approach.

#Mastodon #MastodonUI #MastoAdmin

:skull360: We've successfully upgraded our Mastodon server to v4.6.0-alpha.5+mementomods-2026-03-21, along with Mastodon Bird UI 4.0.0-alpha.0-4.

This update includes today's latest daily build with 269 new commits from upstream since mementomods-2026-02-21.

What's new in Mastodon core - These are the changes Mastodon Team have introduced us in the latest nightly version we are running:

✨️ New features

- Collections: Public collections on profiles, remote account support, share dialog, reporting, moderation tools, tag suggestions, and language selector (not active for us yet)
- Profile editing: New API, avatar/header image uploading with descriptions, featured tags editing, account fields grid layout (not active for us yet)
- New `exclude_direct` flag for account statuses API
- Split `invite_users` permission into `invite_bypass_approval` for finer control
- `max_note_length` and `max_display_name_length` now exposed in instance configuration API
- Accessibility improvements to sign-up flow, reset password and confirmation pages
- Lots of fixes, refactors, and dependency updates

🔮 Upcoming

- Profile redesign and Collections continue to be built incrementally upstream behind experimental flags, we'll enable them once Mastodon Bird UI support is ready
- FASP (Fediverse Auxiliary Service Providers) infrastructure continues to be developed

🐦⬛ Mastodon Bird UI 4.0.0-alpha.0-4 (nightly)

- Fix focusable background color standing out too much for account name
- Fix install script for Mastodon 2026-03-21 `common.scss` removal

Mastodon Bird UI 4.0.0-alpha.0-4 is still a work in progress in the nightly branch. It's not 100% ready, but it's stable with today's Mastodon alpha.5. Unfortunately a development is a bit stalled due to a lack of time personally.

Source code: https://github.com/mementomori-social/mastodon

As always, if you notice anything unusual or buggy, please reach out to me or any of the admins. Enjoy your time here, and feel free to message me with any questions or thoughts. :bunhdheart:

If anything feels off, please let us know!

#MementoMoriSocial #Mastodon #MastoAdmin

Anthropic's models have been down most of the Monday. I wonder if that has anything to do with the recent events.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/28/openai-us-military-anthropic

#AI #OpenAI #Anthropic #Claude #ClaudeDown

Server providers are increasing their prices because of higher hardware and energy costs (RAM and SSD prices have jumped by up to 500% since 2025, partly due to the rise of AI). If you're using a free or donation-based Mastodon server, remember that hosting costs are going up. Support your instance if you can.

#Mastodon #MastoAdmin #SupportYourLocal #SupportFreeSoftware

@cadusilva Yeah, the theme changes broke it. I'll push a fix soon.

Wow, there are a lot of breaking changes in the latest Mastodon nightly. I'm a bit surprised by some of the UI choices being made. I haven't been able to refactor all the code in Mastodon Bird UI yet, and I already have quite a bit of technical debt. This won't make my life any easier. I hope I get some breathing room before 4.6.0 is released.

#Mastodon #MastoAdmin #MastodonBirdUI #BirdUI

My book app is coming along, but the codebase getting really complicated. I might change my plans and not make it open source, at least not right away.

Still, the main idea stays the same: build it for myself first and make sure there are multiple ways to own your book data. Most likely, that means things like Nextcloud sync, an API, CSV export...

If Daft Punk released one more album, it wouldn't save the world. But it would help a little.

Over the years, I've realized how far we've drifted from the original idea of the World Wide Web. These days, it feels more like a corporate, big-tech web. I think there's real value in self-hosting as much as possible while still using major platforms, especially when you can pick more European and reasonable options.

People often forget that YouTube, WhatsApp, and Instagram were once independent companies, not owned by Meta or Google. Google was meant to be ad-free, and OpenAI was founded as a non-profit research organization, etc.

We'll probably never return to that vision, but I'm glad I own most my data and have about half of my tech self-hosted and open-sourced. It's only a dent, but I'm proud of that dent.

#OpenWeb #Internet #SocialMedia #BigTech

@stefan

I hope these get implemented some day:
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/8565
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/14762

@eberfreitas @pahoittelemme

@stefan I like that things are becoming more federated. What makes me a bit sad is that we still can't all be online using the same protocol. But then again, that's nothing new, people have always been spread across different platforms anyway, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter... without being able to communicate with each other.

As a pacifist, what I love most about the Fediverse is how it feels like a shared search for peace. We have Caturday, when everyone posts cat pictures every Saturday. There's Mosstodon, which is all about sharing beautiful photos of moss and nature. And we have SilentSunday, where people post calm outdoor and nature photos. Even with all the chaos in the world, the Fediverse has a way of calming my mind.

#Fediverse #Mastodon #SocialMedia

I've been wondering about Bluesky's decentralization again. I can't think of any reason why I'd want to self-host Bluesky in its current form. I cannot 100% self host "my own Bluesky".

Their main selling points for building their own protocol were easier migration and better discoverability, but right now there's no simple way to migrate my Bluesky account to my own instance. And hosting the centralized parts yourself isn't really possible, or if it were, not affordable, they haven't made that feasible, by design, it seems.

Even if you self-host a PDS, Bluesky's Relay only indexes up to 10 accounts from it. You can run more, but they won't federate, the central infrastructure decides what gets seen. They control this (source: https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-federation#:~:text=For%20a%20smooth%20transition%20into,for%20everyone%20in%20the%20ecosystem.). You can self-host a PDS (Personal Data Server), but you still depend on Bluesky's centralized Relay and AppView. There's no production-ready alternative infrastructure from what I gather.

It feels like I'd be renting a room in a hotel that someone else is running anyway, when I want my own hotel.

If Mastodon gGmbH vanishes tomorrow, my instance keeps running and federating with everyone else. If Bluesky PBC vanishes, the ecosystem would need to scramble to stand up replacement infrastructure that doesn't really exist yet.

ATProto keeps getting evaluated on its promises while other systems get evaluated on their merits. The "portability" selling point depends on infrastructure that isn't mature enough to actually catch you if Bluesky falls.

I trust W3C, the builders and fathers of the World Wide Web, ActivityPub and the Fediverse.

#Decentralization #SelfHosting #SelfHosted #Mastodon #Fediverse #Bluesky #Servers

It’s funny how in 2022 they claimed that Mastodon as a whole was CSAM social media because of a few nazi servers managed by two scumbags. Now they don't seem to see the irony in X and Grok, a massive platform with half a billion users.

#X #Twitter #SocialMedia

@lety Thank you for the support. My next step would have been to explore the fedi.buzz API and the possibilities of combining several public Fediverse APIs. Emelia Smith, who has worked on moderation and trust & safety tools for the Fediverse, kindly helped me improve auto-deletion and similar features, so I thought it was okay to do something like this. But I guess not. It seems that public posts cannot be used publicly in any way, according to the Fediverse Police / HOA forces. Still after this time I'm a bit sad about everything that happened.