Notices by Misty (misty@digipres.club)

Rust folks: is there a dead-easy “check for this C library or download a source tarball and build a static library" thing for build scripts? I want to set up a dependency for something if I can but I really don't want to maintain any real complex buildscripts.

@mcc Sorry, by "static library" I mean a C library - not something provided by Cargo itself. Cargo provides the ability to write Rust build scripts that are executed during the build to handle things like this; I'm just wondering if there's something easier than writing the whole "fetch this release tarball, unpack, build, etc." logic myself.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/build-scripts.html

Whoof, double vax hitting me hard today. At least that means it's working

A little recommendation for new members: if you'd like people to be able to search the text of your posts, you can turn that on! (It's off by default to preserve users' privacy.) You can follow the instructions here: https://fedi.tips/how-do-i-opt-into-or-out-of-full-text-search-on-mastodon/

This story is WILD. Local news channel discovers a nearby 250-person town has a *50-person police force*, staffed primarily by officers who had been fired somewhere else. https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2024/khou-11-investigation-coffee-city-police-department/

Still creeps me out that that bird.makeup instance is still around. Like sure there are people it would be nice to have on here but nonconsensually mirroring someone's entire twitter timeline feels genuinely invasive to me.

(Judging from how I see people replying to "accounts" from there, I'm guessing many people boosting/interacting with them don't even realize those aren't "real" accounts.)

It also, like... so Mastodon users are constantly getting mad at services based on scraping fediverse user data, right? But then we get these instances doing *the exact same thing* to twitter users, and people seem happy to boost their posts, etc. Creepy. I don't like it.

I've seen people who realize they're being mirrored from these kinds of services and feel awful about it. And there's not really any kind of opt out!

@Tak I don’t remember the specifics; I’d have to dig it up.

Saw an interesting misunderstanding the other day. Someone approached a user asking them to add alt text to their images. However, the images *did* have alt text, in a format ActivityPub supports, but that Mastodon doesn't know how to read.

I suspect people will encounter more and more of this as there are more ActivityPub-based programs that are doing things beyond just what Mastodon represents, and we'll have to get used to knowing that our view of a post might not be how it was authored.

@mcc I signed up for them early, saw the credit card info leak thing happen, decided I didn't trust it enough to use it again

@AlanSill Hi! I'm curious, is your server still running on toot.io's managed hosting? I'm looking into them and curious to hear from admins how they feel about it.

Really impressed with how good Infinite Mac is these days. Being able to just drag an ISO onto my browser desktop and have it be mounted in a way that just works is really, really impressive. https://infinitemac.org

The Internet Archive has lost its appeal on ebook lending: https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/4/24235958/internet-archive-loses-appeal-ebook-lending

The most important thing here is **don’t panic**. They’re not going to just disappear. This isn't good but it's not catastrophic.

Putting out the call again: does any #mastoadmin know of a managed hosting solution for Mastodon that supports Mastodon forks?

@yamako 週末！！

Question for other #mastoadmin people: I've had a user get followed by a Flipboard account - looks like one of those ones set up to aggregate random interesting fediverse content. The user wasn't sure what to make of it.

Any opinions on these from a privacy perspective? How well-behaved is Flipboard? Anything I should be concerned about here as an admin?

Apple. Apple please. You can't use the same short flag for two different things. Apple *please*

Somewhat spicy headline this time, but been thinking about how GitHub's been feeling to me for awhile and seeing a feature I rely heavily on get worse made me realize: it feels like "GitHub", the traditional website, is being treated as a legacy product from corporate's perspective. It exists, lots of people use it, but it doesn't feel like the *future* of the site. Maybe time for me to really learn about other hosts and git clients.

https://www.mistys-internet.website/blog/blog/2024/07/12/github-is-starting-to-feel-like-legacy-software/

#mastoadmin friends: any advice on rerunning a post-deploy migration that failed in prod? `db:migrate:down VERSION=blah` doesn't seem to do anything in this case, even though its `down` does contain the change I'd need to be able to retry.