By @edent · ActivityPub bot fediverse · 5 comments · 350 words · read ~808 times.
As you may have read, BotsIn.Space is closing down, I have lots of automated bot accounts living on the Fediverse - and I want them to continue posting. Installing and maintaining an entire Mastodon instance sounds like hard work. Paying people to host my stuff feels like putting my fate in someone else's hands. Say… […]
Continue reading →By @edent · ActivityPub fediverse mastodon privacy · 3 comments · 500 words
Several years ago, I posted this poll on Twitter. Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentIf the recent Twitter hack had exposed they way you voted on every Twitter poll, how would you feel?(There is no suggestion that this has happened, I'm just curious about people's relationships to voting and privacy.)Meh. So what?: (167)167Hmph. That's annoying.: (68)68Umm… […]
Continue reading →By @edent · capitalism fediverse mastodon startups · 4 comments · 500 words
Many years ago, when I was younger and more foolish, I worked for an advertising startup. Things seemed to be going pretty well! The office was expanding, the sales team was screaming into phones, the budget for servers was rising. Growth had been healthy, but now looked to be plateauing. One day we were summoned […]
Continue reading →By @edent · ActivityPub fediverse IoT Social Networks · 15 comments · 550 words · read ~2,856 times.
One of the most frustrating things in modern technology is the effort spent trying to artificially restrict abundance. Take, for example, this tale from museum-worker Aaron Cope: I was out with a friend who worked for Twitter and I asked them whether it would be possible for the museum to “create 200,000 Twitter accounts, one […]
Continue reading →By @edent · ActivityPub CyberSecurity encryption fediverse http · 10 comments · 550 words
I'm trying to get my head round HTTP Signatures as they're used extensively in the Fediverse. Conceptually, they're relatively straightforward. You send me a normal HTTP request. For example, you want to POST something to https://example.com/data You send me these headers: POST /data Host: example.com Date: Sat, 24 Feb 2024 14:43:48 GMT Accept-Encoding: gzip Digest: […]
Continue reading →By @edent · ActivityPub fediverse i18n mastodon unicode · 35 comments · 750 words · read ~265 times.
We live in the future now. It is OK to use Unicode everywhere. It seems bizarre to me that modern Internet services sometimes "forget" that there's a world outside the Anglosphere. Some people have the temerity to speak foreign languages! And some of those languages have accents on their letters!! Even worse, some don't use […]
Continue reading →By @edent · ActivityPub fediverse mastodon php Symfony · 10 comments · 900 words · read ~695 times.
I've written an ActivityPub server which only allows you to post messages to your followers. That's all it does. It won't record favourites or reposts. There's no support for following other accounts or receiving replies. It cannot delete or update posts nor can it verify signatures. It doesn't have a database or any storage beyond […]
Continue reading →By @edent · ActivityPub fediverse FOURSQUARE geolocation OpenStreetMap · 29 comments · 900 words · read ~1,228 times.
I used to like the original FourSquare. The "mayor" stuff was a bit silly, and my friends never left that many reviews, but I loved being able to signal to my friends "I am at this cool museum" or "We're at this pub if you want to meet" or "Spending the day at the park". […]
Continue reading →By @edent · ActivityPub fediverse mastodon · 5 comments · 400 words · read ~668 times.
Last week, this strange mention appeared on my Mastodon feed. After a bit of clicking around, I figured out what had happened. A user on the Kbin social network had linked to my Mastodon profile. Thanks to the magic of the ActivityPub protocol, it filtered into my mentions - even though I've never even heard […]
Continue reading →By @edent · dns fediverse mastodon · 5 comments · 500 words · read ~305 times.
How should I design my personal DNS for all the cool new Federated Services and IndieWeb protocols? Way back in the early 2000s, I started this website - shkspr.mobi. A few years later, I added a blog. I could have used the main domain, or created a subdomain like blog.shkspr.mobi. In the end, I chose […]
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