No, ActivityPub votes aren't anonymous


Logo for ActivityPub.

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 →

The Limits of Organic Growth for Startups and Social Networks


A tiny lego Storm Trooper eats a chocolate coin.

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 →

The Fediverse of Things


Binary code displayed on a screen.

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 →

HTTP Signature Infinite Loop?


A padlock engraved into a circuit board.

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 →

Internationalise The Fediverse


Translation icon. By Linh Nguyen.

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 →

A (tiny, incomplete, single user, write-only) ActivityPub server in PHP


Screenshot of a map. There is a pop-up containing an image of me drinking a pint.

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 →

Rebuilding FourSquare for ActivityPub using OpenStreetMap


Map of London with several bits highlighted.

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 →

Federation is pretty cool, but kinda confusing, and maybe a little scary


Otome-chan says: "See here. you can see this mastodon user's post (which to them looks like a regular tweet on twitter does) ends up in our random microblogs section. We can also view their profile directly as well as follow them to have their posts appear in our microblogs (as well as threads if they go out of their way to make one). It seems kbin microblogs appear as threads/comments to you on lemmy. so I have to imagine mastodon posts might be similar?"

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 →

Naming things is hard - DNS for the Federated Web


The multicoloured interlocking lines of the Fediverse logo.

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 […]

Continue reading →

Snowflake IDs in Mastodon (and Unique IDs in the Fediverse more generally)


Hundreds of snowflakes - each one unique and beautiful.

Computer Science has two canonical "hard problems": cache invalidation naming things off-by-one errors Let's talk about how we name unique items in Federated services - for example, posts on a social media service. If you have only one service, it's pretty easy. Every time a new entry is created in a database, give it a […]

Continue reading →