By @edent · mastodon twitter · 2 comments · 550 words
I remember seeing the original "A new decentralized microblogging platform" on HackerNews back in October 2016. A few weeks later, I joined - becoming the 7,112th user. As the years went on, my use of it waxed and waned. I started cross-posting to both Mastodon and Twitter. Gradually, I started spending more time on the […]
Continue reading →By @edent · ActivityPub CyberSecurity mastodon Responsible Disclosure security · 1 comment · 950 words
I've responsibly disclosed a small security issue with Mastodon (GHSA-8982-p7pm-7mqw). It allows a sufficiently determined attacker to use any Mastodon instance to redirect unwary users to a malicious site. What do you think happens if you visit: https://mastodon.social/@PasswordReset/111285045683598517/admin? If you aren't logged in to that instance, it will redirect you to a 3rd party site. […]
Continue reading →By @edent · mastodon MastodonAPI python · 3 comments · 1,150 words · read ~2,827 times.
I wrote a moderately popular post on Mastodon. Lots of people shared it. Is it possible to find out how many different ActivityPub servers it went to? Yes! As we all know, the Fediverse is one big chain mail. I don't mean that in a derogatory way. When I write a post, it appears on […]
Continue reading →By @edent · ActivityPub mastodon WordPress · 6 comments · 700 words · read ~491 times.
You can now have this blog federated to your social media site by following @blog@shkspr.mobi If you're on Mastodon, it should look something like this: You should be able to follow it on Lemmy, kBin, PixelFed, and some cool social network I've never heard of. How This blog runs on WordPress. Thanks to the tireless […]
Continue reading →By @edent · mastodon MastodonAPI search · 8 comments · 850 words · read ~559 times.
The latest version of Mastodon includes search functionality. It's early days, but seems to work pretty well. Here are some of the interesting things I found when using it. Search is complex - expectations I don't mean the act of searching a database - that's routine - but I mean it is socially complex. Lots […]
Continue reading →By @edent · mastodon privacy · 1 comment · 600 words
One of the many great things about the Fediverse (Mastodon, PixelFed, Lemmy, etc) is that your account is portable. Let's say you're bob@social.boring and, one day, you decide to move your account to foxyfun@furryextreme.yif. Well, with a few clicks of a button, all of your old followers are now following your brand new account. You're […]
Continue reading →By @edent · ActivityPub fediverse mastodon · 5 comments · 400 words · read ~669 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 · ActivityPub mastodon MastodonAPI ReDeCentralize · 5 comments · 750 words · read ~526 times.
Twitter's decision to hobble its API has meant that a number of useful alerting bots might no longer function. Your local subway might not be able to Tweet each morning about delays on the line, nor will a tornado warning be displayed as you scroll through photos of brunch, and forget about flood alerts between […]
Continue reading →By @edent · beer cider mastodon MastodonAPI python untappd · 2 comments · 850 words
I'm a big fan of Untappd. It's a social drinking app which lets you check in to a beer and rate it. Look, we all need hobbies, mine is drinking cider. You can see a list of everything I've drunk over the 13 last years. Nearly 900 different pints! After checking in, the app automatically […]
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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