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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • i’m pretty excited for fedify since i’m unsure if there has been any other activitypub abstraction that feels as comprehensive as it seems right now (from a brief skim, anyway).

    one thing i had in mind ever since i first skimmed the docs some time ago is this:

    federation.setActorDispatcher("/users/{handle}", async (ctx, handle) => {
    

    i would really recommend you to NOT tell people to use handles here. i assume this is just naming and the framework doesn’t actually require a handle there, but documentation matters and if you follow on the footsteps of mastodon, pleroma, lemmy, and friends everyone who follows your docs will lose the ability to change usernames down the line without more pain than it’s worth (and yes, there are software out there that allow it right now! please do not build fedi software assuming usernames are immutable jsut because mastodon doesn’t let people do it)

    just like how you wouldn’t use a natural key in a database, you should tell people to use a surrogate key like an autoincrement id or a uuid on the actor IDs, as they’re effectively permanent. while it may be probably fine for a quickstart thing like this to omit that, a lot of permanent codebases do start up by following these kinds of guides, and nudging people to do the correct thing when it’s not that hard is always a good idea IMO






  • mastodon doesn’t “discover” akkoma content and won’t show anything unless you’re following a user from there, which kinda sucks.

    I mean – that’s how all of them work. Even Lemmy. Unless your instance administrator joins relays (which have tradeoffs between privacy / effectiveness of blocking) your instance is only ever aware of posts from followed people (and reply threads followed people are involved in)

    (also MUCH lighter on server resources, compared to most other twitter-like alternatives)

    Mastodon is just unusually heavy, really. Even Misskey & forks are lighter than Masto on the server side (preferring being bloated on the client instead)


  • Mastodon feels like a fucking funeral.

    You’re clearly nowhere near the good parts, then.

    In my experience, once when you find your way into the correct circles the microblog-verse makes the “shitposting” of Lemmy look like r/memes. I do agree that discoverability could be better though, it took me 4-5 months before I got the hang of it. And now I barely check Lemmy despite my Lemmy account being older than my earliest microblog account (under this name, anyway).

    One important thing is that your instance matters quite a bit more than here. Starting on a large general purpose instance (especially if it’s mastodon.social) and just following Large Accounts and Nobody Else like most people recommend for some reason is just setting yourself up for disappointment. Instead, get on a smaller interest-specific instance (rule of thumb: the weirder the domain the better your experience will be!) and follow the local timeline (and on good software, the bubble/recommended timelines). And post stuff/interact with people. Don’t be that one person that does nothing but boost news bots and occasionally butt into replies of people asking rhetorical questions they already know the answer for.

    (Perhaps Lemmy is better at news or whatever, I wouldn’t know as I block all news communities I can find – I just don’t see the point as all the discussion around most news ends up predictable, unproductive (not that internet communities necessarily need to be “productive”), and unnecessarily angry)

    Also in a world with usable™ Misskey forks and Akkoma I think the limitations of Mastodon the software are really starting to show, and I urge anyone who’s been disappointed in Mastodon to try other microblog software. (Quotes are already a thing if you know where to look! So are emoji reactions, because people have more emotions than :star:)




  • I’m not entirely sure if such an instance exists, but just letting you know that in case you can’t find any, a reasonable compromise would be to join an instance that’s enforcing authorized fetch (and is blocking threads)

    this will make it harder for facebook to read your data through federation alone (i.e. even if a post of yours get boosted by someone with followers from threads, it won’t “leak” there)

    there are ways to bypass this of course but if facebook is found to do something of that sort they would out themselves as actively malicious which would definitely get a reaction even from the “wait and see” crew





  • TLDR of linked gist: wayland is not X therefore it is bad. end of.

    Wayland breaks Xclip: As you said it yourself, Xclip is an X11 application, so it doesn’t work on Wayland. Of course it wouldn’t work on Wayland. With Wayland, we’re trying to prevent what happened with Xorg from happening again, or am I wrong?

    also, https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard. perhaps all OP (of gist) needs is a simple shim that can convert calls to xclip to wl-copy/paste? that doesn’t seem too hard to make compared to keeping X.org alive I’d say (perhaps they should try making it if it’s that much of a problem)

    Wayland breaks screensavers: Yeah, that seems to be the case.

    from the dev of xscreensaver at https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/09/wayland-and-screen-savers/ :

    […] Adding screen savers to Wayland is not simply a matter of “port the XScreenSaver daemon”, because under the Wayland model, screen blanking and locking should not be a third-party user-space app; much of the logic must be embedded into the display manager itself. This is a good thing! It is a better model than what we have under X11. […]

    […] Under X11, you run XScreenSaver, which is a user-space program that tries really hard to keep the screen locked and never crash. It is very good at this, but that it needs to try so hard in the first place is a fundamental design flaw of X11. […]

    other people can comment on the parts they know about, these are two i know of off the top of my head







  • One of the reasons I use containers instead of installing things directly is that i can completely uninstall a service by deleting a single directory (that contains a compose.yml and any necessary volumes) and running a docker/podman system prune -a

    or that i can back up everything by backing up a single “containers” dir, which i could have on a subvolume and snapshot if i wanted to

    systemd/quadlet on the other hand makes me throw files in /etc (which is where you’re supposed to put them, but ends up resulting in them being tangled together with base system configuration often partially managed by the package manager)

    The Solution™ to this is configuration management like ansible or whatnot, which needlessly overcomplicates things for the use cases i need (though they’re still useful for getting a base system “container ready” wrt ssh hardening and such)

    tldr: i want my base system to be separated from my services, and systemd integration is the exact wrong tool for this job


  • i was thinking of attempting something of that sort but i quickly realized that it’d be even more useful as a generic “list of communities for/about [thing]”, and people could then use that generic list both as a subscription list AND as a block list, depending on their interests

    and then i swiftly gave up realizing the scale of it all so if anyone wants to run with this idea feel free to do so