In light of recent discussions how to make it easier to interact with content on #fediverse servers other than your home instance:
What MSN does here is interesting. You can “follow” before you sign in (not sure what that means? They implicitly create an “account” just from a session cookie?)
Also, assuming MSN has the money and expertise to really research this, the actual sign-in experience can take a lot of screens and they seem to be okay with that.
I'm having a real hard time seeing how, if he managed to get his hands on TikTok, he would transform it into the "good internet". Without losing all the users.
@reillypascal I'm aware of the protocol. Even beyond the specific protocol, I have never understood why anybody thinks an (all-public, never-can-delete) data store is the right place for social media data. I don't get the all-public about #Bluesky either. (and I'm not understanding what they may or may not support in terms of delete)
But re McCourt, he's not a geek, so he can only act on what geeks tell him, and they told him blockchain :-)
Today, my Mac's available disk space keeps dropping. I keep deleting stuff and disk space keeps dropping to where applications stop working and I apparently have less than 100M left. I'm panicking a bit because I keep deleting things and it gets worse not better.
Finally, I kill time machine. I haven't deleted any more files and have not done anything since, but now I have 135G free on disk.
@Bryan I know, been doing this for a long time. Just today Time Machine went haywire to the tune of 135G and I'm sure it would have kept going. After restarting it, now it happily backs up to the external disk and my local disk continues to have 135G free space.
Anybody know what triggers a profile re-fetch in #mastodon ?
After an instance accessed a remote account for the first time, it fetches name, avatar, number of followers etc. When will it fetch it next to potentially update?
@J12t same for me, I was surprised we did not do it so I had it implemented.
We need a similar periodic check on verified links now, but it has a few complexities.
@J12t Yes, that's certainly one use-case for the outbox... to "catch up" on things you missed, on a per-user basis.
But as far as I am concerned they're separate APIs that pull from a common data source.
For example, reading the ActivityPub spec, one could draw the conclusion that the outbox is an ordered list of activities, likely read as-is from the database.. but that's not strictly defined, so it's possible to dynamically create outbox items on-demand based on user history stored elsewhere.
That would mean less duplication of content (and the syncing that is required), fewer bugs, etc... but the cost is the collection then has to be dynamically constructed.
@julian It's mostly append-only, easy to cache ...
For FediTest, we have come to the conclusion that simple pass/fail isn't going to cut it. We need a more gradual rating, and the current state is 1) fail -- against the spec and likely go cause interop problems 2) soft fail -- against the spec but probably harmless from an interop perspective 3) degrade -- e.g. everything turns into a Note and 4) pass. Not sure this is an exhaustive list ... your empty outbox would get a pass, I think.
Some days you are totally elated about all the amazing things that are becoming possible and within reach. We are changing the world!
Some other days you are in the depth of despair that this is never going to work and how could you possibly ever have thought otherwise.
This week definitely is the former. A movement is forming, good people are coming out of hiding and are getting excited and involved. So glad to be part of it!!
I keep seeing people lamenting being unable to game a following together because of a lack of algorithm.
What you're saying resonates with me because I never wanted that. Never joined a commercially run, centralized, social network, because I never saw it as a "network".
#ActivityPub means, when I follow someone (or someone follows me), I'm building my own social network out of people I personally want to associate with.
That value is worth well more than an algorithm could provide.
@mousey maybe there are two steps: have a machine help me find interesting people that I wouldn’t easily find myself can be valuable. But it needs to be optional and get out of the way once the relationship is established.
"“Web publishers brace for carnage as Google adds AI answers,” ...Until now, publishers have been able to rely on significant volumes of traffic coming from the blue links that appear under many queries. But [their new] AI overviews often obscure these links, requiring users to click to see them, or simply abstracting them away in an automatically generated summary. Analysts ... say a bloodbath is coming..."
Tried to send a message to the IETF's #WebFinger mailing list with some feedback from @feditest. Tried three different sender e-mail addresses. None of them went through. Not sure what else to try.
@J12t It might also help to create an account at https://datatracker.ietf.org. Let me know if you continue to have problems and I’ll escalate it to the tools team.