alex

alex, 4 months ago to random

What do you guys think the world really needs from open-source, online communities right now? I'm building yet another microblogging thing. It's awesome and I think you guys are going to really like it. But I feel like there's some idea floating in the ether that we haven't grasped yet. Something new.

alex, 1 month ago to random

btcd is an endless stream of rejected/orphaned blocks. lnd says it's not synced. But it otherwise seems to be up-to-date. How do I move beyond this?

image/png

alex, 3 months ago to random

Something exciting today. It's now possible to zap on the Fediverse! ⚡ ⚡ ⚡ You can zap users on Nostr! You can zap users on Mastodon/Pleroma/ActivityPub! Let the sats flow!!!

https://soapbox.pub/blog/mostr-zaps/

Check it out and get set up to send and receive MONEY across the Fediverse for your shitposts.

This works thanks to the Mostr Bridge + Zapple Pay, an amazing result of Apple banning zaps on Damus. Who would have thought?

Enjoy!

alex, 5 months ago to random

Baphomet statues absolutely are first amendment free speech. You are free to hate it but the whole point of free speech is to defend people and ideas you DON'T like. It is literally a slippery slope where Christians and Catholics will become censored if they don't allow devil worshipping. Sorry folks but it has to go both ways.

alex, 2 months ago to random

Corporate scum have wormed their way into all aspects of life. We need to bring back the guillotine.

https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/home-entertainment/your-roku-tv-will-be-unusable-if-you-dont-agree-to-the-companys-controversial-new-terms/

alex, 5 months ago to random

Fellas, it will soon be possible to play Game Boy Color ROMs in Soapbox.

Code: https://gitlab.com/soapbox-pub/soapbox/-/merge_requests/2868

Demo post: https://gleasonator.com/@alex/posts/Ac5HNKguMNj8AkmF0a

video/webm

alex, 3 months ago to random

If you receive this in your notifications it means I'm trying to send you MONEY. Add a Lightning address to your profile using the guide below so you can actually receive it.

RT: https://gleasonator.com/objects/8930d51c-2dc3-4086-af0b-1c1c516a23b2

alex, 6 months ago to random

Hey guys, I gave a talk at Nostrasia 2023 about the Mostr bridge! In this talk I discuss the bridge between ActivityPub and Nostr, Elon Musk and Donald Trump, the very long usernames, and of course, "I'm vegan btw". Watch the full talk here!

https://poast.tv/w/jUknj6g3BbkESsidKbDRzr

alex, 9 months ago to random

@460c25e682fda7832b52d1f22d3d22@mostr.pub Hey do you have a link to that Nostr-hosted static HTML site? It was importing .js and .css files from Nostr relays through an http proxy.

alex, 3 months ago to random

I should not actually do this, right? Or... should I?

alex, 9 months ago to random

primal.net is apparently indexing the entirety of Nostr on a cluster of SQLite databases and serving it in microseconds. I'm intrigued by this, so I'm figuring out how to run Julia code to see it for myself. Also brewing some sen-cha. 🍵

alex, 8 months ago to random

On this evening of September 11, I am pleased to announce that I have tagged a Ditto alpha1 release and deployed it to https://gleasonator.dev

Ditto LIVES. Here's what you need to know:

• It's Soapbox on Nostr.
• Ditto pretends to be a Mastodon server while using the Nostr protocol.
• You can use Mastodon apps other than Soapbox (but you need to obtain a Nostr private key first).
• ActivityPub is not supported yet, but it will be. It's part of what makes Ditto, Ditto.
• Ditto is about building communities on Nostr, similar to ActivityPub.
• Nostr uses private keys. There is still a lot of work to do in Soapbox to improve this experience.
• This is not optimized. Please excuse any slowness or glitches. If something isn't working, try refreshing the page. I will improve this.
• It's still a demo. This is just for poking around, so don't get too attached.

This is just the beginning. alpha1 is just BARELY usable. But I want to get the ball rolling. Things are going to change a lot in both Soapbox and Ditto. These things take time, but we will win. Thank you all for your patience, enthusiasm, and support!

Follow along with #ditto here: https://gitlab.com/soapbox-pub/ditto/-/issues

Enjoy!

alex, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to random

Fellas, I think threads.net might be blocking some servers already.

It does not work on any Pleroma servers yet. (EDIT: this issue has been fixed https://gitlab.com/soapbox-pub/rebased/-/merge_requests/296/diffs ) But I believe that is an unintentional compatibility issue. However some servers seem to be outright blocked.

Let me explain. Threads requires signed fetches. What that means is that every GET request to a threads.net resource needs to be cryptographically signed. Threads will then look up the signer and verify its signature.

The flow looks something like this:

gleasonator.com -> GET threads.net/zuck (signed by /actor)
threads.net -> GET gleasonator.com/actor

The request to Threads contains a signature, with information about how to verify it. Threads will then verify it by fetching info from the origin server before returning the data.

You can see Threads fetching your own server by looking at the "facebookexternalua" user agent. Try this command on your server:

grep facebookexternalua /var/log/nginx/access.log

If you see logs there, that means Threads is attempting to verify your signatures and allow you to access their data.

On Gleasonator, I am seeing logs there. It is trying to let me establish a connection, even though it fails due to a bug in Pleroma or Threads. This means Gleasonator is not blocked.

However, on Spinster, and the Mostr Bridge, I have no requests from Threads at all, despite sending signed fetches. graf reports that Poast also isn't receiving any requests.

I do not believe they are operating on a whitelist. If so, it wouldn't make sense for Gleasonator and many other widely-blocked servers like gameliberty.club to be able to fetch from Threads.

So then I thought it may just be a caching issue, or a fluke on their end. But when I make a request from Gleasonator, I get the pingback from Threads within seconds. On Spinster and Mostr, there is no attempt being made at all.

So I am starting to think they may be blocking at the server-level already. And they are blocking Poast, Spinster, and the Mostr Bridge.

alex, 3 months ago to random

"Don't do drugs, kids. sips coffee"

alex, 5 months ago to wholesome

This is peak #wholesome

video/mp4

alex, 6 months ago to random

>Visit Buddhist temple
>Buddhist restaurant attached
>"We are not vegetarian" on the door
>Buddhist
>Believes in reincarnation
>Not vegetarian
>???

alex, 3 months ago to random

Vegan sushi time 👍

image/jpeg

alex, 4 months ago to random

Bro what the actual fuck. This is by far the weirdest spam email I've ever received, and I receive a lot of them. It just goes on and on and on and then there's pictures of a dude's bruised body at the bottom. The text is just nonsense.

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alex, 1 year ago to random

Got my first NIP merged into the Nostr protocol. 💪

NIP-30: Custom Emoji https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/30.md

alex, 1 year ago to random

This is mildly annoying and very easy to prevent, but I don't feel like writing the MRF for it. Anyway, enable rate limiting on your server and use "by approval" registration mode or you're gonna be on Fediblock for a dumb reason.

RT: https://social.selfprivacy.org/objects/71532636-b085-473d-b3c7-554eecadde90

alex, 5 months ago to random

Mastodon.social seems like it can talk to Threads fine, but nothing I do makes it work.

curl -H "accept: application/activity+json" -H "user-agent: http.rb/5.1.1 (Mastodon/4.2.2; +https://mastodon.social/)&quot&quot); https://www.threads.net/ap/users/mosseri/

Even pretending to be Mastodon.social's user-agent 404s. I wonder if they have an IP whitelist.

alex, 7 months ago to random

Not even hard, Dungeons & Dragons, and I'll even throw in mom and pop bookstores. I wouldn't weep over Tim Burton either tbh.

alex, 7 months ago to random

Mom can we get trees
We have trees at home

alex, 9 months ago to random

Thought today was going to be a good productive day, but turns out a new Pleroma security vuln just dropped instead: https://gitlab.com/soapbox-pub/rebased/-/merge_requests/270

alex, 5 months ago to random

Well there's nothing to do with Threads at the moment, unless someone can point to new profiles being fetched or posts coming through.

Back to writing my custom websocket pool.