The Voyager 1 remote bugfix is especially impressive (galling?) as I'm a few days in and still can't get my microcontroller to talk to this bog-standard RFID reader.
I wonder if the team at NASA could just remotely debug it for me? 🤔
Update: Thanks, NASA! I don't know what you're doing, but 20 minutes of work after posting this and I'm reading RFID cards like a boss. Okay, like, a very amateur boss, but still... It's something!
ZeroRanger taking the boss pattern name "Tiny Valor" verbatim from Radiant Silvergun is literally stolen valor. Send tweet. remembers I'm crossposting to 4 sites now and can't say that anymore Send, uh, send, uhh,
@mcc@leona my endorsement doesn't carry any legal weight, and I'm obviously biased, but as the person who coined the word "tweet", I wholeheartedly support this approach. 😁
The back-woods, working class, remote rural community near where I live, whose primary employers are a zinc/lead smelter and a pulp mill, just elected amazing queer hero, Birkley Valks, to the local school board of trustees. He soundly won the election against a hate-mongering anti-trans bully. Love wins! 🎉🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️❤️
Does anyone know what the most broadly implemented standard is for signalling that a web page has an alternative ActivityPub endpoint?
What I found online (and with @evan and @silverpill's input) was to deliver a Link header and set a <link> tag, but it doesn't seem to work (at least with Megalodon)...
@evan@julian@nightpool for what it's worth, webfinger should be (re: is) able to do this, even if the implementations in the wild don't. The intent at the time was for webfinger to be the "DNS records" for "social addresses", and the main reasons we didn't just use DNS was because (1) DNS doesn't support anything but bare domain names, (2) management of DNS records at scale is hard, and (3) it wasn't possible to query DNS via the web.
@evan@julian@nightpool lots of folks advocated to support any URI scheme in a webfinger lookup, and that's why we have the "acct" scheme at all - so that email-style addresses could be used alongside http etc URIs!
The <Link> approach definitely works, but feels a bit reinventing-webfinger/creating more complexity in lookups (on the client side).
@evan@julian@nightpool in the Postel sense, though, it's too bad that a client implementor needs to maintain (at least) four discovery pathways, and may require four separate requests to validate the information. Similarly, an ap host doesn't know which spots a client will check, so needs to implement all four. I'm well out of the standards game, but I'd very much advocate for "pick one and stick with it" 😊
The real reason to write rust is that sex is good, but have you ever tried a successful build after fighting with the esp-idf+cargo toolchains for 12 hours?
On instagram, which I only use these days to follow friends who are on there, the most frequent "notification" is from obvious spam (presumably phishing) accounts. Meta has thus far been unable to stem the never-ending flow.
Except these accounts are all brand new. I don't know anyone who's not on instagram in 2024 that will decide to sign up and follow me
If Instagram had a flag that said "don't let new accounts follow me", it would stop the spam dead.
Obviously, as a growing network, way more people are setting up new accounts on the Fediverse than on Instagram, so "new" would need to be a bit more nuanced, but having an auto-reply that says "hey, if you want to follow this personal account, that's cool, just ping me out-of-band and I'll follow you first."
We could even have a "force-follow" button that makes an attestation that you're not spam/a bot/etc. Spammers that use that mechanism get their server banned. Idk?
I'm not sure if it's new or if I'm just really bad at paying attention, but I just learned about it and I'm so excited about #fedify: https://unstable.fedify.dev/
I think systems that are shaped like fedify are one of the key things needed to really open experimentation and exploration of the possibilities that the fediverse affords.
I feel like billionaires are letting the world down.
So much wealth, so much power, but as far as I can tell there won't be a flock of supersonic jets with transparent upper fuselages following the eclipse.
I mean, there are ~2500 billionaires in the world, and none of them are going to experience five full hours of totality.
Is there any TLD registry (not registrar) and accompanying domain name extension (.com, .net and so on) out there that’s owned by a small/independent, i.e. trustworthy business? Feels like they’re all owned by some creepy mega-corp.
.blog owned by Automattic is a decent example, though they’re not exactly very indie anymore, and have come under strong scrutiny of late. I wonder if there are even better alternatives.
@Edent@erlend it was always my hope that webfinger (plus some extra bits) could be used for contact details (I think webfinger is properly understood as "DNS for People[/things/etc]").
By using the ability to do key lookups, it's not too complicated to build an authenticated profile server that wouldn't rely on a shared/trusted service.
I imagine something like a Facebook profile page with "friends-only" visibility for profile details, etc. Could work really well with Signal's new usernames..
Random unsolicited thought (disclaimer: I haven't been watching or participating in the spam response at all):
One of the main differences between social/activitypub spam and email spam is that contact lists are largely open, and programmable querying is possible. What does that mean?
If you see a new follow request or mention, you can check to see if anyone else you know follows that person. If not, the spam propensity is much higher. Email servers can't do this [without centralization].
With ActivityPub+Webfinger, we also know precisely who sent the message, with cryptographic signatures for verification, unlike email where From-address-level signatures have proven an elusive goal. The best you can do with SMTP in most cases is to verify that "a server that's trusted by the domain sent the message" but there are so many exceptions due to SMTP's architecture that it's really a crapshoot.
Put another way, if we get this right for the Fediverse AND upgrade our email addresses to support ActivityPub+Webfinger, a robust response to spam across the Fediverse that takes into account social connections could make [SMTP-based] email much less prone to spam and phishing attacks than centralized server- and content-filtering-focused attempts have been to date.
Been getting this sense lately that the fediverse may be thinning out a bit, and in parallel getting a sense people I know are finally jumping to "bluesky" in numbers.
Trying to figure out exactly at what point I decide I'm willing to create a feed over there. My position has been "I'll post there when I don't have to use their servers to do it", but I continue to suspect this will literally never happen because their protocol is designed to look like federation without being ever federatable
@mcc a lot of people I know are asking these questions!
Once upon a time (mid-2008? Oh, I was so naive) I tried to build an "apache/cgi-bin for building cross-protocol decentralized social tools." At the time that was xmpp, pubsubhubbub, RSS, and indieweb-i-guess. I maintain that it's still possible with the modern set of photos, and probably easier than one would reckon (and probably harder, too). I'm not sure what the modern metaphor would be (so many options!)
@mcc the other historical story here that I can offer is that the xmpp pubsub spec (xep-60) was around 350 printed pages. I sat down with Peter Saint Andre and @hildjj at OSCON in 2007 and we wrote out a minimal profile of the spec in Notepad.exe that was two printed pages including example XML stanzas. That "tiny spec[k]" formed the basis of the functional pubsub Interop that @ralphm and I implemented between Twitter and Jaiku, basically over one evening at Social Web FooCamp.
This is the way forward for Canadian media. Eat Local, Buy Local, Connect Local. Really glad to see @thetyee (which I had a very small hand in launching 20 years ago!) taking open, federated media seriously. I wish more Canadian journalists would make the move, because it's the only way that I can see that we re-build strong Canadian journalism.
I lived there for ~15 years, in my teens and through university, so I guess so? Usually I say "From BC" because I've lived kind of all over the province. I was in Vancouver during the (again, brief) Tyee project – spent most of my time those days working on/running resist.ca.
