deadsuperhero

deadsuperhero, 1 day ago

There’s some valid questions as to whether this brings decent benefits, of if it’s just a hype technology that’s mostly drawbacks. I’m not totally sure yet.

That said, I can think of a few narrow applications where something like this might actually be really interesting, like a Fediverse cache for URL and media previews for instances, or some kind of limited holdover service for media and data for an instance that’s bitten the dust.

Anyway, interesting learning experience, might be able to do something with it.

deadsuperhero, 1 day ago

@ilja So far, the easiest workaround (that was surprisingly easy for us) was to use an Object Storage service that puts everything in IPFS, but serves it back with an S3-compatible API.

After a lot of bumping around and figuring out the pieces, it ended up working better than expected! In practice, though, it just works like regular Object Storage. A next step might be to try to make Mastodon serve back the CID and render it directly, instead of proxying the S3 endpoint.

deadsuperhero, 2 days ago

@thisismissem @darius Yeah, I regularly have to correct the AI transcriptions generated by Riverside, which we use to record interviews.

Overall, it works pretty well, but the misreads are ridiculous. Some included:

• That reversed
• Steady verse
• That we heard
• Lead dispersed
• Freddy Durst

deadsuperhero, 3 days ago

@dansup don’t do it, Dansup! You’ve got enough on your plate!

deadsuperhero, 3 days ago

@Arataka Some of the reporting on this topic is really messy.

Jack was on the board, but allegedly had little to do with the day-to-day operations and decisions. He was supposedly bullied off of Bluesky last year by people still mad at him for Twitter, and has largely been supporting Nostr for the duration.

His unfollowing thing on Twitter is supposedly just a test of the algorithm as it exists today. That’s what Jack said, anyway.

deadsuperhero, 3 days ago

@hashraydamon Yeah, I wrote about them in the piece. There’s a difference between doing a fork to pursue your own interests and features, and doing a fork to compete with the original project.

The first is easy, the second one is extremely difficult.

deadsuperhero, 3 days ago

@soaproot My goal isn’t to discourage anyone from running a fork, so much as it’s an insight into what you’re signing up for.

For me, a big concern involves trying to run a fork that actively competes with Mastodon, to the point of trying to replace it. This is what I see when people make calls for a hard fork, and it concerns me because it’s never a call to support an existing fork or another piece of software.

What it communicates to me is that someone is more interested in being the SABDFL, rather than being one of the contributors supporting an existing project.

deadsuperhero, 3 days ago

@soaproot TL;DR: I’m not saying “don’t do it”, I’m saying “okay, but there’s some big headaches and you need to make peace with a number of things”.

Committed developers, deep knowledge of the code, community outreach, a coherent product vision, and having a designer all go a long way towards making this successful. Making it easy for communities to switch over is important, too.

deadsuperhero, 2 days ago

@jdp23 You are more than welcome to quote and link!

And yeah, I may have been projecting some of my own discomforts a bit. The last few calls for a hard fork, to me, have felt less like “let’s build our own thing together!” and more like a call to abandon Mastodon in favor of this amazing hypothetical fork where some other person is the SABDFL.

I think there is very much a need for an alternative to Mastodon. I’m not sure it’s necessarily Mastodon itself.

deadsuperhero, 3 days ago

@tedu Can’t wait to see what the endless meetings with almost no code contributors will bring!

deadsuperhero, 3 days ago

@BoscoZebra In an existential sense, I can’t say that a single thing I do is “important” in the big picture. Some days, I get hung up over the idea that nothing I do actually matters. But, that could be said of any person, any effort, any dream.

There certainly won’t be statues built of me, or plays written in my honor. I probably won’t even have a Wikipedia page. But, I do feel that I’m writing about a significant development in online communities, one that could change the Internet as a whole. Being a part of that gives me drive, and a sense of purpose.

deadsuperhero, 4 days ago

@atomicpoet You’re not alone! I have a similar problem with scope creep, although it often happens in the planning stages.

For a while, my cloud drive was a graveyard of great ideas. I kept biting off more than I could chew, with not enough breadcrumbs to move from the start of the story to the central idea.

I may actually pick up trying to write stories again, though. Part of me desperately loves world-building. A challenge I have for myself is to start by writing things that are comically low-stakes, like a plot to buy a coworker a cake to take advantage of their Costco membership.

deadsuperhero, 4 days ago

@Huubje I don’t blame you at all. I still think the peer-to-peer aspects of Nostr are interesting and worth writing about, and I do like how they rely on multiple relays, rather than being tethered to a single server.

I’m doing my best to find the diamonds in the rough, as I think there’s good work happening there, just as there is with Bluesky or Secure Scuttlebutt or wherever else. My whole thing is taking notes on different ideas, and seeing if anything that seems good might help us somehow.

Fediverse has been, and always will be, my number one place.

deadsuperhero, 4 days ago

@atomicpoet @fediversenews Akkoma seems to be a little bit broken for the time being, although the situation seems to be improving.

Basically: on the Fediverse side, you need to follow @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy. Right now, the follow seems to be at least a little bit broken with Akkoma, stuck in the “Awaiting Approval” state. But, the profile still shows up on Bluesky’s side.

I’m building a Bluesky list of bridged accounts for testing purposes: https://bsky.app/profile/wedistribute.org/lists/3krwhq36tjs2r

Unfortunately, Bluesky users have to also opt into the bridge in order for you to see them. Unless we can get the Bluesky team and a bunch of accounts to opt into it, we might not be able to see many people on this side.

deadsuperhero, 5 days ago

@piggo That’s an interesting idea. Our server runs on Phoenix, Arizona time, maybe it’s better to align that to other servers?

It’s just weird, some statuses end up being literally unfetchable. I had some luck in the past by disabling Authorized Fetch on the backend, but why that even worked was beyond me.

deadsuperhero, 6 days ago

@rabble It’s not completely true, but can happen.

Here’s a way to understand it: there are two ways conversations are handled in the Fediverse:

1. Replies are delegated by the author of the Thread. This is how Diaspora, Friendica, Streams, and a bunch of “long-form social” platforms have done it. The whole conversation tree can be pulled in, but a thread with hundreds of comments can potentially bring performance issues.
2. Replies are constructed based on what the observer’s server is already aware of. The author will see everything, but that context is not necessarily set for readers from other instances.

There are some interesting proposals coming out of Streams to basically treat conversations more like form 1 rather than form 2. I’m not sure if it’s a proposed FEP yet, but the idea is to make ActivityPub natively work this way across implementations.

deadsuperhero, 5 days ago

@rabble you can see every reply by viewing the thread on the original server. You will only see replies that your server knows about in the local view, plus any mentions that you appear in.

It…could definitely be a lot better. The improvement I described earlier to propagate responses to anyone who fetches a thread could potentially fix this, but there’s still the case of loading a thread with many, many replies that’s still something of a headache.

deadsuperhero, 8 days ago

I guess maybe I sound a bit ungrateful. I’ve had dry spells between jobs, where I was lucky to find much of anything.

But, the absolute low-balling random people will give you is just astonishing. I didn’t even apply for your crummy job! I have no idea who you are!