dumpsterqueer

dumpsterqueer, 27 days ago to random EN

Account self-registration / sign-up stuff got merged into #GoToSocial main :) It'll be included in the next release (0.16.0), but snapshot users can already try it out.

Documentation here: https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/admin/signups/

Had a surprisingly good time working on this feature, and glad to have it merged!

dumpsterqueer, 1 month ago to random EN

Preset CSS theme selector work in progress :)

For folks who don't want to write CSS just to change their profile color schemes and stuff around, we're working on easily-selectable preset themes that you can pick in the settings panel for your account.

#GoToSocial

Screenshot of the light blurple theme. It's basically white with sort of lavender highlights.
Screenshot of the dark blurple theme. It's intense, dark shades of purple and pink.

dumpsterqueer, 2 months ago to random EN

Working on writing up permissions for what accounts that have Moved still can and cannot do on the instance they've Moved from.

I guess read-only stuff that pertains specifically to their own account, so they can still see their old bookmarks and faves and stuff 🤔 But browsing timelines probably not. Hmm. Editing their profile? Not sure. Probably best to disallow it and just say somewhere "if you want to edit your profile to reflect that you've moved somewhere, do that BEFORE triggering the Move". Hmm, hmm.

dumpsterqueer, 2 months ago to random EN

it's quite something to watch the logs of this instance and see all these weird requests coming in

• getmammoth.app FY Agent trying to use the client API, presumably because whatever app that is tries to use the client API of instances to fetch replies 🙃
• various plume instances trying to POST to inboxes without signing requests
• something called "fediversity" (?) claiming to be Mozilla/5.0 (compatible) to do GET requests, which fail because trying to fetch the key they're signing with (https://fediversity.site/?operation=rsakey) always fails with a timeout.
• various mastodon instances sending Delete messages for users which are already deleted, so when we try to validate the Delete by fetching the key of the deleted account, the fetch fails (we should just not try, that's on us)
• bunch of different RSS readers (this one's normal but it's just fun to see)

dumpsterqueer, 3 months ago to random EN

Mastodon got some PRs merged lately to update their HTTP signature behavior to include url query parameters in outgoing signatures, and to check for url query parameters in incoming signatures too

this is good news, since it works around an incompatibility that was occurring between GoToSocial and Mastodon when either tried to iterate + fetch replies from the other's posts

so it's not in a release yet, but when it is it will fix all those pesky code 401 dead jobs in Mastodon sidekiq

relevant links:

• https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial/issues/894 - GoToSocial issue discussing the problem
• https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18638 - Mastodon issue discussing the problem
• https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/28476 - Mastodon PR (merged) implementing fallback checking for incoming signatures
• https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/28788 - Mastodon PR (merged) implementing fallback signing for outgoing signatures

Once we update GoToSocial to also try both ways of creating + parsing signatures, the loop will be closed.

dumpsterqueer, 4 months ago to random EN

tapping the "it's alpha software" sign so hard and so often that my finger goes right through it and i sustain a small but annoying injury on my fingy-fing

dumpsterqueer, 4 months ago to random

I don't like the sort of performative world-weariness and contemptuousness that devs often have when dealing with other people's software, and the design decisions encapsulated therein. I can think of very few other fields where people behave in such a way towards the work of their colleagues (academia maybe? art?). It's tired, it's unhelpful, it's cliché. I believe that as a group, software developers (myself included) owe it to ourselves and each other to pull that particular stick out our arses and throw it away for good.

dumpsterqueer, 4 months ago to random EN

I know I know I know, I'm on holiday, but I really wanted to finish the big HTML + CSS refactor. So I tidied it up and I think it's almost ready to go:

https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial/pull/2480

Previously: the code smell of our HTML was absolutely honking, because when we wrote all that template code we didn't really know yet how to get the most out of Go HTML templating. If you did "view source" on a #GoToSocial page, the indexing and formatting was all over the damn place, HTML soup!

Now: I'm not saying I've become an expert, but I think I've improved things somewhat. No more HTML soup! You can "view source" now and it produces readable HTML. I tried to introduce more semantically meaningful HTML elements in there as well, and use aria-labels a bit more diligently to make thread viewing easier.

If you wanna try it out, here's some links to pages on an instance running with the patch. I recommend doing "view source" or "inspect accessibility properties" on them:

• https://goblin.technology
• https://goblin.technology/@tobi
• https://goblin.technology/@tobi/statuses/01HHCZFCAKVCDRS8S8EHRXR12N

We've still got a ways to go with regards to ARIA labels, but I think it's coming along!

dumpsterqueer, 4 months ago to random EN

We will never accept an invitation to speak to Meta. We are not interested in speaking to Meta. We're not even on Meta's radar, but if they do for some godforsaken reason reach out to us, we will promptly tell Meta (more or less) to fuck off. That's the #GoToSocial promise, baby! Death to capitalism!

dumpsterqueer, 4 months ago to random

Gonna write a document about #GoToSocial memory usage and tuning in the coming weeks, now we're getting a better handle on how everything performs. Lots of folks ask us about it so it'd be good to have it written down properly.

dumpsterqueer, 4 months ago to random

Here at SuperSeriousBusiness, all requests for help with federation between GoToSocial and Threads will be redirected to our helpful staff at /dev/null. You will get a response to your query in undefined days.

dumpsterqueer, 4 months ago to random EN

Hiya! I've been working my butt off to refactor our HTML and to try to add decent anchors and stuff like that.

Screenreader users - could you possibly do me a favor and open the following links in your browser, and let me know if your screenreader encounters any issues?

https://goblin.technology/@tobi/statuses/01HGT3QEVW1EW83R1GKYH3Y95G

https://goblin.technology/@tobi

I tested it so far with Orca and windows Narrator, and they both seemed OK-ish, but more feedback would be welcome.

dumpsterqueer, 5 months ago to random EN

I like tapping computers and making them do things, but working as a programmer and writing software people use (and talk about) a fair bit is quite exhausting sometimes.

For whatever reason, many software nerds tend to be sullenly adversarial by default, in my experience. They also seem to constantly be trying to talk down about things they don't like (often for arbitrary, highly-subjective reasons), instead of working to understand why they are the way they are, or indeed just quietly accepting them and moving on. Some nerds seem incapable or unwilling to understand that their particular hangups about a thing are not universal, and nor should they be; instead, they squat like a troll under the bridge of projects they've taken a disliking to, haranguing passersby that xyz is bad because [insert reason here]. This doesn't really benefit anyone, least of all the increasingly-frustrated person doing the haranguing.

That's not to say that criticism of a project is always illegitimate, by any means; but I would hope that software nerds (who often prize their own intelligence and logical thinking) would be canny enough to recognize the difference between constructive criticism, and the rather less helpful behavior described above. There's a big difference between saying "xyz SUCKS" and "xyz didn't fit my requirements because [...]".

So anyway this post is both a big "thank you" to the many nerds who are chill and easygoing and joyful, and an exhortation to others to free yourself of contemptuous, competitive attitudes, and re-embrace the intellectual curiosity that presumably once brought you into programming in the first place. If you want an excellent read on the topic, treat yourself to Contempt Culture, which is much better written than this post.

dumpsterqueer, 5 months ago to random EN

we're trying to narrow down a (bizarre, kind of funny) #GoToSocial bug where a boosted status can appear in timelines to be authored by the person who boosted it -- so essentially boosting a status can sometimes "steal" that status

it's a bugger to reproduce, so if you see it, and you have any useful info to share about it (either in logs, or in the Network tab of your browser when looking at the status in a client) please do share

dumpsterqueer, 5 months ago to random

we gotta stop calling LLMs "ai" you gays:

• there's nothing intelligent about it; it's literally not "AI" at all, in the same way that throwing darts completely randomly at a board and occasionally hitting triple 20, then optimizing for that, isn't "playing darts"
• it validates the marketing work done by total asshole shills; it's giving them oxygen
• makes it sound way cooler than it is, and makes people working on it sound way smarter than they are (didn't we learn this lesson with blockchain? They're dickhead, world-burning capitalist charlatans all the way down)

So instead of "ai" I propose we start calling large language models "ugg", for "unwanted garbage generator".

Advantages of "ugg":

• sounds like something a caveman would say
• can be grunted in frustration
• emphasizes that it's fucking garbage

Thank you!

dumpsterqueer, 5 months ago to random

Working on some better language tag support for #GoToSocial, including being able to set preferred server language(s). It won't do much yet but it will be important down the line.

dumpsterqueer, 5 months ago to random

Placeholders for unknown media attachment types are merged into #GoToSocial and will be in 0.13.0 :)

This means that if someone posts a media attachment of a type your instance doesn't recognize or can't process (funky video types, pdfs, image types we don't support yet), or if there's a network issue fetching a piece of media, it will no longer just be thrown away.

Instead you'll be served a link to the remote URL for that piece of media, so you can open it in directly in your (mobile) browser.

The next time you refresh that status (2hr cooldown), your instance will try again to fetch the piece of media, and automagically update the status if it succeeds.

You can see some screenshots of how it looks on the frontend and in clients here: https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial/pull/2331

dumpsterqueer, 6 months ago to random

If there's one thing i've learned from working on software that people actually use, it's that some folks will react with contempt to any given design decision, no matter what. Folks are really quite remarkably stubborn about software, and once they've decided that something is shit, or that you're a bad developer, there's not much point trying to bring them round.

So you might as well just plod along making software you enjoy using in a way that you're happy with, and which people who like the software are happy with, and not worry too much about the rest.

dumpsterqueer, 1 year ago to random

you gotta spend like 95% of your time being wrong and uncertain and clueless, to then be able to spend 5% of your time knowing wtf you're talking about; i'm still definitely in the 95% bracket when it comes to activitypub and jsonld

dumpsterqueer, 1 year ago to random EN

free software advocates when you ask them to take an intersectional view on the ethics of using certain software, going beyond the question of 'is this thing foss or not': ⁉️ 😕 😠 🤬

dumpsterqueer, 1 year ago to random EN

tech guys: the agpl software license is bad because it’s too restrictive

me: the agpl software license is good because it makes tech guys say ‘the agpl software license is bad because it’s too restrictive’