@julian@fietkau.social
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

julian

@julian@fietkau.social

Human-computer interaction #HCI, computer science & programming, home server & self-hosting, games and other fun stuff.

Increasingly into making tools for the fediverse: FediRoster, Pinhole, more to come(?). See https://fietkau.software/tag/fediverse for project info and downloads. If you do HCI-related research, check out https://directory.hci.social.

He/him. Posting mostly in English, but you might see the occasional German boost.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

Jeremiah, (edited ) to webdev
@Jeremiah@alpaca.gold avatar

Hey @MDN, with Stack Overflow’s ongoing community implosion, now would be an excellent time to launch MDN Answers so people have a better place to help each other learn.

https://answer.apache.org/

Edit: Or @nodebb / other ActivityPub-enabled forum/threaded discussion community server software

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@Jeremiah Might not be wise to count on @MDN to avoid similar issues long-term: https://github.com/mdn/yari/issues/9208

smallcircles, to fediverse
@smallcircles@social.coop avatar

Call to Participate: Help update with the original lead author at the

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/call-to-participate-help-improve-webfinger-rfc-with-its-lead-author/4208

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@smallcircles The question is, participate where? Is the mailing list still getting shut down soon? Should I reply to the linked SocialHub thread with my WebFinger concerns? I don't have much experience with development mailing lists, and I don't see a straightforward way to reply to a specific email there if I wasn't on the mailing list at the time it was sent...

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@smallcircles I saw the reply button, but that just opens a regular mailto window that would result in a top-level thread reply, instead of the reply to a specific message that I would want. 😦

Maybe it's kind of a generational divide, but joining a mailing list just to quickly chime in on an ongoing conversation seems like a lot... but I'll consider it.

gamingonlinux, (edited ) to random
@gamingonlinux@mastodon.social avatar

I want to do a test on how much traffic and resources the Mastodon embed takes on my server, so boost this plz

Edit: all done, you can stop sharing now lol

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/05/steam-deck-most-played-for-april-2024-has-plenty-of-fallout/

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@gamingonlinux @rdnielsen The "Mastodon effect" is a real thing, but its impact will depend heavily on how a site is set up. I'm surprised a news site would struggle with it.

Discussion on the Mastodon GitHub here: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/23662 A fix seems to be currently planned for 4.4.0.

andresmh, to random
@andresmh@hci.social avatar

Good morning 🌤️ Hanging out in the PNW for a week!

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@andresmh That's a real place, huh? I always thought they made it up for What Remains of Edith Finch. 🧐
@davidthewid

julian, to fediverse
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

I recently saw someone complain that they missed several recent @itchio game bundles. And I thought, okay, building a notification bot for newly live bundles could be a cool little side project.

Looking at https://itch.io/bundles I realized that it's (a) not sorted nor sortable by anything that makes sense, and (b) incomplete. The current big Palestine charity bundle isn't even on there.

Is there any way to get a list of all current itch.io bundles? Or a news feed of any kind?

SweetAmelia, to random
@SweetAmelia@sakurajima.moe avatar

im thinking about just going back to using a spreadsheet for non-anime shows. trakt sucks, simkl sucks, letterboxd is hardly worth mentioning. trakt is the one ive used for the longest time and it just fucking sucks. why is the history tab and ratings tab and progress tab and collections tab different tabs?? these could all be put into one. if i want to see the shit i've rated i have to go to ratings and i can go to history if i want to see everything and then i can't clearly see ratings. the site is done in such an obtuse way. you need to pay to use dark mode. you can only use a 10 point scale. it SUCKS. anilist brought anime tracking into the modern era compared to myanimelist (not happy with how the last actual feature release was in 2021 though, their roadmap is a joke). backloggd made game tracking actually good compared to backloggery. we need something like this for non-anime stuff. hell if it included anime too that'd be perfect. i see no reason why anime and non-anime needs to be separated. someone PLEASE MAKE IT AAAAAAAAAAAAAA

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@SweetAmelia I've been keeping a close eye on the fedi project space and I recently learned about NeoDB: https://github.com/neodb-social/neodb Apparently it's a federated media tracker where you can have a profile with your own entries and be followed from other fedi platforms. I've yet to try it out, but if it's any good I might eventually migrate my own anime list to it. The website makes it look remarkably mature.

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@SweetAmelia None that I've seen. I hope they have a full UI translation into English at any rate.

treyhunner, to python
@treyhunner@mastodon.social avatar

One of these functions prints and the other returns, but they seem like they do the same thing.

Read more 👉 https://trey.io/ibXciv

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@treyhunner I've been meaning to ask you Trey (I hope it's okay to go off-topic), do you have anything written down about how the Python interpreter behind the Python Morsels pastebin works?

I recently used Pyodide to create a browser demo for one of my old Python projects: https://fietkau.software/timberbot

It was pretty simple to put together, but it suffers from chonky loading and initialization times that I don't see on Python Morsels. Are you using a different engine, or did you create one yourself?

Edent, to random
@Edent@mastodon.social avatar

🆕 blog! “Lazy way to cause SHA-256 collisions for lazy evaluators”

Humans are lazy. That's why we have computers; to do the boring work for us. I recently downloaded a file. The website said the file should have a SHA-256 hash of: ca978112ca1bbdcafac231b39a23dc4da786eff8147c4e72b9807785afee48bb So I ran sha256 filename on my machine. And then lazily compared the h…

👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/04/lazy-way-to-cause-sha-256-collisions-for-lazy-evaluators/
⸻
#cryptography

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@Edent There's a topic in the HCI & security field overlap about hash visualization, saying that software may want to offer deterministic visualizations of hashes so people can perceive and compare them more holistically. The quintessential work is Perrig & Song (1999): https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~adrian/projects/validation/validation.pdf

A few years ago I got together with a colleague to survey the landscape and propose our own algorithm: :fietkau_science: https://fietkau.science/hash_visualization_password_validation See slide 8 for more prior work examples.

Fun stuff! 😀

atomicpoet, to fediversenews
@atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org avatar

A few influencers, active both on the “regular” Fediverse and Threads, have noted that having a Threads account hasn’t given them a bigger audience even though Threads has a bigger userbase than (for example) Mastodon.

Quite the opposite. There’s more visibility here. People are more likely to interact with your posts. It’s easier to gain followers as well.

None of this surprises me. There’s always been two types of people who build content for social media: those who engage with people, and those who game algorithms.

@fediversenews

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@damon That's super cool that you're working on something on that topic, Damon!

Have I ever shown you this blog post by @maya? https://maya.land/responses/2022/11/28/we-live-in-a-society.html It's been hugely influential on my thinking regarding this matter, and it does a great job highlighting consequences of algorithms and algorithm choice that aren't often talked about. Would recommend taking these thoughts into account as you clarify your own.

@atomicpoet

davew, to random
@davew@mastodon.social avatar

Understanding AP and RSS

I've been trying to figure out what ActivityPub does that RSS doesn't.

Off the top of my head, it's not the ability to syndicate, RSS already does that. I can follow anyone on any server.

I think it's the timeline? And the ability to delete posts. Keeping all that in sync is a lot of work, and presumably a lot of traffic?

Also replies. If I reply to a post when viewing it on another server, the reply should show up under any other view of that post.

What else??

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@davew People mentioned social interactions, which are core in AP. I've seen comment submission facilites grafted onto RSS but it didn't seem like that ever caught on much.

Then there's the push-based model, which allows AP to be fast. When a friend posts on social media, I want to see it in seconds, not after 15 minutes or whatever RSS pull interval.

But yeah, "kinda like RSS" is a useful shorthand for explaining AP, similar to "kinda like email" but with a different venn overlap.

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@davew Oh neat! I hadn't seen that. 🙂 Yeah, at that point you have something very close to ActivityPub.

From a first glance, one difference seems to be that with AP your follower list is based on individual accounts and not servers/aggregators. Multiple accounts can have shared inboxes to reduce redundant traffic, but they're not mandatory. So arguably AP gives you more knowledge of who your followers are. Now, whether that's on the whole a good thing? 🤷

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@davew What I'm getting at is, as I understand rssCloud (like I said, very cursory research just earlier), when someone follows you you get an IP address or a hostname. Which can be a server somewhere (potentially giving multiple people access to the feed) or the person's home or their VPN or whatever.

With ActivityPub, when someone follows you, you get their account. Which of course doesn't need to correspond to an established identity, but it still seems like a qualitative difference.

Edent, to github
@Edent@mastodon.social avatar

Oh, nifty! now allows you to connect your . When did that happen?

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@Edent It's rather recent: https://scicomm.xyz/

julian, to typescript
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

What am I doing this weekend? Learning , , and @hongminhee's all at the same time, for a project which I'm hoping will be used by many people.

What could possibly go wrong? 💪

deadsuperhero, to random
@deadsuperhero@social.wedistribute.org avatar

I wonder how hard it would be to write a simple boost bot? 🤔

You'd basically just need an API token for your user, and a way to target a specific account you're following. Upon seeing a new status from that account, your own account would boost it.

Seems simple enough?

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@deadsuperhero @thisismissem There is the Web Push API, right? https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/push/

But I would probably poll every few minutes instead if it isn't time-sensitive stuff, that approach has a better chance of being simple. 😄

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@thisismissem @deadsuperhero Right, but you can have the bot account follow the original account and enable post notifications to finagle that.

taylormccue, (edited ) to random

I'm making a game and I'd like what advice for resolution is best.

Please help as my last game was in 144p.

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@taylormccue I use 2160p these days, but 1080p is much more common as far as I know and scales neatly to it. 🙂

Are we talking pixel art? Scaling that between 1080p and 720p can basically not be done well as I understand it, but the "golden path" would be to have all the important bits inside a 720p canvas and then extend the margins with content (or a decorative border, see Undertale console ports) to 1080p. Integer multiples of those two resolutions should then cover most current displays.

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@taylormccue Thank you, I appreciate that and I appreciate you! 😀

In case it helps, Mark Brown (GMTK) recently published a video where he talks about this topic for his game. Sadly his conclusion is to abandon the pixel art style, but the thoughts he expresses on the way are good for visualizing what I said about canvas size and scalability: https://youtu.be/UlzgvZqig40?t=74 (It's the part from 1:14 to 4:12.) He feels that the border/margin suggestion doesn't work for his game, but I like it the most.

jjb, to mastodon
@jjb@mastodon.social avatar

I'm implementing (slowly) a personal Mastodon/ActivityPub server. Would someone who has done that before please tell me what is wrong with:

https://jeremy.org/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:placeholder@jeremy.org
and
https://jeremy.org/@placeholder

...that lookups from other sites don't seem to produce the expected results?

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@mariusor @jjb You sure? Mastodon has the acct: prefix in there. https://metalhead.club/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:mariusor@metalhead.club

Furthermore, https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7033#section-4.4.1 says the subject should be a URI, so it seems to me that having the scheme in there is correct.

devnull, (edited ) to fediverse
@devnull@crag.social avatar

Can an instance operator running a derivative of Misskey (Sharkey, firefish, or maybe even Misskey itself) get in touch with me? I can't seem to federate with that entire pie of the fediverse... 401 Unauthorized 😬

Alternateively, if you've run into this type of issue before, any tips? Heh.

✅ Resolved! — https://crag.social/@devnull/112135536070616187

#fediadmin #activitypub

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@devnull They can be a bit picky. I remember fixing an interop issue by removing the space after the commas in my HTTP signature header. I.e. before:

keyId="...", algorithm="rsa-sha256", headers=...

After:

keyId="...",algorithm="rsa-sha256",headers=...

I don't remember with 100% certainty whether it was Misskey that needed this.

FWIW, the grapevine tells me that the upstream Misskey team can be difficult to reach, but I've experienced the Iceshrimp team to be very friendly and helpful.

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@devnull Nice, Julian fist bump! 👊 Yeah, the algorithm was already in the example I learned from: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/python-mastodon-server-post-with-http-signature/2757 Glad that did the trick. 🙂 Maybe one day we'll be able to move the ecosystem towards actual RFC 9421 compliance.

dansup, (edited ) to random
@dansup@mastodon.social avatar

Edit: As mentioned below, it appears to be a bug, not intentional!

Threads hiding @pixelfed mentions, not a good look Meta 🙄

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@PersistentDreamer Pixelfed is an ActivityPub-powered social platform that @dansup is developing. It's focused on photo and image sharing. It's interoperable with Mastodon, so you can follow Pixelfed users from here if you want to. https://pixelfed.org

The above screenshot documents and incident where a post on Meta's Threads was automatically marked as spam for mentioning Pixelfed. This is likely because Pixelfed is a competitor to Instagram and Meta is petty.

axbom, to random
@axbom@axbom.me avatar

Doing a session tomorrow on Postmortem Design - actually designing to protect the legacy of users after they pass away.

I'm prepping my slides and I'm already crying. So much data getting lost and so hard for families to access it.

I'm using my grandma's attic as a backdrop. I used to love heading up there and discovering old photos, letters, stamps, coins and memorabilia each with its own story.

Now who owns everyone's attic… do our digital legacies matter and if so, who should own it and access it…

julian,
@julian@fietkau.social avatar

@axbom Been there with my dad, I handled the "digital estate" for mom after he died. He had no online presence to speak of, so it was mostly about taking over the email inbox and using that to cancel subscriptions, delete accounts, etc. Not every site was accommodating and it took a year of piece by piece labor.

I'm curious what designers can do better. I know of Facebook's and Google's systems to inherit data, but having to have a pre-existing account on every service is clearly not practical.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • anitta
  • mdbf
  • magazineikmin
  • Durango
  • Youngstown
  • vwfavf
  • slotface
  • ngwrru68w68
  • khanakhh
  • rosin
  • kavyap
  • thenastyranch
  • PowerRangers
  • DreamBathrooms
  • Leos
  • ethstaker
  • hgfsjryuu7
  • osvaldo12
  • cubers
  • GTA5RPClips
  • modclub
  • InstantRegret
  • everett
  • tacticalgear
  • normalnudes
  • tester
  • cisconetworking
  • provamag3
  • All magazines
    •