Darius Kazemi

I'm the administrator of this server. https://tinysubversions.com is where most of my stuff lives. I make Hometown along with a bunch of other fediverse software (see pinned posts). I'm trying to fix the internet, and some people say I'm at least kind of succeeding. Based in Portland, Oregon, USA. he/him

Website: https://tinysubversions.com
Podcast 1: https://explainjojo.com
Podcast 2: https://toomuchnotenough.site

Public Key

npub1fd2lu838dkm58sm2gh5an5acrwd7gz2eyl059nt8fu4jk798k7qqlrf2f9

NIP-05 Address

darius_at_friend.camp@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsyk407rcnkmd6rcd4yt6we6wuphxlyp9vj0h6ze4n572et0znm0qqpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dse3mvxh

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1fd2lu838dkm58sm2gh5an5acrwd7gz2eyl059nt8fu4jk798k7qqlrf2f9

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Last Notes

2026-07-31 15:41:51 UTC

Twenty years ago we had Johnny Cash, Steve Ass, and Bob Grass. Now we've got no cash, ass, or grass -- nobody rides for free!

2026-04-15 02:31:16 UTC

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oh hey belated congrats

2026-02-28 19:36:08 UTC

I'm at a loss for words but here are some from Mayor Mamdani that will suffice for now:
"Today’s military strikes on Iran — carried out by the United States and Israel — mark a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression. Bombing cities. Killing civilians. Opening a new theater of war.
Americans do not want this. They do not want another war in pursuit of regime change. They want relief from the affordability crisis. They want peace."
https://nitter.net/NYCMayor/status/2027799160574120418

2026-02-24 22:29:14 UTC

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yeah, I'm running a very old Ubuntu that doesn't support postgres 14 and it's been a nightmare to upgrade all the dependenices. but my fault for going (checks calendar) 8 years without anything but the bare security updates

2026-02-24 21:21:40 UTC

In the 24 hours since our last Hometown release, Mastodon released version 4.5.7, so we have provided a quick release to sync with 4.5.7:
https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/releases/tag/v4.5.7%2Bhometown-1.2.0
#Hometown #HometownAdmin

2026-02-23 22:08:57 UTC

Hometown 1.2.0 is now available! It brings Hometown up to date with Mastodon 4.5.6, including all major features introduced in Mastodon 4.3, 4.4 and 4.5.
A million thanks to @npub1eh5…yenk who led the charge on this release.
https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/releases/tag/v4.5.6%2Bhometown-1.2.0
#Hometown #HometownAdmin

2026-02-19 16:55:19 UTC

Feels like I constantly complain about this but man do I hate 2026-era web development stacks!!!
I often find myself looking at a project website that's serving less than a dozen static documents to the end user... why am I looking at Vite and a build process at all???
It's like looking at a McDonald's franchise supply chain (warehouses, trucks, repeatability) and saying, "Yes, that is the appropriate setup for my home kitchen, just in case I one day need to scale it to a worldwide franchise."

2026-01-08 17:26:25 UTC

Me: Fine. I'll sign up to use a passkey to log in to this particular service. So many people tell me passkeys are the obvious thing to do now. Maybe the experience has gotten better in the last few years since I tried. [Signs up on desktop with 1password]
Service, a week later, on their mobile website: Please sign in with your passkey.
Me: [presses button]
Service: We couldn't find a passkey in your mobile web browser.
Me: Uhhh it's in my 1password app vault?
Service: lol what's that

2026-01-06 18:33:50 UTC

My favorite thing on Bluesky is a labeler made by the Social Technologies Lab at Cornell Tech.
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:oubsyca6hhgqhmbbk27lvs7c
It surfaces metadata on posts. Most useful to me is "This person posted more than 50 times yesterday."
It recasts a post like the one pictured. It reminds me to look at their profile and figure out if they are a real person, and are they terminally online, or engagement farming, or what. Then I might block/mute because I don't need people like that in my lifeworld.
https://friend.camp/system/media_attachments/files/115/849/562/218/488/353/original/2a4205f6ba52cc54.png

2025-12-29 17:36:27 UTC

> delphitools is a collection of small, focused utilities that respect your privacy and work entirely in your browser. No data leaves your machine, no accounts required, no tracking. Just tools that do what they say.
https://tools.rmv.fyi/

2025-12-26 22:15:25 UTC

Seeking advice. I have many services that require cert renewal for HTTPS. My usual workflow for nginx is:
1) set up a cron job to call certbot monthly (strictly more often than needed for a 90 day cert but I'm lazy)
2) 91 days later, re-cert fails, realize that there was a bug in my script, fix it
3) 91 days later, re-cert fails, realize there was a bug in my script, fix it
4) at this point it probably now works forever
Is there a good way to test things properly so I skip steps 2 and 3??

2025-12-11 03:09:38 UTC

You discover a file on your hard drive called "eggn.ogg". You play it. What does it sound like?

2025-12-09 21:34:06 UTC

I think I'm addicted to assembling uniforms for nuns... it's habit forming

2025-12-06 18:06:24 UTC

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Good thing there's no incentive for anyone to collude and to game this system 😇
Not even Mr. Beast himself can control what he says in his next video. He is effectively a weather pattern

2025-12-06 17:55:51 UTC

I peek at Meta's Threads every now and then. Just saw an ad for an app that lets me bet on things like "what will Mr. Beast say in his next video?" though completely unclear what yes/no means in this context.
I looked it up and this is being considered A Very Serious Company by other very serious companies.
It's just lightly regulated betting, but they call it "direct investment hedging against unpredictable macroeconomic events". I hate our reality
https://www.businessinsider.com/kalshi-cnbc-deal-cnn-data-integration-partnership-2025-12
https://friend.camp/system/media_attachments/files/115/673/871/724/574/412/original/56c068e1178cacd0.png

2025-11-20 18:38:20 UTC

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same!! I was so excited to meet a merveilles person! Uh... Merveilleseur?

2025-11-01 15:49:22 UTC

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someone linked me to this article
https://www.404media.co/we-dont-want-your-password-3/
And like. I get it. It is probably better for most users. It's just annoying that I have meticulously optimized one part of my internet life (passwords) and then some sites simply say no and force me into the least optimized part of my internet life (my email, which is a garbage fire of thousands of unread messages and generalized anxiety).
Now that I think of it, my real complaint here might be "email sucks"

2025-10-31 19:20:19 UTC

Websites that let me log in ONLY via email recovery feel like they are personally punishing me as a password manager user... like, come on, I have an awesome, one click, client side way to recall a long unique password for your website but sure, allow me to personally increase your email service bills I guess
In return I get One More Email To Deal With. Thanks pal

2025-10-23 23:04:19 UTC

Here I am talking a bit about the ActivityPub Fuzzer and how it's intended to help improve interoperability on the Fediverse.
https://youtu.be/EGo7ZaBG-4s

2025-10-15 17:50:40 UTC

browser extension to replace ✨ with 💩

2025-10-13 23:18:56 UTC

I remember a while back someone on fedi posted a little thing they built that was a personal url shortener in a single HTML page. If I remember correctly they just loaded in an array of ids and destinations and then you'd point someone to mysite.example/short?id=123 and the page would just redirect via window.location... something like that. Which one of you clever people was this?
I reimplemented it this morning but I wanna see/credit the original

2025-10-01 18:02:59 UTC

Extremely pleased to announce the release of the ActivityPub Fuzzer! This is a tool that runs in a local development environment and (partially) emulates known ActivityPub software. It can even create a fake local "public fire hose" shaped like what you might see if you hooked your in-development software up to the real Fediverse.
I built this because I wanted ways to test in-progress fedi software for compatibility without actually making it live and breaking things.
https://asml.cyber.harvard.edu/2025/10/01/introducing-the-asml-activitypub-fuzzer-improving-testing-in-the-fediverse/

2025-09-25 23:01:28 UTC

I've learned recently that there are adults who do not know that 1mL of water weighs 1g. If you didn't before, now you know.

2025-09-25 16:57:16 UTC

I'm sure other people have noted this but at some point we went from talking about "social network sites" to talking about "social media sites".
At first, the network was the thing that mattered. Then, the media was the thing that mattered.
A quick Google Trends query shows the shift might have happened around 2012:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%22social%20network%20site%22,%22social%20media%20site%22&hl=en

2025-09-18 15:11:30 UTC

if you are intolerant of people who are tolerant of people who tolerate intolerance, that's the paradox of the paradox of intolerance of tolerance of intolerance

2025-08-30 22:22:35 UTC

Weird that I can't think of this off the top of my head but... who on the fedi is based in the PNW and is an implementer of / contributor to Fediverse software?
(small projects fine! tinkerers too! technical role or not! just trying to consider who I might be able to wrangle together to talk about stuff because I feel professionally isolated sometimes)

2025-08-22 19:56:47 UTC

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that is in fact cheaper than I expected!

2025-08-22 19:50:54 UTC

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Yes! I was a huge user of this when it first came out, but I'm thinking I want a continuous piece of paper. Could be useful for proofs though!

2025-08-22 19:36:08 UTC

I would like to do some cheap large format (like poster size, not street sign size) printing of poems I like, to put up in my home. Anyone have any hints, tips, and tricks along those lines? Local print shops are great but too expensive for me at the moment for what would just be "text in a pleasing font on a piece of paper, but bigger"

2025-08-21 20:00:00 UTC

I had to stop everything I was doing today to make this.
https://friend.camp/system/media_attachments/files/115/068/498/968/809/563/original/ad4f65ee27b188a8.png
https://friend.camp/system/media_attachments/files/115/068/499/669/752/370/original/0effe0122202d274.png
https://friend.camp/system/media_attachments/files/115/068/500/535/121/085/original/a2f0feb6bda0caf8.png

2025-08-06 18:40:53 UTC

I made this neat little e-ink display for my kitchen with bus arrival times and hourly weather. It uses an ESP32 microcontroller device and talks to Home Assistant.
More details here:
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/use-esphome-with-e-ink-displays-to-blend-in-with-your-home-decor/435428/489?u=dariusk
I followed the guide at the top of that thread but made a bunch of changes and posted some annotated code.
https://friend.camp/system/media_attachments/files/114/983/258/326/568/730/original/7e0fac4d008950b5.png

2025-07-21 16:16:17 UTC

"35% of the US stock market is held up by five or six companies buying GPUs."
Ed Zitron, The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/

2025-07-18 18:45:35 UTC

So ARPANET had a famous "Flag Day" where they switched over to TCP/IP in 1983; it required a simultaneous switchover of all host machines to the new protocol. And I know that "flag day" has since referred to big changes like that in networked systems. I assumed the name referred to some bitwise flags set in packet headers. Turns out, the term comes from Multics, when similar coordination was required for an encoding change. It happened on actual US Flag Day 1966!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_day_(computing)

2025-06-11 13:47:31 UTC

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This piece in particular:
> It gets most things right, but it consistently makes mistakes in the places that you are least likely to notice. In places where a person wouldn’t make a mistake. Your brain keeps trying to develop a theory of mind to predict its behavior but there’s no mind there, so it always behaves infuriatingly randomly.
Let me repeat:
> Your brain keeps trying to develop a theory of mind to predict its behavior but there’s no mind there
Chew on that

2025-06-11 13:45:20 UTC

I'm a week late to it but @npub16y8…d455 pretty much sums up my genAI coding feelings here. In particular the piece on aesthetics (probably not the kind of aesthetics you are imagining as you read this!) is going to bounce around in my head for a while.
https://blog.glyph.im/2025/06/i-think-im-done-thinking-about-genai-for-now.html

2025-05-09 12:40:31 UTC

If you spend enough time in the "social media for public good" space, you'll realize there is a subset of people who essentially want to build what I call "Valhalla but for debate club members".
Their vision of a perfect social media experience is endless debate about big important ideas where people constantly get to show off how much more rational and civil they are than each other. The debate never ends. If you are obliterated in the public sphere you are reanimated. It's all in good fun.

2025-04-28 15:10:29 UTC

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a blog is a slet delivered over rss; a slet is a blog delivered over email
....ok my actual hypothesis though: each has their own unique (and changing) rhetorical formula. A newsletter, even when delivered by RSS, is simply written differently than a blog. It's addressed to a different audience and has a different ethos (perhaps one of expertise vs the blog's willful amateurism)

2025-04-28 15:02:08 UTC

Just as "web log" became the even more awkward "blog", I suggest we change "newsletter" into "slet"
Then we can talk about the sletosphere, have startups like sletspot and sletlines, etc. It'll be terrible, as nature intended

2025-04-02 17:14:45 UTC

Klan Cookout (1983), an Apple II game where you play a person with a flamethrower trying to burn as many KKK members as possible
https://www.mobygames.com/game/138166/klan-cookout/

2025-04-01 17:59:50 UTC

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High Level Amnesia is so real. It exists in all fields of knowledge. It annoys me, and scares me if I think about it deeply.
I think the specific thing you're pointing to is in part to do with how science treats its own "mistakes" -- we do learn about Lamarckian evolutionary theory but that's because it's a nice (and oversimplified) story about Good Science beating Bad Science. When the narrative is "we believed something wrong and now we don't" it's not so alluring

2025-03-27 18:00:40 UTC

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Weird Medieval Guys has a great podcast where this is discussed in like.. every other episode or so.
https://play.pocketcasts.com/podcasts/b04d4d20-f3fa-013b-f523-0acc26574db2/

2025-03-26 16:56:30 UTC

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preservatives of various kinds to increase shelf stability

2025-03-24 18:46:52 UTC

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put another way: if the average user is 95% likely to land on a server that doesn't support some feature, it is not useful for me to say "Fediverse users get access to feature x", I need to say something like "users of particular implementations of Fediverse software get access to feature x"
I know it might sound like I am splitting hairs but I am very concerned with how we represent the capabilities of the fediverse to people who have never and will never know what a FEP is

2025-03-24 18:44:02 UTC

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if only a very small number of servers have a feature it is not terribly real. Especially when it comes to features regarding federation the meaningful existence of a feature is determined by interop. If say Brave browser is the sole implementer of an RFC it is not useful or meaningful for me to say that RFC feature is on the Web.
There are degrees of reality when we talk about nascent technology, these degrees matter

2025-03-24 12:06:13 UTC

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I've read the Portable Objects FEP. It seems okay and I don't have enough domain expertise to have an opinion on its specifics. There are not many implementations listed in the "implementations" section though.
I don't like the framing of "feature x is already on the Fediverse" when all that means is "more than zero software implementations support it".

2025-03-24 02:50:57 UTC

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nope! Other people are way better informed than me and there are approximately 7.6 million DID methods last I looked. did-webvh seems nice but that's not a strongly held opinion I have

2025-03-22 23:08:02 UTC

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tfw you're a proud Polish girl from Toronto (29 y/o) #justAdminThings

2025-03-16 03:49:41 UTC

POV you are Nicole, but I can call you the Fediverse Chick
#justAdminThings

2025-03-12 16:20:55 UTC

I made a little tool that lets you search the full text of all published Fediverse Enhancement Proposals.
https://fep-search.glitch.me/
It does so privately in your browser using a neat in-browser elasticsearch-type-thing called FlexSearch:
https://github.com/nextapps-de/flexsearch

2025-02-26 21:08:00 UTC

I'm a simple man: I see a petard, I hoist it

2025-02-01 14:21:29 UTC

If people at #FOSDEM social web room want to see Hometown's Article support that @npub1036…dl9x mentioned... this is it!
https://friend.camp/system/media_attachments/files/113/929/070/302/051/142/original/5e5368da4d54c6e1.mp4

2025-01-28 18:29:15 UTC

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your response is a bit of what I'm railing against here. We all agree we've made a machine that makes excellent pancakes. Where I make a sour face is the claim of empowerment through automated excellent pancakes

2025-01-28 18:28:21 UTC

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the use case you are describing is inside the very narrow band domain that I feel pretty positive about
Although I don't think knowing how to code is any more empowering than knowing how to say, verbally persuade people. The fact that it feels like magic and that verbal persuasion (as one example) doesn't is... a problem imo

2025-01-28 18:08:30 UTC

I have a very long, possibly book-length take on LLMs that has been brewing since May 2015 but basically: wow humans love to take something that works extremely well in a certain narrow domain and then bend over backwards to insist it will solve every problem in the universe. (That's a nearly banal observation but the book length part would be tracing the technological, financial, historical, and psychological incentives that make it happen.)

2025-01-20 21:46:28 UTC

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wow I've never heard of either of these authors

2025-01-18 01:48:38 UTC

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+1 to this!

2025-01-06 16:54:55 UTC

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I'd followed his work since the early days of his "pasta & vinegar" blog, I must have started around 2006 in my early 20s and was really influenced by how he approached the world

2025-01-06 16:37:52 UTC

I'm hearing that Nicolas Nova has died. This is a profound loss for the world. On a personal note, he was always so generous and kind to me. I remember he would give me enthusiastic encouragement for my various projects, particularly the ones related to tech history. As my work travel ramps up I was hoping to run into him at various conferences like in the pre-covid days. I'll miss him.
https://www.nicolasnova.net/
Memorial page: https://nicolasnova.org

2024-12-21 21:40:24 UTC

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yeah there are already some experiments doing peer to peer PDS stuff though I'm not super on top of ATProto stuff

2024-11-25 16:05:17 UTC

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I love the bear print behind you?!?

2024-11-21 20:44:06 UTC

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Video of Evan's disruption of anti trans fascist Nancy Mace here! Now without TikTok link
https://friend.camp/system/media_attachments/files/113/522/890/507/829/616/original/45861982c462976d.mp4

2024-11-21 20:27:19 UTC

US House Rep Nancy Mace, a noted anti trans legislator, was speaking on a panel at the Project Liberty Summit. She was disrupted by @npub1u3y…38tr .
I was walking out of the room when it happened. It was awesome. Evan is doing okay.
https://www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2024-11-21-transgender-digital-rights-activist-confronts-hate-monger-rep-nancy-mace-at-internet-summit/
Edited to add: non TikTok version of video in my reply to this post

2024-11-21 14:21:08 UTC

Starbucks has proven to me this morning that if you use burnt coffee beans it is in fact possible to burn cold brew

2024-10-29 02:10:57 UTC

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it's to identify problems as a first step prior to further investigation. But I need to know what software to investigate in the first place. I've already done a bunch of investigation myself that has led me to learning about lots of new to me projects and sleuthing in their federation source code

2024-10-29 00:28:30 UTC

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no, it's just to see what kind of data formats live activitypub servers use. Definitely no posting to servers here

2024-10-28 17:22:57 UTC

Hi Fediverse denizens. I've been working on a project I hope will help Fediverse devs make software that federates across ALL services, not just Mastodon-plus-a-few-others.
It's called the Fediverse Schema Observatory and before launching it, I am opening up a public comment period re: safety and privacy.
This post lays out what the software does, what data it records, and why I think it's safe to deploy:
https://asml.cyber.harvard.edu/fediverseobservatory/
Please give feedback here or at the email in the post!

2024-10-27 18:20:19 UTC

Me at age 13 in 1996: wow this Clerks movie is funny. I love the star wars monologue
Evil genie: so what I'm hearing is you wish for variants of that monologue to become the dominant form of mainstream cultural commentary
Me: uhhhhhhhhhh

2024-09-26 18:28:25 UTC

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Content was a mistake, management was a mistake, and systems were a mistake, so I don't really see a way forward here!

2024-09-14 14:27:31 UTC

Excited to announce that I will be at #fediforum today speed demo-ing my latest project: an ActivityPub data observatory!
This observatory does not collect any user data or metadata. Instead I am looking at the *shape* (aka schema) of data being sent around the fediverse. This will let software devs ask questions like "How is a Mastodon 4.2.0 image post formatted differently from a Misskey 2024.7.0 image post?"
And we'll get real answers based on data rather than on poor documentation.

2024-09-13 17:55:48 UTC

A friend is raising money to help a Black trans person manage their chronic illness. I know they'd really appreciate any donations:
https://gofund.me/86e165a3

2024-08-30 17:39:56 UTC

On Sep 12 the Applied Social Media Lab (where I work) is hosting “Beyond Discourse Dumpster Fires: Strategies and Tools for Better Online Civil Space" to explore new ideas for healthier and more satisfying online communication.
I'm particularly excited to hear from @npub1u2k…nxuj!
RSVP here, online via Zoom or (limited) in-person tickets in Cambridge MA: https://brk.mn/discourse
There will also be a recording available afterwards, so those who do not use Zoom can still watch!

2024-08-25 17:04:53 UTC

For sale: clown shoes. Honk honk.

2024-08-22 16:44:47 UTC

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Yeah. I read a lot about her early career. I see Harris as someone who was once willing to fight police, got kneecapped (as you put it) by more powerful people, and I suspect has unfortunately left the experience believing that being broadly pro-cop is a compromise she's going to have to make to remain effective in other areas

2024-08-20 23:46:27 UTC

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I will be attending, though only on Saturday (I have daylong work meetings the other days)

2024-08-20 16:53:39 UTC

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I want to draw special attention to our Quick-Start Guide For Fediverse Governance Decisions. It is a collection of current best practices for server governance we found during our interview process. If you're an admin/mod, or thinking of becoming one, give it a read!
https://fediverse-governance.github.io/images/quick-start.pdf (PDF)
Also feel free to forward to any admins or mods in your life :AngelDevil:

2024-08-20 15:48:22 UTC

Since January, @npub1sac…kcpe and I have been researching governance on Mastodon and Hometown servers of about 80-2000 people. That research is now available!!!
Blog post: https://write.as/fediversalist-papers/releasing-our-findings
Paper: https://fediverse-governance.github.io/
Special thanks to the participants we interviewed, you all were so great.

2024-08-11 17:35:26 UTC

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my assumption is I don't have a moral right to rehost other people's content I've quoted so I just render it as a URL

2024-08-11 16:06:08 UTC

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mine is designed to only show posts from the originating user though, so multiple participants isn't something it's designed to handle

2024-06-28 18:25:33 UTC

I'm sure many of you have seen the Threads list of servers they have defederated from.
https://www.threads.net/moderated_servers
I think it's really interesting that "No publicly accessible feed" is a criterion for defederation. It's definitely a cover-your-ass type move: if they can't scan your public feed then they can't really know who you are so they might as well preemptively defederate.
This, and other behavior from Threads, leads me to believe that they are about as scared of the fedi as we are of them.

2024-06-25 19:40:43 UTC

"Everyone is talking about Retrieval Augmented Generation, but most companies don't actually have any internal documentation worth retrieving. Fix. Your. Shit."
God this is good
https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/

2024-05-09 17:45:44 UTC

I just witnessed some software transcribe "Fediverse" as "Feddy bears" which.. do I need to start a new server??

2019-12-30 20:39:21 UTC

I've been building a Facebook Events style event organizing system for the Fediverse. It's based on the simple, open source, privacy-respecting event organizing tool https://gath.io
The attached video is a work-in-progress preview and shows compatibility with Mastodon. My hope is to get it working with lots of software, including stuff like Friendica that supports events and calendars.
Check out more at my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/organizing-on-32729070
https://friend.camp/system/media_attachments/files/000/859/155/original/78bf151e508df716.mp4