32 items tagged “mastodon”
2024
Whatever you think of capitalism, the evidence is overwhelming: Social networks with a single proprietor have trouble with long-term survival, and those do survive have trouble with user-experience quality: see Enshittification.
The evidence is also perfectly clear that it doesn’t have to be this way. The original social network, email, is now into its sixth decade of vigorous life. It ain’t perfect but it is essential, and not in any serious danger.
The single crucial difference between email and all those other networks — maybe the only significant difference — is that nobody owns or controls it.
— Tim Bray, Why Not Bluesky
How decentralized is Bluesky really? (via) Lots of technical depth in this comparison of the Bluesky (ATProto) and Fediverse/Mastodon/ActivityPub approach to decentralization, from ActivityPub spec author Christine Lemmer-Webber.
One key theme: many of the features of Bluesky that aren't present in the rest of the Fediverse are the result of centralization: Bluesky follows a "shared heap" architecture where participating nodes are expected to maintain a full copy of the entire network - more than 5TB of data already. ActivityPub instead uses a "message passing" architecture where only a subset of the overall network data - messages from accounts followed by that node's users - are imported into the node.
This enables features like comprehensive search and the ability to browse all messages in a conversation even if some come from accounts that are not followed by any of the current node's users (a problem I've faced in the past).
This is also part of the "credible exit" mechanism where users can theoretically switch to a different host while keeping all of their existing content - though that also takes advantage of content addressed storage, a feature that could be added to ActivityPub.
Also of note: direct messages on Bluesky are currently entirely dependent on the single central node run by Bluesky themselves, and are not end-to-end encrypted. Furthermore, signing keys that are used by ATProto are currently held custodially by Bluesky on behalf of their users.
Bluesky WebSocket Firehose. Very quick (10 seconds of Claude hacking) prototype of a web page that attaches to the public Bluesky WebSocket firehose and displays the results directly in your browser.
Here's the code - there's very little to it, it's basically opening a connection to wss://jetstream2.us-east.bsky.network/subscribe?wantedCollections=app.bsky.feed.post and logging out the results to a <textarea readonly> element.
Bluesky's Jetstream isn't their main atproto firehose - that's a more complicated protocol involving CBOR data and CAR files. Jetstream is a new Go proxy (source code here) that provides a subset of that firehose over WebSocket.
Jetstream was built by Bluesky developer Jaz, initially as a side-project, in response to the surge of traffic they received back in September when Brazil banned Twitter. See Jetstream: Shrinking the AT Proto Firehose by >99% for their description of the project when it first launched.
The API scene growing around Bluesky is really exciting right now. Twitter's API is so expensive it may as well not exist, and Mastodon's community have pushed back against many potential uses of the Mastodon API as incompatible with that community's value system.
Hacking on Bluesky feels reminiscent of the massive diversity of innovation we saw around Twitter back in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
Here's a much more fun Bluesky demo by Theo Sanderson: firehose3d.theo.io (source code here) which displays the firehose from that same WebSocket endpoint in the style of a Windows XP screensaver.
Mastodon discussion about sandboxing SVG data. I asked this on Mastodon and got some really useful replies:
How hard is it to process untrusted SVG data to strip out any potentially harmful tags or attributes (like stuff that might execute JavaScript)?
The winner for me turned out to be the humble <img src=""> tag. SVG images that are rendered in an image have all dynamic functionality - including embedded JavaScript - disabled by default, and that's something that's directly included in the spec:
2.2.6. Secure static mode
This processing mode is intended for circumstances where an SVG document is to be used as a non-animated image that is not allowed to resolve external references, and which is not intended to be used as an interactive document. This mode might be used where image support has traditionally been limited to non-animated raster images (such as JPEG and PNG.)
[...]
'image' references
An SVG embedded within an 'image' element must be processed in secure animated mode if the embedding document supports declarative animation, or in secure static mode otherwise.
The same processing modes are expected to be used for other cases where SVG is used in place of a raster image, such as an HTML 'img' element or in any CSS property that takes an
data type. This is consistent with HTML's requirement that image sources must reference "a non-interactive, optionally animated, image resource that is neither paged nor scripted" [HTML]
This also works for SVG data that's presented in a <img src="data:image/svg+xml;base64,... attribute. I had Claude help spin me up this interactive demo:
Build me an artifact - just HTML, no JavaScript - which demonstrates embedding some SVG files using img src= base64 URIs
I want three SVGs - one of the sun, one of a pelican and one that includes some tricky javascript things which I hope the img src= tag will ignore
If you right click and "open in a new tab" on the JavaScript-embedding SVG that script will execute, showing an alert. You can click the image to see another alert showing location.href and document.cookie which should confirm that the base64 image is not treated as having the same origin as the page itself.
uv under discussion on Mastodon. Jacob Kaplan-Moss kicked off this fascinating conversation about uv on Mastodon recently. It's worth reading the whole thing, which includes input from a whole range of influential Python community members such as Jeff Triplett, Glyph Lefkowitz, Russell Keith-Magee, Seth Michael Larson, Hynek Schlawack, James Bennett and others. (Mastodon is a pretty great place for keeping up with the Python community these days.)
The key theme of the conversation is that, while uv represents a huge set of potential improvements to the Python ecosystem, it comes with additional risks due its attachment to a VC-backed company - and its reliance on Rust rather than Python.
Here are a few comments that stood out to me.
As enthusiastic as I am about the direction uv is going, I haven't adopted them anywhere - because I want very much to understand Astral’s intended business model before I hook my wagon to their tools. It's definitely not clear to me how they're going to stay liquid once the VC money runs out. They could get me onboard in a hot second if they published a "This is what we're planning to charge for" blog post.
As much as I hate VC, [...] FOSS projects flame out all the time too. If Frost loses interest, there’s no PDM anymore. Same for Ofek and Hatch(ling).
I fully expect Astral to flame out and us having to fork/take over—it’s the circle of FOSS. To me uv looks like a genius sting to trick VCs into paying to fix packaging. We’ll be better off either way.
Even in the best case, Rust is more expensive and difficult to maintain, not to mention "non-native" to the average customer here. [...] And the difficulty with VC money here is that it can burn out all the other projects in the ecosystem simultaneously, creating a risk of monoculture, where previously, I think we can say that "monoculture" was the least of Python's packaging concerns.
I don’t think y’all quite grok what uv makes so special due to your seniority. The speed is really cool, but the reason Rust is elemental is that it’s one compiled blob that can be used to bootstrap and maintain a Python development. A blob that will never break because someone upgraded Homebrew, ran pip install or any other creative way people found to fuck up their installations. Python has shown to be a terrible tech to maintain Python.
Just dropping in here to say that corporate capture of the Python ecosystem is the #1 keeps-me-up-at-night subject in my community work, so I watch Astral with interest, even if I'm not yet too worried.
I'm reminded of this note from Armin Ronacher, who created Rye and later donated it to uv maintainers Astral:
However having seen the code and what uv is doing, even in the worst possible future this is a very forkable and maintainable thing. I believe that even in case Astral shuts down or were to do something incredibly dodgy licensing wise, the community would be better off than before uv existed.
I'm currently inclined to agree with Armin and Hynek: while the risk of corporate capture for a crucial aspect of the Python packaging and onboarding ecosystem is a legitimate concern, the amount of progress that has been made here in a relatively short time combined with the open license and quality of the underlying code keeps me optimistic that uv will be a net positive for Python overall.
Update: uv creator Charlie Marsh joined the conversation:
I don't want to charge people money to use our tools, and I don't want to create an incentive structure whereby our open source offerings are competing with any commercial offerings (which is what you see with a lost of hosted-open-source-SaaS business models).
What I want to do is build software that vertically integrates with our open source tools, and sell that software to companies that are already using Ruff, uv, etc. Alternatives to things that companies already pay for today.
An example of what this might look like (we may not do this, but it's helpful to have a concrete example of the strategy) would be something like an enterprise-focused private package registry. A lot of big companies use uv. We spend time talking to them. They all spend money on private package registries, and have issues with them. We could build a private registry that integrates well with uv, and sell it to those companies. [...]
But the core of what I want to do is this: build great tools, hopefully people like them, hopefully they grow, hopefully companies adopt them; then sell software to those companies that represents the natural next thing they need when building with Python. Hopefully we can build something better than the alternatives by playing well with our OSS, and hopefully we are the natural choice if they're already using our OSS.
Today’s research challenge: why is August 1st “World Wide Web Day”? Here's a fun mystery. A bunch of publications will tell you that today, August 1st, is "World Wide Web Day"... but where did that idea come from?
It's not an official day marked by any national or international organization. It's not celebrated by CERN or the W3C.
The date August 1st doesn't appear to hold any specific significance in the history of the web. The first website was launched on August 6th 1991.
I posed the following three questions this morning on Mastodon:
- Who first decided that August 1st should be "World Wide Web Day"?
- Why did they pick that date?
- When was the first World Wide Web Day celebrated?
Finding answers to these questions has proven stubbornly difficult. Searches on Google have proven futile, and illustrate the growing impact of LLM-generated slop on the web: they turn up dozens of articles celebrating the day, many from news publications playing the "write about what people might search for" game and many others that have distinctive ChatGPT vibes to them.
One early hint we've found is in the "Bylines 2010 Writer's Desk Calendar" by Snowflake Press, published in January 2009. Jessamyn West spotted that on the book's page in the Internet Archive, but it merely lists "World Wide Web Day" at the bottom of the July calendar page (clearly a printing mistake, the heading is meant to align with August 1st on the next page) without any hint as to the origin:
I found two earlier mentions from August 1st 2008 on Twitter, from @GabeMcCauley and from @iJess.
Our earliest news media reference, spotted by Hugo van Kemenade, is also from August 1st 2008: this opinion piece in the Attleboro Massachusetts Sun Chronicle, which has no byline so presumably was written by the paper's editorial board:
Today is World Wide Web Day, but who cares? We'd rather nap than surf. How about you? Better relax while you can: August presages the start of school, a new season of public meetings, worries about fuel costs, the rundown to the presidential election and local races.
So the mystery remains! Who decided that August 1st should be "World Wide Web Day", why that date and how did it spread so widely without leaving a clear origin story?
If your research skills are up to the challenge, join the challenge!
interactive-feed (via) Sam Morris maintains this project which gathers interactive, graphic and data visualization stories from various newsrooms around the world and publishes them on Twitter, Mastodon and Bluesky.
It runs automatically using GitHub Actions, and gathers data using a number of different techniques - XML feeds, custom API integrations (for the NYT, Guardian and Washington Post) and in some cases by scraping index pages on news websites using CSS selectors and cheerio.
The data it collects is archived as JSON in the data/ directory of the repository.
How do I opt into full text search on Mastodon? (via) I missed this new Mastodon feature when it was released in 4.2.0 last September: you can now opt-in to a new setting which causes all of your future posts to be marked as allowed to be included in the Elasticsearch index provided by Mastodon instances that enable search.
It only applies to future posts because it works by adding an "indexable" flag to those posts, which can then be obeyed by other Mastodon instances that the post is syndicated to.
You can turn it on for your own account from the /settings/privacy page on your local instance.
The release notes for 4.2.0 also mention new search operators:
from:me,before:2022-11-01,after:2022-11-01,during:2022-11-01,language:fr,has:poll, orin:library(for searching only in posts you have written or interacted with)
Threads has entered the fediverse (via) Threads users with public profiles in certain countries can now turn on a setting which makes their posts available in the fediverse—so users of ActivityPub systems such as Mastodon can follow their accounts to subscribe to their posts.
It’s only a partial integration at the moment: Threads users can’t themselves follow accounts from other providers yet, and their notifications will show them likes but not boosts or replies: “For now, people who want to see replies on their posts on other fediverse servers will have to visit those servers directly.”
Depending on how you count, Mastodon has around 9m user accounts of which 1m are active. Threads claims more than 130m active monthly users. The Threads team are developing these features cautiously which is reassuring to see—a clumsy or thoughtless integration could cause all sorts of damage just from the sheer scale of their service.
Phanpy. Phanpy is "a minimalistic opinionated Mastodon web client" by Chee Aun.
I think that description undersells it. It's beautifully crafted and designed and has a ton of innovative ideas - they way it displays threads and replies, the "Catch-up" beta feature, it's all a really thoughtful and fresh perspective on how Mastodon can work.
I love that all Mastodon servers (including my own dedicated instance) offer a CORS-enabled JSON API which directly supports building these kinds of alternative clients.
Building a full-featured client like this one is a huge amount of work, but building a much simpler client that just displays the user's incoming timeline could be a pretty great educational project for people who are looking to deepen their front-end development skills.
ActivityPub Server in a Single PHP File (via) Terence Eden: “Any computer program can be designed to run from a single file if you architect it wrong enough!”
I love this as a clear, easy-to-follow example of the core implementation details of the ActivityPub protocol—and a reminder that often a single PHP file is all you need.
Where is all of the fediverse? (via) Neat piece of independent research by Ben Cox, who used the /api/v1/instance/peers Mastodon API endpoint to get a list of “peers” (instances his instance knows about), then used their DNS records to figure out which hosting provider they were running on.
Next Ben combined that with active users from the /nodeinfo/2.0 API on each instance to figure out the number of users on each of those major hosting providers.
Cloudflare and Fastly were heavily represented, but it turns out you can unveil the underlying IP for most instances by triggering an HTTP Signature exchange with them and logging the result.
Ben’s conclusion: Hertzner and OVH are responsible for hosting a sizable portion of the fediverse as it exists today.
2023
Basically, we’re in the process of replacing our whole social back-end with ActivityPub. I think Flipboard is going to be the first mainstream consumer service that existed in a walled garden that switches over to ActivityPub.
— Mike McCue, CEO of Flipboard
Meta/Threads Interoperating in the Fediverse Data Dialogue Meeting yesterday. Johannes Ernst reports from a recent meeting hosted by Meta aimed at bringing together staff from Meta’s Threads social media platform with representatives from the Fediverse.
Meta have previously announced an intention for Threads to join the Fediverse. It sounds like they’re being extremely thoughtful about how to go about this.
Two points that stood out for me:
“Rolling out a large node – like Threads will be – in a complex, distributed system that’s as decentralized and heterogeneous as the Fediverse is not something anybody really has done before.”
And:
“When we think of privacy risks when Meta connects to the Fediverse, we usually think of what happens to data that moves from today’s Fediverse into Meta. I didn’t realize the opposite is also quite a challenge (personal data posted to Threads, making its way into the Fediverse) for an organization as heavily monitored by regulators around the world as is Meta.”
Ice Cubes GPT-4 prompts. The Ice Cubes open source Mastodon app recently grew a very good “describe this image” feature to help people add alt text to their images. I had a dig around in their repo and it turns out they’re using GPT-4 Vision for this (and regular GPT-4 for other features), passing the image with this prompt:
“What’s in this image? Be brief, it’s for image alt description on a social network. Don’t write in the first person.”
Notes on using a single-person Mastodon server. Julia Evans experiences running a single-person Mastodon server (on masto.host—the same host I use for my own) pretty much exactly match what I’ve learned so far as well. The biggest disadvantage is the missing replies issue, where your server only shows replies to posts that come from people who you follow—so it’s easy to reply to something in a way that duplicates other replies that are invisible to you.
A new onboarding experience on Mastodon. Reassuring to see this commitment to resolving some of the biggest pain points preventing people from adopting Mastodon, especially given it has meaningful competition as a federated social network in the form of Bluesky now.
Guppe Groups. This is a really neat mechanism for helping build topic-oriented communities on Mastodon: follow @[email protected] to join (or create) a group, then that account will re-broadcast any messages from people in that group who mention the group in their message.
I found it via the histodons group. I was pondering how something like this might work this recently, so it’s great to see someone has built it already.
Jortage Communal Cloud. An interesting pattern that’s emerging in the Mastodon / Fediverse community: Jortage is “a communal project providing object storage and hosting”. Each Mastodon server needs to host copies of files—not just for their users, but files that have been imported into the instance because they were posted by other people followed by that instance’s users. Jortage lets multiple instances share the same objects, reducing costs and making things more efficient. I like the idea that multiple projects like this can co-exist, improving the efficiency of the overall network without introducing single centralized services.
Wildebeest (via) New project from Cloudflare, first quietly unveiled three weeks ago: “Wildebeest is an ActivityPub and Mastodon-compatible server”. It’s built using a flurry of Cloudflare-specific technology, including Workers, Pages and their SQLite-based D1 database.
Retiring Pinafore (via) Nolan Lawson built Pinafore, which became my default Mastodon client on both desktop and mobile over the past month. He thoughtfully explains why he’s ending his involvement in the project—and why, for trust reasons, he’s not planning on handing over the reigns to someone else. Pinafore is everything I want a good SPA to be—it loads fast, works offline and packs a whole lot of functionality into a tiny package. I’m sad to see Nolan’s involvement come to end—it’s a superb piece of software.
2022
However, with millions of new active users rushing into Mastodon, I’m forced to reevaluate that. I think I may have become too focused on what I saw of as the limits of a federated setup (putting yourself into someone else’s fiefdom), without recognizing that if it started to take off (as it has), it would become easier and easier for people to set up their own instances, allowing those who are concerned about setting up in someone else’s garden the freedom to set up their own plot of land.
Playing with ActivityPub (via) Tom MacWright describes his attempts to build the simplest possible ActivityPub publication—for a static site powered by Jekyll, where he used Netlify functions to handle incoming subscriptions (storing them in PlanetScale via their Deno API library) and wrote a script which loops through and notifies all of his subscriptions every time he publishes something new.
Understanding a Protocol. Andrew’s latest notes on how ActivityPub and Mastodon work under the hood, based on his extensive development work building out Takahē.
Scaling Mastodon: The Compendium (via) Hazel Weakly’s collection of notes on scaling Mastodon, covering PostgreSQL, Sidekiq, Redis, object storage and more.
Weeknotes: Implementing a write API, Mastodon distractions
Everything is so distracting at the moment. The ongoing Twitter catastrophe, the great migration (at least amongst most of the people I pay attention to) to Mastodon, the FTX calamity. It’s been very hard to focus!
[... 916 words]Tracking Mastodon user numbers over time with a bucket of tricks
Mastodon is definitely having a moment. User growth is skyrocketing as more and more people migrate over from Twitter.
[... 1,534 words]... it [ActivityPub] is crucially good enough. Perfect is the enemy of good, and in ActivityPub we have a protocol that has flaws but, crucially, that works, and has a standard we can all mostly agree on how to implement - and eventually, I hope, agree on how to improve.
Home invasion: Mastodon’s Eternal September begins. Hugh Rundle’s thoughtful write-up of the impact of the massive influx of new users from Twitter on the existing Mastodon community. If you’re new to Mastodon (like me) you should read this and think carefully about how best to respectfully integrate with your new online space.