One thing I have yet to see non-AP advocates bring up is the lack of the need to depend on centralized networks to use AP (at least, just AS). The e-mail model is a prime example and I think a lot of people look at it like IMAP (Internet e-mail) versus something like POP (which, tbh, just needs the IP stack).

I hope y'all are understanding that CNN is right wing cosplaying as center now. There's way more important things to report on than that man — I haven't watched it (I don't dignify my time with State propaganda anymore) and I'm hoping y'all stop investing in outlets that do not give a fuck about y'all too.

↑ byhttps://jacky.wtf • posted • archived copy • current

Being "center" is no different from being right in this country (or in the world, frankly). You can't maintain the status quo without continuing the harm the status quo causes to people. Behavior and declarations like that are what people would refer to as "covert X" (where X would be sexism, transmisogyny (and transmisandry), racism, classism - all the -ism that stems from global white supremacy and hegemonic patriarchy).

(NGL, four years ago, I would have to look up each of those words, so I'm happy to define them once globally, if that means you'd be working to help dismantle them).

I hope y'all are understanding that CNN is right wing cosplaying as center now. There's way more important things to report on than that man — I haven't watched it (I don't dignify my time with State propaganda anymore) and I'm hoping y'all stop investing in outlets that do not give a fuck about y'all too.

By 19th News: "'The world’s largest Black group chat': Behind the mission to preserve Black Twitter". The last event held by Wagatwe, Danny and I had a highlight in this article. Really eager to get to work on making this less of a project and more of a reality. https://19thnews.org/2023/05/black-twitter-archive-preserve-storytelling-community/

↑ byhttps://jacky.wtf • posted • archived copy • current

This succinctly describes how I do think of the kind of projects (and what I hope more people) I aspire to:

The people at APHOT want to change the future of what news and social media can look like. Alciné said the team is hoping the learnings from the project can be used to build a new media platform centered on what people want, instead of corporate interests. Some examples he threw out were optimizing and prioritizing moderation instead of it being an additional feature, or making it clear to users how revenue works instead of privatizing advertising.

I want an OBS plugin that — once installed and with a click — allows me to handle my Owncast stream, similar to that for Twitch. Frankly, if it works without having to point it directly to Owncast (as I use a local restreaming service to send to Twitch and Owncast), that'd be a great add.

Can I write this in Rust? Maybe Python.

This man is pushing the kind of laws used back in the 1800s and early 1900s into current day. What's not really peeped on is this is focusing on China but serves as a basis towards anyone he deems as not in the interest of the State, like Cuba and Venezuela. That can expand as more regions are rejecting America's narratives. https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/3994861-desantis-signs-bill-that-will-ban-chinese-citizens-from-buying-land-in-florida/

If I say that Black communities need to do more gatekeeping, there's going to be someone who's going to make it into a case of "self-segregation". And frankly, yeah. There's a lot of shit that people do not need to know about Black people (because it always gets turned into something that can be monetized). There are things that do need to be said, but Black liberal media avoids it a lot (because it needs to keep its sad alliance to patriarchal white supremacy — which is still blowing my mind to this very day) and well-off Black folks don't try to even publicly advocate for works that run counter to the things they claim to be against.

Hence Black capitalism.

I need some tips for making ePubs. There's material I have in PDFs but they're horrible for digital reading on the go because of the lack of reflow support, heavier due to embedded fonts (most of the time) and tbh, because it's mostly a binary format (ePubs are too but they're like an archive). I kinda put ePubs up there with SQLite databases.

Anyway, I want to turn the book of https://telekommunisten.net/the-telekommunist-manifesto/ into one that's a bit easier to read on smaller devices.

The government is getting more and more aggressive about protecting IP in the States, but does nothing w.r.t to China because they can't afford to threaten their relationship with one of their biggest manufacturing places.

Why I Retired my Webmention Server

Why I Retired My Webmention Server

After two years of building and running my own fully featured Webmention server, I think it’s time to shut it down. I’ve been thinking about doing so for a few months, and Eli’s comment has finally pushed me to take a closer look whether or not it’s worth it:



I think I’m ready to wholly remove all indieweb functionality from my website. The only Webmentions I receive at this point are spam from a Russian poker website that likes to link to 1 random blogpost of mine that has nothing to do with gambling, or gaming.



Before I get to the why, I want to take a moment to congratulate the IndieWeb community on their efforts to bring back a personal World Wide Web, a place where people come first and own their domains, a place where things are happily shared instead of stolen, a place where cool things inspire others to tinker. I’ve been a fan of the concept ever since I stumbled upon it, although the implementation of their ideas isn’t always ideal (see the IndieWeb mixed bag). My own Webmention implementation is freely available and fully implements the protocol, verified by unit tests, so knock yourself out if you decide to ignore the premise of this post.


Why Webmentions can be a drag


Maintaining anything can be a drag, honestly. But let’s focus on a generic self-hosted Webmention server instead.


1. Spam


As Eli mentioned, and quite self-explanatory. I spent days coding in guard clauses—see fighting Webmention and Pingback spam—but in the end, that doesn’t fix the underlying issue: not everyone on the internetz behaves the way they should, and in the end, whether you like it or not, you’re still either deleting spam in your inbox or spending time sifting through domain (dis)allow lists. It’s a never-ending story. My disallow list was larger than my allow list. AI-generated Wordpress sites pop up everywhere, “mentioning” your stuff to get a piece of your clicks.


I’d rather spend my Sunday doing something else.


2. Maintenance


This includes database maintenance—compression, upgrades, yaddayadda—and server maintenance—sudo systemctl restart gojamming yaddayadda.


I’d rather spend my Sunday doing something else.


3. Very few mentions are worth mentioning


That’s right; about 75% of the mentions I do receive are completely useless “like” messages. Microformats supports multiple “types” of mentions, whether it’s a comment on your article, an RSVP, or just a very social media-like “like” with an empty body. I had to write a few lines of code to filter out that stuff. If you don’t believe me, visit a random Webmention-enabled site and scroll down to the “comments” until you see a lot of Twitter-infested avatars or hearts without any text.


4. Microformats is far from perfect


A Webmention parses HTML to scan for the author, aforementioned mention type, and contents. The problem is that some people send mentions as type “like” with an empty body, and some as type “mention” with body text “like”. Then your parser fails to detect a h-author or someone placed one of those bogus classes on the wrong <div/>. Every little design mistake someone makes on their site results in a fucked up mention. You did take all those stupid cases into account while building your server, did you?


5. Most mentions come from Bridgy


Bridgy is a free service that allows you to connect social media accounts to your Webmention server (probably using another hosted service, Webmention.io), meaning for instance tweets of people mentioning or replying to your link via Twitter suddenly appear as a mention on your site. Great stuff, right? Except those people have no idea their avatar and text is being yanked. I’ve questioned these practices before and it’s clear that they’re built without thinking too hard about privacy.


As a result, I had to anonymize everything coming from Bridgy myself. Yet another unnecessary if {} clause, yay. By the way, using a hosted Webmention server kind of defeats the purpose of the whole IndieWeb “own your data” mantra!


6. Very few mentions are received at all


In the past month, I think I received exactly two mentions: both originating from jefklakscodex.com, my other blog. Me, myself, and I! I did/do receive the occasional mention, but I’m acquainted with most of these authors and we also exchange pleasantries using email, a protocol I deem much more appropriate for the occasional digital message or two.


I’ve been on the fence several times, and the /notes section was solely there to provide a mention starting point for other sites, but I’d rather just send out emails: contrary to the Webmentioned notes, they usually net interesting conversations.


7. My own server is far from perfect


When I published a blogpost and then deleted it in January, I accidentally triggered mentions to be resent for every single post on Brain Baking due to how my server uses the RSS feed and timestamps to determine which article to process. Whoops. Even though that’s fixed now, I’m sure the server is still a potential danger to both others (sorry about the spam!) and my own server (please don’t hack me).


8. It complicates my website


As mentioned, before you can enable Webmentions, you need to be “IndieWeb-complaint” by sprinkling CSS pseudotags to label content and help Microformat parsers correctly identify your data. If your HTML structure isn’t up to snuff it could require reshuffling things back and forth, as a p-author tag should be within a h-entry. After hours of cursing I just ended up pasting h-entry on the root <html/> element. For now, I’ll leave the tags as is.


I eventually threw out Gemini compatibility precisely because of that: yet another thing that needlessly complicates matters.



To have comments or not to have comment—that’s the question. I’ve seen similar evolutions on other blogs. As for me, I’d rather spend my Sunday doing something else. Wait, I already said that, didn’t I? I’m at a point in life where I need to optimize my time spent with anything, and again, If I have to choose between spending time coding in yet another edge case or just writing and replying to a lovely email from a reader, I’d prefer the latter, even though I highly enjoyed building the Go server, and when things start itching again, I’ll probably build another IndieWeb tool in the future. And no, that problem isn’t fixed by outsourcing your mentions, it just triggers other more questionable problems.


If you’d like to comment and/or reach out, I’d be happy to receive, read, and respond to your email. The “reply via email” button is still there in the RSS feed. Cheers!


(No mentions were sent during the publishing of this post)







tags icon




webmentions

indieweb


↑ byA photo of Me!A photo of Me! • posted • archived copy • current

Okay now even Sentry has OpenAI in it as part of an "experiment" to help fix issues. Again, if I'm working on something sensitive, I do NOT want this being fed into some service, especially with all the shit wrong with the service itself.


AI and these generative tools are being shoved down our throats at this point.

↑ byhttps://jacky.wtf • posted • archived copy • current

OpenAI (née Microsoft, again, follow the fucking money) is forcing its way into as many products as possible. This has to be some kind of "moat" situation with no acknowledgements of the harms of these tools. It's irresponible at this point. The thing in Sentry is https://docs.sentry.io/product/issues/issue-details/ai-suggested-solution/

Okay now even Sentry has OpenAI in it as part of an "experiment" to help fix issues. Again, if I'm working on something sensitive, I do NOT want this being fed into some service, especially with all the shit wrong with the service itself.

AI and these generative tools are being shoved down our throats at this point.

So I'm seeing https://fiatjaf.com/ab1127fb.html pop up on my reader and of course, I got comments.

No serious competitor is likely to step in and build serious apps using a protocol that is directly controlled by Bluesky.

None has to; bridges can be made that makes them more viable. And again, let's be honest. We live in a society that puts celebrities, politicians and brands on a pedestal. BlueSky (the company) is not against that, and we have seen no shortage of the ilk on there. As far as my views goes, I'm not going to also balk at the current state of affairs, especially given how social media is designed today.

They decided to adopt this method as a placeholder until someone else doesn’t invent the impossible alternative that would provide all their desired properties in a decentralized manner

This isn't impossible per se. And nor is BlueSky seemingly interested that deeply in it. They made it clear that this flagship was meant to be centralized to iron — no, they can read on their own.

[..] other things that are typical of centralized networks and can’t be reliable or exact on truly open networks (like Nostr)

NGL, I stopped reading here. Deeming Nostr as the bastion of the solution when it avoids any sort of moderation by design (the last time I checked, especially since it preaches its anti censorship mantra with no mention of individual content protections) is enough for me to not take this seriously.