A note on the passing of Tony Baldwin. Before 2016 the fediverse was a small world of familiar faces, and Tony was one of those. Tony was characteristic of the pioneers of federated social networks in that he was multi-talented. In addition to hacking on miscellaneous social network stuff he was a father, runner, painter, photographer, multilingual translator and anarchist. Like a lot of us he was also a precariat, living on uncertain income in a hostile world and struggling with all of the usual things, and some not so usual ones.

One thing I should point out which he would probably find funny. I never much liked his Shakespearean insult bot. It was amusing at first, but the joke soon got irritating.

One of Tony's PHP scripts lives on in an adapted form in the Freedombone project. It's purpose is to clear out old posts so that the database size doesn't grow indefinitely. When you're running on small ARM boards without much storage, and want to keep the performance reasonable, this is quite a good thing to have.