Notices by Darius Kazemi (darius@friend.camp), page 3

Today is the 50th anniversary of RFC-1, which in a sense means that programmers have now been chatting and arguing about the internet for 50 years. https://write.as/365-rfcs/50-years-of-rfcs

I wrote a thing about why I believe the best and most useful decentralized applications are going to be the ones that utilize multiple protocols. I imagine a world where ActivityPub, Dat, and Secure ScuttleButt are all seen as tools in a toolbox rather than as ecosystems, and what kind of amazing software we could build with them outside of the central/corporate paradigm.

https://blog.datproject.org/2019/03/22/three-protocols-and-a-future-of-the-decentralized-internet/

I'm looking for literature (articles, blog posts, books) that covers "succession planning" for IT/sysadmin in activist groups. Like, for a volunteer group, what happens if your IT person just leaves? What are best practices so that the group isn't locked out of their web hosting etc (simply through lack of information rather than malice on the previous IT person's fault)

If I'm typing a bunch of unix command line stuff trying to figure out the right solution, and I eventually DO figure out the solution, one thing I do when possible is re-run the command with a comment like

$ doing-the-thing.sh # This is the one that actually works

So when I inevitably search my shell command history later, I have nice little notes

Anyone know any US-based public librarians who are active on the fediverse? I don't just mean aware of it, I mean actively participating on at least one federated social media instance

If you're a computer programmer and you've heard of the Dat protocol but looked at the docs and still scratched your head (I was there myself a few months back), there's a new guide that explains in very clear, very detailed language what Dat is and how it works.

Just to be clear, I do not recommend it for non-programmers as that is not the intended audience but I *highly* recommend it for programmers:

https://datprotocol.github.io/how-dat-works/

I'm just gonna put it out there: if you decide to run a federated social media server of any kind, strongly consider keeping it invite only and capping its size from the beginning. If your server has fewer than 100 active people on it and you have some level of trust or shared values, then moderation is a single person task that you as the admin can handle. At least in my experience.

I'm considering writing a "how to run a nice little community in the fediverse" guide with some best practices.

I've posted it a little early because I'm excited but here is my reading and analysis of RFC-1, the very first official Request for Comments document and an important piece of internet history.

https://write.as/365-rfcs/rfc-1

I'm doing one of these a day for a year. You can follow along at @365-rfcs. I'll only be posting the really noteworthy ones on this account.

Hey did you know that I do a podcast with @deerful where we talk about our obsessions? Well we just kicked off Season 2 with an episode about Fourier transforms, a mathematical concept that is apparently really hard to teach well. This does not stop me from trying to teach Emma in 25 minutes.

https://toomuchnotenough.site/episodes/s02e01.html

@awilfox @paulkruczynski I use goaccess, both in the terminal and I have a cron job to generate their html reports https://goaccess.io/

I wrote an article for the Mozilla Hacks blog that's a brief technical introduction to ActivityPub. I also provide an intro to my simple #ActivityPub Node.js server.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/decentralizing-social-interactions-with-activitypub/

For people working on ActivityPub implementations I just wrapped up a nice chat with the folks of https://homebrewserver.club in Amsterdam (@manetta @rra and others). It was all via document editing and you can read the whole thing starting at line 188 in this document

https://pad.vvvvvvaria.org/ap

It's a bit disorganized and I think they are going to digest it into a blog post or similar but for now this may be helpful to people who are puzzling their way through ActivityPub implementation!

Just FYI, Mastodon v2.6.0 web client adds a nice feature that makes having inline RSS feeds (via something like my RSS-to-ActivityPub converter, https://bots.tinysubversions.com/convert ) much more convenient. The feature adds a "read more" to any post that is taller than a certain number of pixels, so now my "podcasts" list renders in a way that makes more sense. ("Read more" opens up a detail dialogue where you can read the full post in-client.)

@silkevicious @aral Here's the source code: https://github.com/dariusk/activtypub-to-rss

A while back I built a site that converts RSS feeds to ActivityPub actors that you can subscribe to from Mastodon and other ActivityPub-compliant social networks: https://bots.tinysubversions.com/convert/

I've now also published the source code: https://github.com/dariusk/activtypub-to-rss

I actually built a little toy service (that I will also eventually open source) which converts any RSS feed to an ActivityPub actor that you can subscribe to in Mastodon (or any other AP-compatible client).

Play with it if you like! It is SUPER rough and most feeds end up horribly rendered in Mastodon but it's still kinda cool to see it work: https://bots.tinysubversions.com/convert/

I'm happy to announce that my barebones ActivityPub server, implemented in Node.js/Express, is now open source! I intend for it to be a reference implementation for developers who are adding ActivityPub to their own services, but also it is an application server that you can build on if you want.

In other words, t's a few hundred lines of code that lets you create Mastodon-compatible accounts that can accept follow requests and post stuff to their followers.

https://github.com/dariusk/express-activitypub

I see people posting that Esquire article about Mastodon and for all its faults the funniest thing is the <title> tag, which was presumably at one point the title of the article. I love how even the basic conceit of "this is not a corporation" loses people

Friends, be careful of what third party Mastodon clients you use. They have different defaults than you are used to on the web client, and most of them are not as thoughtfully developed as the web client. For example: on web if your account is locked, your new posts are followers only by default. On Tootdon, for example, your locked account will default to public posts every time. This can lead to mistakes where you're federating things you'd rather not.