...Well, the edit appears just fine on my site, but so far I still see the original post from my secondary account on another instance. And...

...Well, the edit appears just fine on my site, but so far I still see the original post from my secondary account on another instance. And it occurs to me that I didn't go look at the update-sending code yet. No clue how long it may take and I haven't looked at whether it's supposed to support federating update, sending an update #webmention to any mentioned #indieweb sites, or both.

State of the Blog Address

So there's some folks, starting with @read@blog.nigini.me, who have put together an org (as mentioned here to help those of us using #microblogpub to move forward with some new development while the original developer is...well, apparently not originally developing for a while (I certainly wish him the best with whatever's keeping him away).

I definitely need to spruce up my own customizations so that maybe some of the ones that some other people might find useful can be contributed toward the new org.

First step of that was to try to get my changes rebased on top of some of what's already been incorporated.

I will readily admit...I did not comb through all of the changes trying to figure out what all of them were. I was interested in doing that rebase as soon as I was contacted about the community effort, really...but what got me eager enough to jump in feetvfirst this past week was finding out that one of the contributors had determined that the software already had support for federating updates, and had implemented a simple post edit ability.

Which was a key thing I'd wished I had, although now that there's nowhere I care about syndicating to (and therefore no need for u-syndication links), I have less need for it. The bird site is no longer a place I consider worth caring about, and even if it were, the API changes have made syndication a hassle and backfeed nearly impossible. So far, I'm not really interested in federating to Bluesky or bridging to Nostr or anywhere else. So...I'm just here, and don't generally care about syndication links. But editing is still nice to have!

So I spent some time on that these last few days, and now I'm up and running on top of that fork. #bw3dev

As of this writing...the original dev's sites seem to be down, and the footer has been updated to have a link to one (the most prolific, I think) contributor's fork, but still lists the same version as before. I'm probably going to change a few of those things shortly and then test the edit feature.

EDIT: I have updated my site footer to point to the org and to indicate that I'm on a customized version, for now - my Site page already links to my own fork, although it occurs to me some of the info there is now definitely out of date. I'll probably make that a problem for after I get some sleep...and in a moment, I guess I'll know whether the Edit feature works! Editing appears to let me change the title and the content, but not the visibility (which I think may be an #ActivityPub limitation), sensitivity, content warning, post type, or attachments, nor does it give me the little emoji inserter bar which I never use anyway.

One of the changes that was made was adding separate styling for some of the buttons, which made me very unhappy with how my site looked until I figured out why.

There were also a lot of dependency updates. In fact, that same very prolific dev had updated FastAPI past what was apparently a breaking change. He compensated for most of that - in the same commit, in fact - but not for the semi-hidden custom route support that I use for my About, Site, and License pages, so I had to figure out why my site was broken and fix that bit. As a result...even though I tried to clean up my changes when I rebased...even my new branches are already kind of a mess again. Oh well.

Anyhow, because of my rush to get to that point, I actually spent little enough time perusing the rest of the changes that I'm not even entirely sure what else I pulled in. I think the place has a few minor appearance changes, but maybe that was only the new button styles before I figured out what had happened and changed my theme. So I guess I'll see if I notice anything else different, and this'll be an adventure!

@rajelaran@oldbytes.space https://xkcd.com/2038/

@rajelaran@oldbytes.space https://xkcd.com/2038/

@0x2ba22e11@unstable.systems @soatok@furry.engineer Folks who recognize that they have a different threat model may be less likely to argue,...

@0x2ba22e11@unstable.systems @soatok@furry.engineer Folks who recognize that they have a different threat model may be less likely to argue, and less likely to make themselves annoying enough to provoke dunking.

Not immune to either, necessarily.

A thought that has occurred to me, as I head to bed a few hours later than I should have: There was probably a period of time after I had...

A thought that has occurred to me, as I head to bed a few hours later than I should have:

There was probably a period of time after I had some interest in cryptography and before they were discontinued in 2018 during which, if it had occurred to me, I would have bought a pack of Certs mints because of the name. There are enough people in the world that I might not be the only one.

Well, I've found another thing I may need to work on for my site...when people respond to my articles (reply, like, mention, et...

Well, I've found another thing I may need to work on for my site...when people respond to my articles (reply, like, mention, et cetera), the Notifications page where I can review those things (inbound interactions with me in general show up there, as opposed to my stream or inbox where I can read everything from the folks I follow, whether it addresses me or not)...shows my entire article along with every one of those interactions.

Considering how much I tend to ramble, that can make it pretty hard to keep track when scrolling through multiple reactions to one! I should dig into that part of the code and at least style my own writing differently, probably either collapse or truncate it, and maybe in the case of articles even just show myself the link... I should also capture that desire on my Indieweb user page.

That said, it's a fun problem to have. Thanks for your kind words and reactions; I'm glad some folks enjoyed my rambling! #bw3dev

State of the Blog Address

Back in January, I made a post - written as a question/poll - although that aspect of it was just a whim - speculating about what things I might plan on writing about soon.

One of them was "Microblogpub, one year in; likely accompanied by rambling thoughts about a recent Indieweb discussion of the distinction (or lack thereof) between blogs and social media."

Quite a mouthful. But also...I made my intro post on December 10, 2022. So when I made that post in January, I was already past a year.

I suppose at the time I could have said the four weeks I was offline starting in early September didn't count...but now it's May. So I decided I'd just call it a State of the Blog Address.

My blog's address has not changed states; it is still http://bw3.dev thank you and good night.

...Just kidding.

Getting ready to write this made me go back and look at when and what I've written about my blog already. That in turn led to some updates to my Site page, and the decision to use #bw3dev for some things, and...I should probably make sure my #Indieweb Wiki user page is up to date soon, too.

Anyhow...this article was also the only one from the list about which I got a (belated) comment (via webmention), so there's that.

The technical side

Unfortunately, because of how I rebased my customizations to #Microblogpub, I can't easily tell and remember anymore exactly what I worked on when. I know the commit for "thread rendering improvement" is something I wrote about on 2023-02-21, for example, but after rebasing, the corresponding commit is dated in July.

The only major change I haven't already blogged about is that I found Microblogpub's existing support for custom routes, so I took advantage of that to make a way that I can add plain html files and render them as pages, with or without including a navigation link to them in my header.

That lets me do a couple of things. First, I can have stuff like an About page more detailed than my profile, a License page, and a Site page without them being articles or posts which I then (currently) can't update without mucking directly with the database (and if I do that, I don't think I have a way to federate the updates, either). Editing (and federating the edit, and sending #webmentions if appropriate) is still on my itch list.

Second, at least to a degree, it gives me that way I was looking for to make a post that is publicly visible, but doesn't federate (or appear in my feeds). I can send webmentions manually if I want. It's not a very convenient solution, but it's a solution. And the more I've thought about the circumstances and reasons I might want to do that, the more I've realized that there aren't all that many.

So while I'm on that subject:

Future Enhancement Considerations

While I wouldn't rule it out completely, for the moment I've tabled the idea of implementing any other way to make non-federating posts.

What I still may want to implement is a collection of ways to see less of certain things in certain contexts. I think I want to implement some subset or combination of:

• Additional filter support for my stream and inbox, so that I can filter out activities by hashtags or other content details...similar to filters that can be done on other instances, but possibly with the ability to toggle them on and off. One use case: Hiding live-toots about an ongoing conference so that I can catch up on what the rest of the folks I follow are doing.
• A filter that just drops the activity without ever storing it locally. One use case: maybe I just don't even want to store posts about hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, even if I could hide them from myself.
• The ability to configure filters that, if matched, apply a different retention policy when I run the pruning task. One use case: I might follow a weather forecast bot and not want to bother keeping its posts longer than a week.

I'm pretty sure I have already figured out how to do the prune, and I think I might have seen something from the main dev about how the inbox view filter is pretty easy to add, at some point. The drop-immediately may be trickier; I know the software already does that with delete activities from unknown actors, but I think it does that before it has parsed the content and tags, so that might not be the right place to inject custom handling. When and if it becomes enough of a desire that I start working on it, we'll see.

The main other thing I would like, as I mentioned before, is still the ability to edit, including support for appropriate federation and webmentions. It would be nice if that included a way to have a post in draft mode, so I can check the rendering before publishing it for example...but I would probably still work on my drafts elsewhere, as I do now; and I have the option of posting to Mentioned Actors Only so I'm the only one who can see the post, checking the rendering, then deleting and re-posting. And one of the main reasons for editing would have been for rel-syndication links, but...there's nowhere I want to syndicate to.

Unfortunately, I'll need to understand the code - and probably the specs - better than I do currently to try to do that myself.

The Experience as a User

...has mostly been Just Fine.

I had a bit of an issue back in January with the chirp dot social project. I am not sure whether the issue was that chirp itself sent all of its activity (or at least, a lot of it) to the inbox of every server it knew about, whether anyone on that server was following that "chirp group" or not, or if something else somewhere (either malicious or just broken) was relaying it all to me...because I didn't manage to figure out whether the originating server was part of chirp or not...but I was getting a lot of stuff delivered to my instance that I didn't want to see, wasn't following, and hadn't had boosted to me either. That ended up being the first domain block I put in place for what was, as far as I could tell, a technical reason. Chirp has since shut down. I was disappointed by the problem, because if Chirp had come to my attention some other way and, well, had only hit my inbox with things I followed, then it could potentially have been a nice partial substitute for following hashtags (which doesn't really work all that well on a single-user instance).

gup.pe is a similar project I may take a look at, but I'm a little cautious about that because the place I found it mentioned indicated it had even less moderation capability. And I'm also still trying to figure out whether Flipboard can help me out there to some extent.

As an ironic side note, there's an issue on the repository for guppe where someone was seeing excessive lookups for actors on his instance, and it turned out to be due to a combination of two things: first, guppe had a bug wherein if an actor URL had a fragment, it wouldn't be found in the cache and would be requested again every time; and second, the server seeing the problem...was apparently federating all its public content to every guppe inbox it knew existed, whether a guppe group was mentioned or not. So almost the inverse (or is that the converse?) of the problem I had with chirp.

I've also been seeing this odd wrinkle where sometimes when I click on the link for what something is in reply to, usually to open something in another tab and come back to it later while I'm reading my stream, I get an error page. This is particularly frustrating because I end up with no convenient way to figure out what I clicked to get there. I haven't dug into this yet. Maybe I'll post more about it when I do.

The Experience, Part II: A sense of belonging, or not

There have been a few things happening in recent memory between the Indieweb and the Fediverse that I've found kind of interesting due to the way I interact with the two sets of conventions, among other reasons, and that I considered writing about at the time, but...I just kind of didn't have the energy for it then. So instead, I'm going to give some thoughts on them now, mostly from the perspective of how being part of two things also sometimes means being different from both.

Bridgy Fed

When Bridgy Fed launched support for following RSS feeds as #ActivityPub actors, similar to rss-parrot and some other alternatives, I didn't have to worry too much about whether I wanted my feeds bridged to the Fediverse. I didn't, because...my blog is already an ActivityPub actor; it would be redundant. I was more academically interested in whether there was any good way for Snarfed to recognize when a feed was already from the Fediverse and not create the bridge.

I ended up adding #nobridge to my profile regardless, because at least one other bridge developer was considering support for it. I figured it could help prevent extraneous bridges from picking me up, I was in favor of that. I also decided that I wanted to take more direct control of any bridging of my content anyway. This is partly related to the (CC)BY-NC-SA license under which I choose to post my original content, but...that's not something I want to get into in detail right now.

When Bridgy Fed announced upcoming support for bridging to Bluesky, I also found it reassuring that, unlike people who had been using Bridgy Fed's excellent existing services to give their personal websites a federated presence, I didn't have to worry about collateral damage from overzealous domain blocking.

Wordpress Activity Plugin 2.0

Shortly before the Bridgy Fed stuff, there was a similar but smaller furor surrounding the release of version 2.0 of the Wordpress ActivityPub plugin.

Unfortunately, part of the announcement was phrased thusly:

"When you respond to comments from the fediverse on your blog, they will now be federated."

Now, in my opinion, to someone who already understands that the point of the plugin is to let you use your Wordpress site as your personal instance, that reads as meaning "When people make comments on your already federated blog post by replying to it through the Fediverse, and you reply in turn to those already federated comments, your replies will also federate.

Unfortunately, if you aren't familiar with what the plugin does, the antecedent of "they" can be unclear enough for it to be read as meaning "When people comment on your blog through the Wordpress comment system, and you reply to those comments, those comments will be federated.

Which is very nearly the opposite of what was actually being described, and got a lot of people in a tizzy until they finally figured out they were talking past each other.

That got me thinking a little bit about the fact that I don't have to worry about managing plugins for my Fediverse presence - although there are pros and cons to that.

Moreso, some of the comments about it got me thinking about something else.

Is blogging social media?

The third conversation that came up that I felt was relevant was one around the question of whether blog comments are social media. I think it might even have been prompted by some of the comments about the Wordpress plugin, because one of the things being discussed there was the possibility of people being surprised to see their Fediverse posts appearing on people's blogs, because while it's an expected part of the federated experience for a lot of people that their public posts can be viewed from other instances - possibly without logging in - a lot of blogs don't look like instances, even if they effectively are. Mine, I think, looks relatively "instance-y."

Unfortunately I don't really remember a lot of the rest of that conversation I'm talking about. The main pieces I do remember are this article and the one it was in response to. There have also been plenty of Indieweb articles I've looked at in the past about backfeed, surprise, and context collapse.

Given how my blog functions, I guess it's only natural that I'm in the "yes, blogging is social media" camp. But then I thought a little more about whether I felt that way about blogs in general, and whether I always had...and I concluded the answer was yes, as long as there was a comment section at all.

Another thing all these events had in common was bringing to mind the occasional strange feeling of hanging out in the Indieweb community, but having taken a somewhat less common approach from what a lot of folks there have done.

There's quite a bit of presence of folks who use the Wordpress plugins for Indieweb functionality or ActivityPub or both. There are also a lot of Bridgy Fed Users, and users of various Webmention-assisting services, and some folks who use micro.blog (some in addition to all the rest). And there are some folks who roll their own functionality.

But one of the things that's less common about my setup, as I've mentioned before in a few places, is that it is essentially an ActivityPub instance first, that uses microformats and sends Webmentions; moreso than it is an Indieweb blog that also federates. The ActivityPub aspect is prominent, which means it is more natural for me (especially when it comes to conversations and threading, as opposed to just someone replying once) to interact with someone else's federated identity than with their Indieverse website...even if I do put in the effort to direct my reply to both and to elevate the personal domain; and when someone else tries to elevate my Indieweb identity over my federated identity - particularly, when someone posts an Indieweb reply and sends a webmention, but whatever they're using for federation doesn't also make their post an ActivityPub reply to mine - it can break the conversation threading as seen by the Fediverse.

I haven't decided yet how much that bothers me. It's definitely at least a little, but it might only be a little.

@colinstu@birdbutt.com @deviantollam@defcon.social ...And now I realize that's what you were talking about in the first place (albeit...

@colinstu@birdbutt.com @deviantollam@defcon.social ...And now I realize that's what you were talking about in the first place (albeit different features of said third party fix).

@colinstu@birdbutt.com @deviantollam@defcon.social Shoot, MS doesn't care if they break their OWN stuff. You need a third-party bugfix...

@colinstu@birdbutt.com @deviantollam@defcon.social Shoot, MS doesn't care if they break their OWN stuff. You need a third-party bugfix in Windows 11 just to turn the taskbar back to vertical like it belongs.

What my ideal pants would be like, and how the pandemic shaped this ideal

First of all, the obvious: my ideal pants should fit me comfortably. At the moment I have several pairs of pants I probably ought to get altered, because I prefer wearing thin-soled, zero-drop, wide-toe-box shoes...which make the fact that most pants that fit around me tend to come with a slightly-too-long leg even more of an issue than it was when I habitually wore thicker and thicker-soled shoes that would help keep the pant hem from hanging all the way to the floor.

They also need to be pretty durable. I had some convertible pants from LL Bean that I absolutely loved until unfortunately I discovered that the stress put on them by riding my bicycle to work basically tended to cause either a seam blowout or a wear-stress failure in the seat. They even felt like pretty tough fabric and fit me with room to move, but...well, the mechanics of my preponderous posterior on a bicycle seat were apparently beyond their capacity.

But the part that has to do with the pandemic is the pockets. Although...it didn't start with the pandemic.

I suppose it really started with my first cell phone. To sum up a couple decades of habits...

I started carrying a cell phone circa 1999, when they were bigger than I felt was practical to carry in a pocket. (Look up the Motorola i88s, if you want a reference.) So I carried it on my belt. Eventually (by which I mean a decade or so later), a reference somewhere - it might have been an ad for a minimalist wallet - to people allegedly having spine alignment problems due to sitting on thick wallets got me contemplating the possibility of carrying my wallet on my belt. This led to replacing my wallet, phone holster, and multi-tool pouch with a Maxpedition Triad admin pouch for several years, and it gradually accumulated more and more stuff...but also kind of got more and more in my way.

Then came the pandemic...and I found that one thing I couldn't conveniently fit in my Maxpedition pouch was a mask.

At one point, because the guidance being published seemed to suggest it was sufficient and it was definitely getting a better fit than anything else I'd tried, my mask of choice was a combination of things that resulted in at least three layers of different kinds of fabric and what seemed to me to be a better face seal than I was getting with any other sorts. That was the only kind I ever found that seemed to fit my face well and could be carried in a regular pocket without deforming problematically. So when the guidance on what kind of mask to use made me feel I needed to move on from that, I started looking for pants that I thought I could carry a mask comfortably in. And pretty much every kind of pants and shorts I've bought since has had that as a criterion. I have a lot more cargo pants than I used to.

So where has that left me when it comes to my ideal pants?

Well. Basically, from the crotch up - and, comes to that, at the ankles - I want LA Police Gear Terrain Flex Tactical Jeans.

These have the usual pockets one would expect from jeans - back pockets, front pockets, watch pocket...except there are watch pockets on both sides. They also have an extra pair of pockets on the hips - sized for rifle magazines, apparently; for my purposes, one usually holds the minimalist wallet I use these days, and what goes in the other varies a lot. There's also this tiny pocket in the rear belt loop that's supposed to fit a handcuff key. So far I've never used it. I don't think I could ever put something there that would be a problem if it got laundered, because I absolutely would forget about it.

The one problem with these jeans is that after I stopped using the three-cloth-layers mask, they don't really have a very good mask pocket. I can sort of cram a Resonance 95 mask (the preference I eventually settled on) into one of those extra side-hip pockets or in a front pocket, but it always feels like it might mess up the mask structure a little to do that.

So what I would like added to those jeans would be either the leg pockets of the (unfortunately discontinued) Amazon Goodthreads Carpenter Pant, or the Bocomal Fire Resistant Cargo Utility Jeans, or possibly a pocket similar to that of a Unionbay Survivor IV Cargo Pant - although I think the little mini-pocket on the front might be hard to do in denim. If I could get all three varieties, I would.

And then, for extra credit...take that result, shift the down-leg pockets a little higher if necessary, make them in a more cargo-pant-style fabric instead of denim, and add zip-off legs.

Well, I certainly disappeared for a while. I guess the best way to describe what happened is that I had a few perfectly ordinary transitions...

Well, I certainly disappeared for a while. I guess the best way to describe what happened is that I had a few perfectly ordinary transitions come up close together and ran short on attention for a bit.

I have decided that the first I am going to cover of the topics in my poll (https://bw3.dev/o/2BahR) is probably going to be "What my ideal pants would be like, and how the pandemic shaped this ideal." Because I felt like getting started on it tonight. Not sure about whether I'll finish it tonight or not.

Today, I finally got a FIDO2 ssh key working. (Next step is to make sure I can use it from more than one client machine.) I have lost track...

Today, I finally got a FIDO2 ssh key working. (Next step is to make sure I can use it from more than one client machine.)

I have lost track at this point of the number of different ways I've failed to do so. I'm pretty sure "nah, I don't feel like doing this tonight after all" has beaten all others combined.

I think the funniest failure might have been the time I realized that the OpenSSH client I was using, while it did have a version number newer than when the feature was added...had support for it explicitly disabled because the dependencies weren't available for the platform yet.

@soatok@furry.engineer @ator@tech.lgbt For me, it's "On a related note" followed by something completely unrelated.

@soatok@furry.engineer @ator@tech.lgbt For me, it's "On a related note" followed by something completely unrelated.

@philnash@mastodon.social Well, now I am. Probably. I already need to get caught up on https://tryhackme.com/room/adventofcyber2023... but...

@philnash@mastodon.social Well, now I am. Probably. I already need to get caught up on https://tryhackme.com/room/adventofcyber2023... but I'm gonna go with English.

@seldo@alpaca.gold I hadn't noticed. Maybe once either of the fixes is installed for the bug where the start bar is stuck in that weird...

@seldo@alpaca.gold I hadn't noticed. Maybe once either of the fixes is installed for the bug where the start bar is stuck in that weird barely-usable horizontal position, the ads don't work anymore.

One piece of good news is things seem to have picked up from where they left off without much issue.

One piece of good news is things seem to have picked up from where they left off without much issue.

...And we're back. (What? What do you mean back?) So...what happened, as best I can tell, is that around September 9-10, another...

...And we're back.

(What? What do you mean back?)

So...what happened, as best I can tell, is that around September 9-10, another application running on my server ran into a bug that caused it to exhaust all available disk space recording far too rapid retries to the syslog.

Unfortunately, in my first attempt to figure out what had gone wrong, I was ...kind of sleepy, and got to the point of "Well, maybe I should just rebuild the instance with a larger boot volume" before I reached the point of noticing the 24GB of syslog - mainly because I thought the problem would turn out to be something else I'd already been worried about - and I wound up losing the instance reservation and having to wait until capacity was available again in order to bring it back online.

I suspect that a lot of instances gave up on sending posts to me while my server was unreachable...I wonder whether they'll just start again or if there'll be a Hassle involved.

@derozard@mast.eu.org @carnage4life@mas.to @bobwyman@mastodon.social @ben@werd.social Re: this and...

@derozard@mast.eu.org @carnage4life@mas.to @bobwyman@mastodon.social @ben@werd.social

Re: this and https://werd.io/2023/licensing-site-content-using-a-text-file, other potentially relevant points of interest are https://spawning.substack.com/p/aitxt-a-new-way-for-websites-to-set and http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-license

It's getting to be that time of year again. The time of year when I might work up a sweat from doing something like, say, standing...

It's getting to be that time of year again. The time of year when I might work up a sweat from doing something like, say, standing still outdoors for a few minutes.

#andstatus seems to work pretty well with #microblogpub these days. The result of trying to post with "public" checked but...

#andstatus seems to work pretty well with #microblogpub these days. The result of trying to post with "public" checked but "followers" unchecked seems to be "direct," which I think may make sense but was not what I had guessed.