Posts by mat@friendica.exon.name
(DIR) Post #AJ8d52T9EtoXbFxm6K by mat@friendica.exon.name
2022-05-05T09:43:45Z
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Came close to ordering a Yubikey on multiple occasions. My last note on the subject is from August last year, prompted by this comment. No. If replacing a lost/broken key is going to be hard, then no. Perhaps as a 2FA lock on my password manager, but I can't see the need. I do not, in fact, backup my password manager in the cloud, and I do have an emergency backup at home. Fingerprint protection is good enough. If Yubikey can sort out the migration process so that I can do without the password manager, then maybe we're talking.
(DIR) Post #APIPPomVSf0ZNXpzmK by mat@friendica.exon.name
2022-11-05T14:03:16Z
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Among the many, many fediverse features I am only just now discovering 😁, in the Mastodon followers list, I show up as a small avatar and a big empty rectangle. Is there a way in Friendica to set a background image so that it shows up on other sites?@helpers
(DIR) Post #APitWVICnBb8g2LR3Y by mat@friendica.exon.name
2022-11-18T08:50:05Z
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Since you identified AR/VR as the next attempt at lock-in, it's worth linking to thirdroom.io. It's a Voltron of existing open source components that could plausibly tackle Meta head-on. But they need support, especially from digital artists.
(DIR) Post #AREWvwYMVSkTf5YDh2 by mat@friendica.exon.name
2023-01-02T10:05:48Z
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I've been experimenting with the plugin for a few weeks on several test servers, intending to write up the results as a proper article. Here's what I've found so far - rather a mixed bag https://mat.exon.name/notablog/wordpress-activitypub/. (I just wrote it up as plain HTML because I have nowhere better to publish it right now.) I might well have missed something important, so I'd welcome any feedback or corrections.
(DIR) Post #AYfGjNX9viM1L2JyOO by mat@friendica.exon.name
2023-08-10T17:51:00Z
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Oops, maps.me finally went away. It used to be a good app, it worked offline and almost all the screen was map. They gradually cluttered the screen with more and more junk, and now you can't download more than ten regional maps, not enough even for a whole country. It's now useless as an application for, like, viewing maps.Are there any free apps for viewing OSM offline any more? #openstreetmap
(DIR) Post #Aajk0pOHXirP4LyeB6 by mat@friendica.exon.name
2023-10-13T16:13:38Z
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I guess I'll comment just as a data point, I have a digital ocean droplet with 2GB of RAM and a database that is stable at 30GB after 6 years of continual use. But it was quite a roller-coaster setting up garbage collection aggressively enough to keep the database stable. That server runs all my stuff too, email, XMPP, several other websites. I seem to be paying 30 USD per month, half of that storage. I'm the only user.I've run test instances on Raspberry Pi Zeros with no trouble. I don't think the website runs very happily that way, but if you use an app then latency probably doesn't even matter.
(DIR) Post #Aajkdz69Nt22TEAS0W by mat@friendica.exon.name
2023-10-13T19:19:07Z
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Haha, of this I have no doubt 😛 Been meaning to move somewhere else, but I made the mistake of deciding to learn how to use docker at the same time, and well, funny how quickly six months of weekends flies by with no progress...
(DIR) Post #AhpPPbvYF1gGvGQnD6 by mat@friendica.exon.name
2024-04-20T11:32:13Z
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Did anyone manage to grab an archive? In particular this piece from Seth Abramson deserves a place in the annals of human history. If only we had listened to him, perhaps this could have been avoided! https://post.news/article/2IanIj231d7nc5bxqOxIJpFfGwe
(DIR) Post #AhpPPdnTI2PEimfMtU by mat@friendica.exon.name
2024-04-21T00:01:49Z
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Found it: https://archive.ph/aop7QIt truly is so important to think, before you sign up, that your account could disappear on the whim of some admin. Luckily, no one could possibly imagine Noam Bardin taking such a step.(I wanted that article because I still intend to write about how there's an important point buried in there and the dogpiling was unfair. Tragically, however, it's just so funny.)
(DIR) Post #AhrRCS3YDbxKlgwhBw by mat@friendica.exon.name
2024-05-03T06:13:37Z
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The testing mantra is, every test should test just one thing, and I don't see a good reason to depart from that rule here. If there are two things that can go wrong, run the test twice. Efficiency shouldn't be a concern at this point of the pipeline."Degraded" doesn't really say anything actionable to me as a developer or a user. I'd be better off just looking at a straight percentage of failed tests, and diving into the details of the ones that "fail". I'd certainly much rather have a clear yes/no answer to each individual question.I certainly wouldn't choose my testing framework based on the requirement that it doesn't just pass or fail. Best to treat your difficulty in finding such a thing as a message.
(DIR) Post #AhsDnu8VZnPmN4Bmym by mat@friendica.exon.name
2024-04-27T08:30:04Z
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After the last conversation I saw, I was movitated enough to write a whole philosophical treatise on the subject: https://fedi.exon.name/2024/04/21/conversations-and-articles/The conclusion I came to: Mastodon is probably more-or-less doing the right thing by refusing to render articles, but perhaps it would be nice to have a pop-out view for reading them. Friendica and Wordpress, however, would do better to give authors explicit control over the post type of each individual object.
(DIR) Post #Ahtw3VhCnqiqLSd7zs by mat@friendica.exon.name
2024-04-22T19:21:34Z
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Perhaps it makes more sense for custom content types. For example a video site that has specified a custom "captions" field. A user on a text-only site can't see the video, but the video site could fill in the captions as a fallback display type. A site that supports normal video can't use the captions, but it can display the video fine, so it can ignore the fallback text.I think you're right when it comes to standard types. The spec pretty much covers all cases already.
(DIR) Post #Ahtw3YEbMecmDcGpKS by mat@friendica.exon.name
2024-04-22T19:29:42Z
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The problem there is that the content gets displayed even if the receiving platform already supports the main object. You don't want to duplicate content. Same thing as image sets. You could just create 6 <img> tags in the hope that at least one of them loads correctly in the user's browser, but that's not really the intended outcome 😂
(DIR) Post #AhwGgcfPCoa0esdTQO by mat@friendica.exon.name
2024-05-01T12:05:25Z
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It's nice to see a mention of Relays as the defining design feature of Bluesky. I would argue it is even more important than Tenor or Twilio. You can remove those two and the network will still function, but that's not true about Relays.I would offer Matrix as an example to challenge the decentralised/noncentralised distinction. It's still very much centralised around Element. But they make their money selling entire networks to governments, promising to deliver "digital sovereignty". It's not easy to unilaterally "alter the deal" when your customers have, at the end of the day, nukes. So it is possible to irrecovably decentralise and become noncentralised.
(DIR) Post #AhyMHTrFo9be8iUZTU by mat@friendica.exon.name
2024-04-22T20:11:30Z
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The chess platform doesn't want to display the image because it has its own built-in UI. Maybe it animates the move in a cool way, and each user has a customised board display. I don't know. I don't play chess 😛The other suggestions are what bothers me. Those are, basically, hacks. Ways to smuggle structured data in via the existing fields. That way we end up with a hundred apps, some adding their own HTML tags in the description, some with a summary with odd syntaxes, some abusing EXIF data in attachments. AP is supposed to be extensible, but in practice using custom objects cuts you off from the main body of users, whose platforms silently discard objects they don't understand. So I fear developers will instead abuse the fields they have, and writing general-purpose clients will become a nightmare.Not exactly Sean's point, but that's why I paid attention when he mentioned fallback display.
(DIR) Post #Ai1miaCfVKv3v8yLSa by mat@friendica.exon.name
2024-04-27T13:09:33Z
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Be honest, who's out there telling you what you need to know? @whitehouse? Or this one roll of hello kitty toilet paper @1796996923? Let's get 2021.020.0359 onto the most-followed list! ✊ #museum
(DIR) Post #AkzxquMuQ4JCZRfCU4 by mat@friendica.exon.name
2024-08-15T17:45:52Z
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Mastodon does let the blocked person's instance know that you blocked them. That's only visible to admins, but a lot of trolls are on single-person instances where the troll is the admin. I think it's worth bearing in mind that the "block" button sends a message.
(DIR) Post #AxwOl5pOkpBIJMzvfM by mat@friendica.exon.name
2025-09-06T20:11:28Z
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It follows that AP is best suited to talking to friends, while AT is best suited to talking to strangers. And there is a far larger demand for the former than the latter. So I'd predict a future where AT evolves into a high-performance enclave embedded inside AP.
(DIR) Post #AxwUuySLcICa4LJLQe by mat@friendica.exon.name
2025-09-06T21:42:20Z
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You're mostly agreeing with me: AT is destined to have problems because it's designed to scale to many users, not to many providers, leaving it vulnerable to censorship. Where we disagree is whether social media is for talking to the public. Compare the MAU of Facebook and Twitter to answer that question.
(DIR) Post #AzCvokjGXkh0UlpyOe by mat@friendica.exon.name
2025-10-14T17:29:39Z
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I went back to check my notes on why I never bought the Neo 1973. It was the size. 12cm! How could anyone carry around such a brick? Preposterous! And now...Anyway, what I'm saying is, this is probably my fault. Sorry about that.