Monday, January 20, 2025 →
NodeBB v4 launched today with Activitypub support
I’m not actually very familiar with NodeBB. I’ve used the older web boards like phpBB, as well as newer ones like Vanilla and Discourse, the latter of which seems to be everywhere.
Federating forums is an exciting area for the Fediverse. Lemmy has been moderately successful, but emulates Reddit more than a traditional message board (“traditional” maybe not a great differentiator, when Reddit turns 20 this year, but you know what I mean).
Facebook Groups helps keep people tethered to Facebook. I have to keep my account active to stay connected with my neighbors and with my kids’ schools. An open web alternative would be a great way to loosen their grip on people.
One tough part of building ActivityPub apps is deciding how much to cater to Mastodon’s implemention vs doing what makes sense at the protocol level. In a way it reminds me of the bad old days of web development, choosing semantic tags vs. ones that actually work in popular browsers.
I’m going to dig into NodeBB’s federation more, NodeBB’s ActivityPub documentation is here, but I’m excited to see an existing platform adopt ActivityPub.
Friday, January 17, 2025 →
The Idiot Box - The "Annex Canada" Stuff Is A Test And You're Failing
Trump is a threat to our country, certainly, but his real talent is sucking all of the air out of the room with his absurd rambling promises and declarations (aka “flooding the zone”) while the senior leadership of the GOP does the really fucked up stuff. Trump’s wild plans rarely (if ever) come to fruition - but Mitch McConnell’s plans…that’s another question. Mitch’s stuff seems to work out a lot, especially when everyone is freaking out about some moronic Trump shit.
Every time you see people dunking on Trump, look at what’s below the fold in the newspaper to see what is getting deflected.
Tuesday, January 7, 2025
Some of my favorite tricks for finding RSS Feeds to follow:
Reddit Get the feed for the top posts of the month for a subreddit: https://www.reddit.com//r/simpsonsshitposting/top/.rss?t=month (Replace simpsonsshitposting with a subreddit you want to monitor)
This gives you the top posts from the month, so it’s not a firehose of stuff flooding your reader–just about a post a day. The downside is that sometimes you see posts late. This is my number one tip for monitoring noisy subreddits where I don’t want to miss out on the best posts.
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Tuesday, January 7, 2025
I’m trying out Micro.blog for blogging. I’ve been looking for a new platform to use, and when I saw Tantek’s post about micro.one offering $1/month blogging, I decided to give it a shot. Plus I have this great new domain that I’ve been wanting to use, since the .ing TLD rolled out a year ago.
My main requirements for a blogging platform are ActivityPub support and not being a hassle, either technically or financially.
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Thursday, May 5, 2022
My friend Adam recently asked me about the RSS feeds I consume, so I thought it was a good time to do the equivalent of a 2022 blogroll post. The orange RSS icons in this post link directly to RSS feeds you can subscribe to.
If you don't have a way to follow RSS feeds, a site like Feedly or Newsblur will get you started for free. For my own setup, I self-host FreshRSS in a Docker container on my NAS, and then I mostly use NetNewsWire to read the feeds from FreshRSS.
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Friday, December 3, 2021
Just in time for the shortest day of the year (in the northern hemisphere), my solar panels are live!
First off, solar panels make financial sense right now. I would see solar panels on people's houses and wonder how much more people are spending just to lower their "carbon footprint" (a term made up by fossil fuel marketing to push individual responsibility for a shared problem). But it turns out panels are cheap.
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