Corn Woman 🌽 @WomanCorn@schelling.pt

A cryptobro DMed me to ask if I wanted to join his mailing list.

I spent slightly too long making this to send in reply.

I spent three evenings investigating why my instance stopped updating notifications and statuses correctly. I figured out that statuses were not gone, but not ordered correctly. Like if something shaked them a bit, but not much, just a bit.

I was debugging goroutines, learning about Universally Unique Lexicographically Sortable Identifier (ULID) which is the ID that is used in the ActivityPub protocol. No luck. This is how they look like btw:

01GHGAC5EHKSQQ0YRPXNWVZ7EJ
01GHGA78BHHQ8A3T6SFVYXAV4Y

These ULIDs are used as unique identifiers and because they are lexicographically sortable, Mastodon implementations take advantage of that and sort by this database column.

Now it might be clear, but jeeez I spent some time until I finally figured: I created my Postgres database on a system with cs_CZ.UTF-8 locale. Therefore my database was created with cs_CZ collation.

See, in Czech, we have one special character "CH" and Czech collation it goes between "H" and "I". That was the problem and this is the big lesson that I learned.

Always create SQL database for Mastodon instances with "neutral" (English, none or C) collation: C.UTF-8. In case of Postgres, what you need to do is:

create database xxx with locale C.UTF-8 template template0

To check your collate, on Postgres do:

SELECT datcollate AS collation FROM pg_database WHERE datname = current_database();

Czech is not the only language that might bring problems I suppose. Check your databases now! Boost it. Thanks! Have fun.

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Mastodon,
is in fact, ActivityPub/Mastodon, or as I've recently taken to calling it, the Fediverse. Mastodon is not a social network unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning federated system made useful by the ActivityPub protocol, JSON-LD and Activity Streams.

Many computer users run an implementation of the ActivityPub protocol every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the implementation of ActivityPub which is widely used today is often called "Mastodon", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically using the ActivityPub protocol, standardised by the W3C.

There really is a Mastodon, and these people are using it, but it is just a
part of the network they use. Mastodon is one implementation: the program that relays posts and other activities between other users on the network.
Mastodon is an essential part of the fediverse, but less useful by itself; it functions best in the context of a complete federated network. Mastodon is
normally used in combination with the rest of the federated network: the whole system is basically ActivityPub with a few extensions added, or ActivityPub/Mastodon. All the so-called "Mastodon" users are really users of ActivityPub.

Interesting comment on Hackernews regarding a possible scenario/long term risk should Mastodon threaten the corporate sphere of social media.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33545541

So *theoretically*, could I take my Twitter archive https://tweets.bmannconsulting.com/, and format it in a Mastodon compatible JSON import format, and just … import 15 years of tweets?

Anyone done this? Any code tools out there for this?

Today’s poem is called ‘An Update to My Privacy Policy’.

❌ we should have daylight when we go to work in the morning

❌ we should have daylight when we come home from work at night

☑️ we shouldn’t have to work so many hours that we have to ration The Sun

Happy "Lights All Askew" Day! Yep, it was 103 years ago today that the #nytimes ran the ultimate stack of #science headlines, after eclipse observations appeared to support Einstein's theory: ( #Einstein #relativity #scicomm )