Corn Woman 🌽 @WomanCorn@schelling.pt

Hi everyone, and welcome to The Union Place! This Mastodon instance is intended as a home for all #union members, friends, and allies, across the #fediverse.

We're just getting started, so pardon the dust and the lack of customization, I've got some feelers out for images, but welcome all input and feedback!

It's fun to watch all the mastobabies have their first instance drama. Oh no poopoo.ninja is a Nazi instance because they said "touch grass"? Oh now you're calling the poc lesbian admin of banana.boat a colonizer? You kids have fun.

Anti-Racist Action Points of Unity (Mastodon Edition)

1. We don't go where they go, we stay home, going where fascists go would make us exactly like fascists. We believe in ignoring them and running away from them. Always let nazis have the street, because streets are a nazi thing now and if you use them you're a nazi.

2. We don't rely on the cops or courts to do our work for us. Instead, we become the cops and the judge and jury of the fediverse. We must rely on our blocklists to keep each other safe and pretend the fascists are defeated.

3. Non-sectarian defense of other antifascists, unless of course they federate with disqordia dot space. An injury to me is an injury to all, but an injury to you is fine.

4. We support abortion rights and reproductive freedom, I don't think we've abandoned that one yet at least, we're still something resembling leftists right? We are committed to building a broad strong movement against discrimination against the admins of monads dot online and rage dot love, also transmisogyny isn't real. We want a walled garden where we have all the clout. We intend to win!

There's a really big problem with how Mastodon and Pleroma handle servers disappearing for a while.

By default, both daemons will "pause" delivery to remote instances that they haven't seen or been able to deliver to in 7 days. When delivery is paused, even sending DMs to/from test users won't result in a request being sent out.

Delivery is unpaused when you hear from the other server.

See the problem?

If a fediverse server has connectivity issues for a little over 7 days, nobody it used to federate with will send it any messages until they hear from it. And that server won't send any messages to remote servers until it hears from them.

While Mastodon has a way to manually unpause delivery, there is NO indication to the end user that they need to contact an admin to make this happen. If you were to, for example, send a DM to a paused instance after it comes up, you won't get any sort of error saying that delivery is paused, but at the same time, no job will ever be made to deliver your message.

Pleroma does not appear to have a way to unpause delivery at all, meaning that if this happens between two pleroma instances, it's essentially a suspension that neither admin can lift, or even see.

This, by the way, does not fix itself if one of the servers becomes aware of the other again through things like boosts. It *must* be manually cleared by an administrator.

How many instances can you never talk to again, because you or them disappeared for a week?

Anyway, please boost, and maybe someone who works on either project will see this. Eugen actively refuses my reports.

For years I had such a hard time explaining to *anyone* why this ActivityPub spec we were working so hard on mattered

When you think about it Elon paid 44 billion just to advertise the importance of the fediverse, gotta give that guy some credit, real generous of him

boost to pet the cat
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100 Mastodon myths:

1. Mastodon is hard.

FALSE. It’s a "soft"ware. Not hardware.

2. You have to use Linux to post on Mastodon.

FALSE. FreeBSD and OpenBSD are also supported.

3. You need to learn to use the Vim editor before posting on Mastodon.

FALSE. There’s also an emacs plugin.

4. Mastodon is only for computer nerds.

FALSE. As you can see, we sometimes try to make jokes that everyone could understand.

clout

clout

let it all out

these are the posts I could do without

unfollow

I'm muting you now

unfollow

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’.