Truly we live in a world web of strange wonders https://www.vimonlineeditor.com/

@DataDrivenMD it would be nice if some of these were per-user options 😕

I know trolls and abuse are why we can’t have nice things, but RSS feeds are a handy way to follow folks and info sources outside of activitypub. Also, requiring auth on fetch breaks some tools like the verification validation I’m playing with in my fediverse webrings project.

Would be a shame if these became standard instance practice. But then, it’s a trade off of defense vs openness I guess

I just peeked on the :birdsite:​ for the first time in awhile and ended up on someone whose bio read "Steak. Organs. Fruit." and had an avatar of a marble statue while talking about human breast milk ice cream. Cool cool cool

Oh and this was in a discussion of the manly virtues of living on a farm with livestock, wherein one's wife is also one of the livestock :blobgrimace:​

Anchovy update: not much to report. Eating well, taking meds, another weigh-in next week.

She’s getting occasional sessions on the couch with us, but after awhile, she gets a little alarmed by the presence of the other critters and is then whisked back to her room. Trying to take it easy. Other critters seem unfazed by her appearance in the house.

Current status is cozy.

Also saw a TikTok today from a supplement-monger muscle bro claiming that "women are not aroused by dad bods" and the comments were just thousands of folks thirsting for dad bod

@nolan Thank you for your work on Pinafore and toot.cafe! Take good care of yourself!

@tedivm Kind of a rhetorical question, but: Why opt-out rather than opt-in?

@benbrown my fingers are itching at the screen to pull on that lil blue tab

Spent a chunk of the weekend working on a Mastodon bot to manage a fediverse ring and give periodic shoutouts to members. It may grow to do other things in the future.

It's been a little manually-managed toy project so far, which hasn't made a lot of noise. Thinking that adding a more active bot will take things to another level.

I'm thinking when I fire the bot up for real, it should message all the current ring members with an update. A part of this would be quick instructions on how to request removal, since the way it works will change. (i.e. DM "remove me" to the bot and you'll be removed shortly)

There's about 35 members right now - some of whom may be reading this very toot! Does messaging all those folks sound spammy?

An alternative is that the system just starts acting different and maybe doing surprising things, which feels shady.

Another alternative is that I just nuke the current ring as an experiment and start over. That seems disappointing?

Overall, trying to think through ensuring everyone with their name on the list is still okay with what it's doing.

https://fediverse-webring-enthusiasts.glitch.me/profiles/lmorchard_hackers.town/index.html

This site-and-bot assemblage is really a Rube Goldberg machine right now.

But, I'd like to get it into a decent shape where it's usable by anyone who'd like to assemble a ring of discoverable, verified, consenting fediverse-dwellers

(Also have a todo item to blog soon about this)

@erosdiscordia I mean, as a sample of one, my wife seems to appreciate my cat-dad-bod

One more Anchovy update: still cozy, just on the other side (this toot brought to you because she's on the way to the attic and I needed to check something up there)

@feoh man yubikeys are easy, all you have to do is cccjgjgkhcbbirdrfdnlnghhfgrtnnlgedjlftrbdeut

Er i mean cccjgjgkhcbbgefdkbbditfjrlniggevfhenublfnrev

Dang it, wait that should have been cccjgjgkhcbbcvchfkfhiiuunbtnvgihdfiktncvlhck

@djsundog Funny enough, I'm trying to do that webring thing in exactly that way 😅

(where "trying" is defined as when I've got spare time and energy in coincidence)

@robdaemon Well that song cued up in my head in full stereo by the fifth word :)

@faho Lava is hot!

@rtn Yeah, she's definitely got a ways to go before she's closer to the spherical shape we have planned for her

@robdaemon Oh dang, that's a fine playlist!

Also, you may enjoy this streaming station that I listen to almost non-stop:

https://www.bigsonicheaven.com/

@robdaemon I need to migrate this off Spotify, but once upon a time I wrote a bot that scraped the station's Now Playing widget (now broken) into a playlist https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1xBbvEJrf5HycEZbwn04o1

I can viscerally understand the urge to build a fediverse indexing spider. I once (okay maybe thrice) built an RSS feed aggregator that gulped down tens of thousands of feeds at great speed.

"HAHAHA THE DATA FROM ALL THESE OPEN WEB ENDPOINTS IS FLOWING INTO MY CHILD! HAHAHA IT IS ALIVE! THE MEMBERS OF THE ACADEMY CALLED ME MAD BUT LOOK WHO LAUGHS NOW! HAHAHA!"

Like, I get it. You can play in the data like it's a ball pit. But also maybe don't?

That said, I think the expectations of an RSS feed versus fediverse endpoints are subtly different.

A published RSS feed is more of an open invitation, IMO. Fediverse APIs are more of a take-a-penny-leave-a-penny thing or the walkway into my backyard that doesn't have a gate on it. (I think this needs a better explanation)

@dave Not entirely sure, most of my pitches went kind of into a "sorry not interested" void. But, also I'm not good at pitches or socializing inside a company.

I also think it looked like a thing that might cost money to start, at a time when we wanted to bring more in 🤷‍♂️

@e_er1n Yeah, I think this is where a lot of the takes like "it's naive to think this won't happen" start.

But also, it seems like the folks who don't think of themselves as "bad actors" would like cooperation / kudos / cheering toward their project. So, my hunch is that "please don't abuse it" on the fediverse may carry more influence or at least friction than on the wider web?

@e_er1n (but also there is a long history of our not being allowed nice things, so it might not work out in the long run)

@e_er1n A search service could be neat, if it were opt-in and could even restrict scope to your own follow network? Maybe?

I can also see a more generally locked down fediverse per this sort of advice, where every fetch requires an HTTP signature backed by a fediverse crypto key pair to trace back to a profile

https://mastodon.fedified.com/@DataDrivenMD/109651794473674866

@alpenglow I happily bounce a little whenever I see one of these!