FYI - I no longer use Twitter, and instead I now post over on the Fediverse/Mastodon full time, at @andrew@aeracode.org (. If you want to find me there, great! If not, that's fine too! It's also my email if you ever want to get in touch.

🫡.

RT @chrisjrn: I think I might finally be about to have a website I'm sadder about disappearing than lanyrd.

My hat is off to everyone who has done the right thing and decided to get fired by Twitter today, and over the last few weeks, rather than work in awful conditions. I've enjoyed your work for many years, and I'll remember it fondly, even if it's about to start dying.

RT @dansinker: Asked the AI to design Brutalist Taco Bells.

Wrote a new blog post with some of my initial thoughts on Mastodon/Fediverse's growth, from the perspective of someone relatively new, and what I'd like to see!

Very unsure if I should cue up "We'll Meet Again" or "Daisy, Daisy" to play once the remaining microservices all start toppling over and Twitter properly goes down.

Wrote up a blog post with my initial ideas and stance on writing an ActivityPub/Fediverse server: I also have thoughts on federation, UX, scaling, and what any successful medium-scale ecosystem might look like, more to come there.

If you're curious about what I am working towards with Takahē (my Fediverse/ActivityPub server), I'm now keeping a high-level roadmap here:

Takahe is really starting to look like A Thing now that I have done some UI work. Not the most beautiful thing ever, but I want a functional yet friendly aesthetic.

OK, got that working without too much hassle. Feeling good about all the support code I wrote for state management Just Working.

I now have Takahe correctly receiving and showing a timeline of posts from users you follow. Once I get it sending out its own posts, it'll be properly real!

I'm not quite sure how to feel about the fact that ActivityPub posts (well, notes) arrive with their text as HTML complete with <span>s and CSS classes.

It's a great day to not doomscroll and instead enjoy the Fediverse's culture of content warnings on politics posts.

It may seem somewhat inconsequential, but I got all the key signing, digest and JSON-LD code to work enough that Mastodon recognises my follow request. Woo!

Yup yup yup, false alarm on the "virtual hosting of users on different domains being impossible for the Fediverse" front. Figured out that you just need a unique _pair_ of domains for each vhost:

Ah, think I have a way around this - each user has a potential pair of domains, one where the actor URIs live (e.g. and one vanity one that also handles webfinger (e.g. .

OK, finally getting to the meat of the ActivityPub spec - looks like while you can have multiple domains per server, the usernames must still be unique across all domains due to the way it interacts with Webfinger!.

(yes, I have now realised that ActivityStreams says you should operate on the compacted format, so my nightmare is hopefully over).

"Expand and flatten the JSON-LD", they said. "It'll make it more reliable to parse!". The nice, reliable flattened format: