Darius Kazemi @darius@friend.camp

I'm pleased to announce the v1.0.0 release of Hometown, my Mastodon fork! It's up to date with Mastodon v2.9.3, and unique features include:

- Local only posting
- Full support for rendering incoming `Article` posts from federated blogs like Write.As
- "Exclusive" lists that let you follow someone without clogging up your home timeline

For more info, including rationale for each new feature, check out our wiki:

https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/wiki

And the release itself is here:

https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/releases/tag/v1.0.0%2B2.9.3

I'm extremely pleased to launch Run Your Own Social: How to run a small social network site for you friends.

This is a guide book to running a small, tight-knit federated social network server. It comes from my year of experience running Friend Camp. It's focused largely on SOCIAL solutions, though it does touch on the technical.

I've tried to keep it technology-neutral, and it should be a pretty easy read for anyone who's been on the fediverse for a while.

https://runyourown.social/

I finished my stint as a Mozilla Fellow and now I'm relaunching my Patreon with a focus on, well, fixing social media.

This means I'm going to continue my concerted work trying to make the fediverse a better place, in the form of best practice guides for running instances, external advocacy, and technical tutorials and training so that more people can contribute software to the fediverse at large.

You can read a partial summary of my work so far at my new Patreon page!

https://www.patreon.com/tinysubversions

One of the most curious things about White's 1973 post is when it's talking about what happens when hosts on the ARPANET change their name/mnemonic. It is eerily similar to discussion on the fediverse about account migration and/or instance migration!

"It seems to me necessary that a host have the option of changing its host name. [...] I think I understand some of the unpleasant implications [...] but it seems necessary nonetheless."

There were a TON of arguments about mnemonics for host names in the early ARPANET days. There is a sarcastically titled 1973 post on a forum at Stanford Research Institute called "Gee Host Names and Numbers are Swell" by Jim White. I just transcribed it:

https://write.as/365-rfcs/gee-host-names-and-numbers-are-swell

I learned of this post via a citation in this wonderful paper by Steven Malcic, which talks about how early ARPANET mnemonic tables evolved into our modern DNS system over about 15 years.

https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/problem-future-users-how-constructing-dns-shaped-internet-governance

Going though my Computer History Museum photos and I found the original copy of this 1971 Telnet system diagram from RFC 158. Now you can compare the charming pencil on lined notebook paper to the official scanned version that's been the only one available for decades.

I love this stuff, it reminds me that the internet was invented by humans jotting things down on whatever paper was at hand and not godlike programmers planning everything exquisitely.

https://write.as/365-rfcs/rfc-158

Discovered that Google Drive will OCR photos of documents. This came from a photo I took of a typewritten document. The actual characters themselves are mostly correct. The styling is... amazing

I'm running a day long workshop at Radical Networks in NYC Oct 18 -- it's about how to run a small social network site for a small community. We're going to be making a (probably temporary) fediverse server for the "community" of our classroom and navigating all the social issues that arise when people with only surface things in common (like "we got tickets for this workshop") try to make an online space for themselves. https://radicalnetworks.org/participants/darius-kazemi/

Wrote a little bit about the Culler-Fried On-Line System at UC Santa Barbara, which was kind of like Mathematica but in the late 1960s. It used a dual-tier keyboard and they had a hell of a time figuring out how to make it communicate over the 7-bit ASCII that Telnet on the ARPANET required.

https://write.as/365-rfcs/rfc-216

@LadyMargaret btw you reminded me of something that Emma asked me to do that I forgot: credit you for doing the bulk of the work on the local-only indicator spacing change! I didn't include this in the original release notes but just updated it https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/releases/tag/v1.0.2%2B2.9.3

@v I may have solved your image problem, turns out there was a limit on max number of pixels in an image accepted by the upload service. I quadrupled it.