Darius Kazemi @darius@friend.camp

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

A year ago I tried learning ActivityPub, and more or less failed. I was confounded by a spec that was so abstract I couldn't make heads or tails of it. Turns out I was missing some key things.

I have written a guide to learning about ActivityPub that I wish existed a year ago when I first set out to learn how to write social media servers that conform to the spec:

https://tinysubversions.com/notes/reading-activitypub/

A while back I built a site that converts RSS feeds to ActivityPub actors that you can subscribe to from Mastodon and other ActivityPub-compliant social networks: https://bots.tinysubversions.com/convert/

I've now also published the source code: https://github.com/dariusk/activtypub-to-rss

Ah, the two genders.

(source: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc129.txt)

You die a villain or you live long enough to be an old villain

@cameralibre btw, per your post here the other day, you may wish to follow @ultradeepfield

If you do a thing in an open source project, and you have a hard time doing it because it's not documented, after you finish doing the thing... document it. If the project has a wiki, put it in the wiki. If it has a docs repo you can write to, put it there. Or at least blog about it so search engines can index it.

Please don't leave the solution to languish in a chat log somewhere.

I'm learning how to write tests in Ruby with RSpec for the new features in my Mastodon fork.

Whenever I write unit/integration tests I feel like an atheist performing a ritual so that other people will say, "yes, you have correctly appeased our god, we will now take you seriously"

Just in case you or someone you know would like to take some money from these people, here is the link.

https://thoughtworksarts.io/open-call/2019-democratization-ai-blockchain/

Was forwarded this call for artwork titled "Open Call: The Democratization of Artificial Intelligence via Blockchain". It is from a residency program that encourages "investigations into impacts of emerging technologies on industry, culture and society."

They link to an "explainer" article by the arts organization itself that doesn't explain what they mean by "democratization" and indeed seems to conflate "democracy" with the equally slippery term "openness".

It's just fucking buzzword soup.