Darius Kazemi @darius@friend.camp

I've been building a Facebook Events style event organizing system for the Fediverse. It's based on the simple, open source, privacy-respecting event organizing tool https://gath.io

The attached video is a work-in-progress preview and shows compatibility with Mastodon. My hope is to get it working with lots of software, including stuff like Friendica that supports events and calendars.

Check out more at my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/organizing-on-32729070

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

The Smithsonian announced today that they have released 2.8 million images into the public domain (CC0 license). In celebration of this I made a bot you can follow that will post one random image from the set every 8 hours:

@si

For more on the imageset, see here: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/smithsonian-releases-28-million-images-public-domain-180974263/?no-cache

Also, by offering an instance of the service to only my existing user community, the moderation burden suddenly goes from "I am hosting or at least piping data for god-knows-what" to "I trust my community and I will be able to keep track of what they do in case there are moderation complaints".

For example, a bunch of terfs were using my service a while back! I shadowbanned them. But if my users are limited to this instance then I won't have that problem.

(One big problem I encountered was people converting thousands and thousands of RSS feeds from a service; doing things like converting every single person they follow on Twitter into an RSS feed through a third party service, then running that through my converter so they could follow all of their Twitter follows on the Fediverse. This is a valid use, I guess, but not one I'm prepared to host! And I know Friend Campers won't pull something like that.)

Having a version that an administrator can limit to people with accounts on a specific Mastodon instance, will let an instance like Friend Camp offer a service like rss.friend.camp or whatever. If you're a Friend Camp user, you get to create new feeds, and anyone on the Fediverse can subscribe to those feeds.

As an ADMIN, this means the number of feeds that is going to be created will be very small, provided your user community is nice, and these hosting problems won't be an issue.

I'm regrettably no longer able to offer my RSS to ActivityPub converter to the general public. This is because:

- it's wildly popular and my hosting costs keep going up for it
- it's been getting used for more and more purposes I'm uncomfortable with, which I've tried to mitigate but new ones keep popping up

I'll be releasing a new version soon that will let admins allow only people with permissions (either a user/password or a Mastodon account) to create new feeds.

https://bots.tinysubversions.com/

this is just about the correct aspect ratio to make a nice phone background

Old IWW posters are great. I found this one while searching for one from ~1917 that purportedly read "Don't Be a Soldier, Be a Man".

I used to use Hipmunk to book flights but they were recently shut down by the giant enterprise software company that bought them a while back. I went to their URL on a whim and was redirected to a statement from the enterprise software company:

"Why is SAP Concur retiring Hipmunk and Concur Hipmunk?

Simply put, our approach to providing integrated T&E management has evolved."

That "simply put" is doing a lot of heavy lifting

"The meaningful threat of garbage language — the reason it is not just annoying but malevolent — is that it confirms delusion as an asset in the workplace."

Molly Young on corporate garbage language:

https://www.vulture.com/2020/02/spread-of-corporate-speak.html

In just 9 months the media will start speculating about who will run in the 2024 presidential primaries.

Might fuck around and turn this into a bot