My Site

At my house I am in an internet deadzone.

My apartment has "free wifi" but it's slow and unreliable. I could get faster internet, but my financial situation makes that not very likely any time soon. I also have poor cell signal in my apartment. I make do, but I've been somewhat forced to think more about local-first development. I think it has actually been a boon in disguise because I feel like it helps me develop more resilient apps.

I recently bought a desktop computer with decent specs so I can build a lot of stuff locally and not depend on cloud services. My new ASMR is listening to the fans kick in as it compiles my projects.

In my previous article, I wrote about how I thought that fediverse implementations should essentially be modularized as simple API services. Yesterday, I found an example of such service and felt vindicated.

Gotosocial is a Go app that is easy to deploy (even though it took me a few tries because I didn't see the easy way in their docs until later). It is essentially a bare activitypub api that you must interact with a 3rd party fediverse client. I feel like this easy-to-deploy single-user-instance might become more popular in the future of the fediverse.

I've been thinking about activitypub and the fediverse for a long time. I started writing software for the fediverse back in 2010 when I created an OStatus server.

One thing that I feel about activitypub is that it should be implemented as a stand alone module rather than as a turnkey system. The biggest reason for this opinion is that activitypub (at least defined by the flasgship instance Mastodon) is prety complicated and contains lots of moving part's that are subject to change. As a result of this, a lot of fediverse apps aren't entirely compatible with each other.

If we extract the core functionality of activitypub into a small module that does very little and use that to build apps, I feel like it would be a lot easier to build on and be more compatible across the fediverse. When Matrix.org created their rust sdk it greatly improved the development experience.

I've been working with Statamic to create content for this site. It uses the Laravel php framework. I haven't used php since the 90's, so it's been interesting to see where this space is currently at from the perspective of someone who hasn't been in it for quite some time.

I've been debating making this my "homepage" as I actually really like it as a CMS. It uses "flat" files for storage instead of a database which kinda reminds of the Agora.