Tag: mastodon

A rough hack to make your fediverse account discoverable via your e-mail address. I made that in 2022, but switched it off again (it clashed with the ActivityPub plugin in WordPress). Since I got asked now how I did that, I put up this description.

On your e-mail domain name, make a folder well-known (here zylstra.org)
In that folder make a file with the name webfinger (no file extension).
In that file put a text like below.


<?php if ($_GET["resource"]) { $vraag = $_GET["resource"]; } if ($vraag=="acct:blog@zylstra.org") { ?> {"subject":"acct:ton@m.tzyl.eu","aliases":["https://m.tzyl.eu/@ton","https://m.tzyl.eu/users/ton"],"links":[{"rel":"http://webfinger.net/rel/profile-page","type":"text/html","href":"https://m.tzyl.eu/@ton"},{"rel":"self","type":"application/activity+json","href":"https://m.tzyl.eu/users/ton"},{"rel":"http://ostatus.org/schema/1.0/subscribe","template":"https://m.tzyl.eu/authorize_interaction?uri={uri}"}]} <?php } ?>

You see that the code ‘catches’ the request sent to it from some fediverse server, asking about the account name blog@zylstra.org. That is an email address and not a real account. However the script responds to that with some JSON that corresponds to my actual Mastodon account. That way your fediverse account can be discovered by search for an email address you have for someone.

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Favorited My Next Chapter With Mastodon by Eugen Rochko

Eugen Rochko is stepping down as lead of the Mastodon project. Assets he holds are to be transferred into the Mastodon non-profit. His role will be taken over by Felix Hlatky, next to Hannah Aubry (Mastodon) as community lead, and Renaud Chaput as tech lead.

As Rochko allures to in the quote there are plenty examples where leading figures become problematic if not downright toxic to the projects they created. Technology is political, and we’ve seen various techbro people who let their radicalizing personal politics become the guide for the course of their projects. Rochko’s step avoids him becoming that OFG. Like turning down oodles of VC money in 2022, this is a political step. Well done.

I also like that two of the three people leadership team have their Mastodon accounts away from the behemoth instance mastodon.social, with Chaput’s on a tiny instance. That too is well done and a politically relevant signal. We need rewilding and an open web.

After nearly 10 years, I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon and transferring my ownership of the trademark and other assets to the Mastodon non-profit. Over the course of my time at Mastodon, I have centered myself less and less in our outward communications, and to some degree, this is the culmination of that trend. […] There are too many examples of founder egos sabotaging thriving communities […]

Eugen Rochko

I finally got around to, and succeeded in updating my and E’s VPS-hosted Mastodon instances.

For about half a year I wasn’t able to update Mastodon, because the automatically generated back-ups before the update were too big for the allocated disk space on the VPS. My VPS runs Yunohost, but the options in the web interface for admins are somewhat limited. One way to get around the lack of storage was mounting another disk, but that required command line access but I couldn’t ssh into my VPS because of a missing password. Making the back-ups smaller by deleting stuff from the database(s) also required the command line. I didn’t see a route out of that and in my burned out state these past 4 months I left it at that.

Today E mentioned she thought that her Mastodon instance was slow. Logging into my Hetzner account, where the VPS is hosted, I noticed that the type of server I have was being deprecated. I was invited to rescale the server. This was an easy option to add a bit of computing power, and extend the disk space. That done, I could update the Mastodon instances. So my need to find a way to the command line of my VPS no longer existed. That of course was the moment I noticed an option in the Hetzner interface to directly access the console of the VPS.

The Mastodon instances are up to date, I have enough disk space, and now know where to find the command line interface.

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Gisteren is de Stichting ActivityClub opgericht en ingeschreven. De stichting vormt het onderdak voor mastodon.nl. Maar het doel van de stichting is breder: “het duurzaam stimuleren, ontwikkelen en onderhouden van de organisatorische en technische aspecten van publieke (sociale) netwerken gebaseerd op onder andere het ActivityPub-protocol, zoals Mastodon, Pixelfed en PeerTube, in het Nederlands taalgebied”

Als onderdak voor mastodon.nl kunnen donaties voor het onderhoud van mastodon.nl aan de stichting worden overgemaakt, in plaats zoals tot nu toe aan een privérekening. En voor plannen om ook andere ActivityPub toepassingen aan te bieden is nu ook plek.

Zodat er voor het publiek bruikbare sociale platformen zijn die ook op een publiek controleerbare manier worden onderhouden.

Samen met Eelco Maljaars (voorzitter) en Mike Dell (secretaris) vorm ik (penningmeester) het oprichtingsbestuur. De stichting is uiteraard non-profit, en bestuurders kunnen niet worden betaald.

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To keep the database size down on my personal Mastodon instance I routinely delete everything older than a few days. This includes anything I bookmarked. The same is true for E’s instance. There’s no ready way to get those bookmarks out of Mastodon into something else. Unlike for public things where you can get an RSS feed from instances by adding .rss to a url, for the non-public bookmarks you need to use the API.

With some suggestions by my automaton junior coding assistant I quickly had a working API call to read the bookmarks (the url is yourinstance/api/v1/bookmarks, and you need to create an access token in your Mastodon instance under the developers menu heading).

Outputting those bookmarks as RSS is a straightforward way to make it accessible to various other applications. So I added code to make an RSS feed. And it works. The code is up on Github.
I’ve added the feed both to my regular feed reader (a self-hosted FreshRSS instance), and to the RSS plugin for Obsidian. The latter so that I can easily access the bookmarks in my notes. The former so that I can from within my feedreader send it to various websites I control as well as have a second route to my notes.

A quick and satisfying home cooked coding snack.

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Peter has experimented for a while with Mastodon (and the ActivityPub protocol behind it) and decided that it’s not for him.

Well, this has been fun, but it turns out that the effort-vs-reward for the fediverse doesn’t balance for me; I need fewer reasons to be tethered, not more. @mastohost, recommended by @ton, was an excellent playground. In 24 hours this account will self-destruct. But, now and forever, https://ruk.ca is where you’ll find me.

I very much recognise his point. The disbalance he mentions I felt strongly in the past month, where it was absent in the five and a half years before it. The enormous influx of people, positive in itself, and the resulting growth in the number of people I followed made my timeline too busy. In response I started following topics more and am evaluating rss feeds from ActivityPub servers. The disbalance expresses itself in spending too much time in the home timeline, without that resulting in notable things. (I mean literally notable, as in taking notes) Unlike my feedreader. It does result in some interesting conversations. However such interactions usually start from a blogpost that I share. Because of the newness of AP and Mastodon to the large wave of people joining, many posts including mine are of the ‘Using Mastodon to talk about Mastodon’ type. This is of course common for newly adopted tools, and I still have a category on this blog for metablogging, as blogging about blogging has been a 20 year long pattern here. Yet it is also tiring because it is mostly noise, including the whole kindergarten level discussions between petty admins defederating each other. There’s a very serious discussion to be had about moderation, blocks and defederation, to turn it into a tool that provides agency to individual users and the groups they are part of. These tools are important, and I’m glad I have them at my disposal. Ironically such serious discussion about Mastodon isn’t easy to conduct in a Tweetdeck and Twitter style interface, such as Mastodon provides. I moved the home timeline over to the right in my Mastodon web interface, so I don’t see it as the first thing when I open it up. I’ve concluded I need to step away from timeline overwhelm. Much as I did on Twitter years ago.


A tired purple mastodont lies on the ground sleeping while groups of people are talking in the background, sketchbook style. Dall-E generated image.

There are however two distinct aspects about AP and the recent incoming wave of people that I am more interested to be engaged with than I was before this started.

First, to experiment personally with AP itself, and if possible with the less known Activities that AP could support, e.g. travel and check-ins. This as an extension of my personal site in areas that WordPress, OPML and RSS currently can’t provide to me. This increases my own agency, by adding affordances to my site. This in time may mean I won’t be hosting or self-hosting my personal Mastodon instance. (See my current fediverse activities)

Second, to volunteer for governance related topics in the wider Dutch user group of Mastodon. Regardless of my own use of Mastodon, it is an environment in which many more people than before have new choices to make w.r.t. taking their online presence and tools in their own hands. A step from a global silo such as Twitter to e.g. a larger Dutch instance, while not the same as running one’s own, can be a significant step to more personal agency and networked agency. I’m involved in a group discussing how to establish governance structures that can provide continuity to the Dutch instance Mastodon.nl, lets people on the instance have an active voice and role in its internal governance, and raises awareness of the variety of tools and possibilites out there while purposefully avoiding becoming a new silo (through e.g. providing pathways away from the instance). Such governance is not part of the Mastodon instance, but structured around it. Such involvement is an expression of my experience and role in using tech for the past 33 years online as being inherently political.


A purple mastodont is conversing with a crowd of people, sketchbook style. Dall-E generated image.