Email incident report: njabl.org

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The spam DNSBL server at njabl.org went no-op in 2013 and dark in 2023, and starting at around 21:00 PST on January 1, 2024, was taken over by new controllers who began to inadvertently reject all email.

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How to leave a Patreon Discord

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I keep on seeing this come up where people want to support someone on Patreon but not be on the patron Discord. They’ll leave the Discord and then get automatically readded and it becomes incredibly frustrating. For years there was nothing you could do about this except either stop being a patron or ask the Discord in question to ban you (which could have other awful side effects, and make it much more difficult to rejoin if you actually want to).

A while back, though, Patreon quietly added the option to leave individual servers! It’s extremely well-hidden, but here’s how you can voluntarily leave a Discord without quitting the creator’s Patreon:

  1. Go to your Patreon member settings
  2. Under “More” select connected apps
  3. Click on Discord
  4. Now you have a list of all the servers you can leave and join!

As far as I know there’s no way to prevent joining a Discord when you first pledge to a creator, but this at least lets you stop being forcibly re-added after you leave.

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The average Mastodon user age

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A question keeps on coming up on Mastodon (and the Fediverse in general), namely trying to figure out what the overall age distribution of the userbase is.

However, every single poll that comes about ends up becoming quite contentious in ways that lead to a lot of conflict and drama, primarily due to the nature of how Mastodon polls work. The most common problem is that due to the limited number of options in polls, it is very difficult to make a poll that gives both range and precision. Commonly, the person attempting to run the poll will end up being attacked by people in an age bracket that feel disenfranchised by the specific poll splits, and there’s this… tunnel-vision hyperfocus that a lot of people get into where if they see an “other” or “X or [older|younger]” category, even if there’s a whole thread of polls that dig into splitting up those larger buckets, you get deluged with responses from those who are very angry about the lack of representation.

Attempting to run the poll on a more suitable polling platform (Surveymonkey, Google Forms, Straw Poll, etc.) always ends up with similar concerns, such as worries about privacy or an unwillingness to use the survey platform of choice for whatever technological hill people want to die on. And, again, users who feel put off by this make it their mission to let the perceived offender (and everyone around them) know.

I started out riffing on this with a couple of threads that were not meant to be taken seriously, and which I thought were obvious jokes, but, you know how the Internet can be. Anyway, my third poll (doing it as a median-seeking binary search) was also meant as a joke (which I intended to just be a one-off), but people actually responded to it fairly well. When I posted a followup in which I explained that it was a joke but asked if people wanted me to follow through with it, the overwhelming response was a resounding “yes.”

Clearly there is enough interest in trying to figure out some sort of statistical distribution for the age of Mastodon users (otherwise this wouldn’t keep on happening!), so, #MastoAge was born, for better or worse.

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What is the IndieWeb?

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Over the past several years, you’ve probably heard me or other web geeks talk about the IndieWeb, but just hearing about it doesn’t necessarily tell you what it actually is, exactly. The reality is that it’s both sort of complicated but also, at its core, really simple! If you do anything online with other people it’s definitely worth understanding and knowing more about.

At its core, the idea of the IndieWeb is that rather than participating in the public web on sites owned and operated by others, you do it on your own website, managed using whatever mechanisms you are most comfortable with, with some fairly-simple protocols for sites to then communicate with one another.

It’s not really any one specific thing, so much as a set of ethics and standards to follow to give people control over their own experience online. It’s people driving practices, which inform protocols. There is no one specific piece of IndieWeb software that you must run in order to participate; instead it’s a set of loose agreements about how to participate, with some simple, mostly-optional protocols to make it work better.

But I know that’s extremely vague and unhelpful, so here’s my attempt at writing a practical guide for what the IndieWeb is and how you can participate in it!

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Creative Commons, summarized

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The Creative Commons initiative has been incredibly transformative for how people make things, and has been a huge boon to content creators the world around.

Unfortunately, there’s still a lot of confusion around what their licenses are and how they work. I see some very common mistakes with using them, both from creators and from users, especially in the game development and YouTube communities.

My hope is to help clear some of these misunderstandings up.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, I’m just a content creator who has found it necessary to know more about copyright law. This is also not an exhaustive guide by any means.

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Some shopping cart comparisons

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Recently I finally set up a shopping site for me to sell some of my art and other merch. In doing so I evaluated a bunch of different shopping cart providers, and decided I should share my findings.

This is of course not an exhaustive list by any means; it only covers the providers and mechanisms I evaluated in trying to build something functional, quickly.

Also this is only for situations where you’re self-fulfilling your own goods; on-demand manufacturing is an entirely different situation (and for that your best bet is probably Redbubble, although I personally mostly use Threadless).

Updated, February 20, 2021: Added information about ko-fi, removed recommendation for Storenvy

Updated, February 9, 2022: Added some stuff about Gumroad, bump ko-fi up to top recommendation, add some terminology explanations

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My streaming setup

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Streaming music production has its own set of challenges which aren’t well-addressed by the various tutorials out there. After a lot of iteration, here is a setup I ended up with that had a reasonable balance of flexibility and performance.

It should also be fairly adaptable to other situations where a single-computer setup doesn’t obtain the necessary performance.

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Independent music distribution, 2019 edition

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As an independent musician who has been distributing music online since the late 90s (and selling it online since 2000), I am always keeping track of the current landscape for selling music, both online and physically, with a focus on small fanbases and narrow-scale distribution.

As of January February 2019, here are what I believe to be the best practices for selling music online.

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Anti-skate calibration records for turntables

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Recently Techmoan released a video on setting up a record player, including a bit on calibrating the anti-skate functionality. He used a proper calibration record, “How To Give Yourself A Stereo Check-Out” by Decca Records. This is a fine way to go, if you can find it, but finding it for less than an asinine amount of money can be difficult in the US (your options are way better if you live in Europe or the UK, though).

There are other anti-skate calibration records out there, but they tend to be a bit expensive for what amounts to a blank vinyl record.

Of course you can buy a blank vinyl record for a lot less.

But what’s even cheaper?

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