Mastodon instance rambling

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Lately most of my social networking has been via Mastodon, which is basically an open source, semi-distributed equivalent to Twitter. When I first joined a few years ago I got an account on the flagship instance, but not much later ended up switching to queer.party. Unfortunately, queer.party has had several scaling issues – similar to a lot of the other small instances – and while it hasn’t gone down entirely, it’s so backlogged that it’s gotten to be pretty much useless.

On Mastodon there’s a general feeling that anyone with a mastodon.social address isn’t savvy because they don’t “get” Mastodon, that the whole point to it is that it’s distributed and you don’t have to be on a single central instance and so on. But the problem is that most of the instances – and there’s quite a lot of them – aren’t run in a way that can be expected to scale over time.

Most instances are maintained as a spare-time thing by someone, but instance management is more and more becoming a full-time job. I am incredibly grateful that Maffsie is willing to run the instance even on that basis, don’t get me wrong! But all the same I’d like to be on an instance where it doesn’t regularly go down or have massive backlogs (7 hours, at present) or random weird federation problems.

The problem with Mastodon in this case is that any Mastodon instance, regardless of the user count (or a user limit), will continue to grow without bounds for as long as it’s being used, and as the ActivityPub network grows, the amount of stuff that every instance needs to keep track of will grow too.

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Notes from the pain management workshop, week 6 ~THE FINAL~

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I was kind of thinking about skipping this last week because the previous few sessions were feeling not very useful for me, but I ended up going anyway and I’m glad that I did.

Also, I’m not sure if I mentioned this before but if you’re in Seattle, these workshops are available to you whether you’re a Kaiser Permanente member or not! There’s more information about that on their living well classes, including online versions (and they also have additional online resources).

Main topics today:

  • Working with healthcare providers
  • Weight management (ugh, but don’t worry)
  • Looking forward

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Notes from the pain management workshop, week 5

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Oops, I forgot to post these earlier while the session was fresh in my mind. I’m going to have to work a lot harder to decipher my handwriting this time around.

This was the 5th week. Next week is the last one. I’m kind of glad to see it ending. Sigh.

Topics covered this week:

  • Medications
  • Depression management
  • Physical activity
  • Mind management

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Thoughts on SQLite’s CoC

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Okay, so, I dropped peewee because of bad behavior on the part of the core maintainer. And then yesterday word got around that SQLite has a… rather tone-deaf but well-meaning CoC that is a bit off-putting. Plenty of people have written about the problems with this CoC itself so it’s not worth me adding my own hot takes on it, and I’m choosing to take Dr. Hipp at his word that he is being sincere about it being a moral framework for working with others and that he doesn’t mean it as a joke (despite the fact that he doesn’t seem to mind the people who are championing it as a “parody of social justice outrage culture” or complaining about the contributor covenant CoC with phrases like “purple-headed feminist” okay argh I’m ranting tangentially, focus).

(I should also mention that the timing of this going around was only a coincidence vis-a-vis my de-ORMing Publ musing. I actually wrote that article several days earlier and started thinking about it over a month ago, and considered rescheduling its publication because I didn’t want people thinking these things were related!)

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On the current dumpster fire

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Trump Administration Eyes Defining Transgender Out of Existence:

The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.

[…]

“Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth,” the department proposed in the memo, which was drafted and has been circulating since last spring. “The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”

To everyone who wonders why trans people are always so unhappy, or why I keep on caring about politics and getting upset about things I can’t control, THIS IS WHY.

This policy isn’t just about nomenclature or bathrooms (although those are both very important!), it also affects me directly in terms of the health services I can receive. It is yet another case of the Republicans being the party of personal freedom but only for the freedoms that they want.

Gender is (partially) a social construct, chromosomes don’t tell the whole story, intersex people exist, trans people exist, dysphoria is real, choose love, be kind.

I refuse to be legislated out of existence.

Webmention is here, ActivityPub maybe next?

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I’ve been pretty busy with Publ and Pushl lately, mostly doing stuff to get Webmention support to a place where I’m happy with it (most of Publ’s recent improvements have been with the goal of making Pushl work better with it, although the side effect has been to also improve its cacheability which is a win for everyone).

Anyway, what’s cool about this is I’m already receiving a handful of natural webmentions, in particular on the ActivityPub rant which tells me that a lot of people are looking into ActivityPub for various reasons. (All of the webmentions thus far have been indications of folks “favoriting” it, which I choose to interpret as people agreeing with it.)

While getting this support in (and using IndieWebify.Me to verify my h-card/h-entry markup among other things) I learned about fed.brid.gy, which is a service that will convert webmentions into ActivityPub activity, for sites which configure a couple of request routes. Obviously I’m going to add direct support for that (in a way which will apparently be compatible, conveniently enough).

Anyway, this blog entry is mostly a test of that, because adding the redirection rule was pretty simple.

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