busybee fluffy rambles

As part of testing my WebSub changes for FoF, I decided to switch to a WebSub hub for myself that provides some subscriber analytics and so on. One neat thing about how WebSub works is that the “hub” layer is completely modular and it really doesn’t matter at all which one you use, and if the one you use has problems you can switch to another one just by changing the URL in your feed and all subscribers will eventually seamlessly migrate (at their next normal polling interval); if anyone even notices a problem it will just be that they don’t receive a push update during that polling interval. (Which, let’s be honest, is incredibly unlikely for most RSS feeds.)

Anyway, because of these new analytics, as well as information I gathered from my new WebSub-supporting reader, I now know a bit more about the state of WebSub.

Update: A lot more supporting readers have shown up in my stats in the two years since I published this article! Please see this entry for a list.

Two years ago when I decided to go indie I had a few motivations behind it. Part of it was that I needed to work on my own thing for a while, but most of it was just that I needed to get the heck out of the tech industry; everything in that industry is so toxic and based around everyone being “passionate” about doing everything for a company with an incredibly asymmetric relationship. I was working myself to death (often literally) and putting myself deeper into intractible chronic pain, which never felt like it was enough and employers kept on demanding more and more, while being less interested in my own physical and mental health.

So I went indie, because I had a bunch of projects I wanted to work on, such as Publ and my games. And I thought I’d be able to make a little niche for myself making music for other peoples' games as well.

Well, it turns out that I’m my own worst boss. When I’m working on my own projects I get just as passionate, obsessed, and self-injurious as ever, and I also managed to burn myself out on all that. And when it came to working for others, well, I had a hard time finding people I wanted to work with who would be able to give me anything approaching a steady income. I was also feeling impostor syndrome like crazy, like what right do I have to be trying to do this when I (feel like I) can’t even get everything done?

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.

So last Thursday I flew to San Francisco to visit my brother, sister-in-law, and nephew.

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

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

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!)