Mastodawn

Random thought: saw the mention of Isso, for a commenting system that can be used on static websites. Had the idea of something similar with ActivityPub instead, but then thought further of something where you could have something essentially proxy and transform content from a static website (given some URL pattern of which pages should be included/exempt, and where to extract content from).

Ergo, you could have some blog or other personal website, that could even be static, while having some secondary service that can transform it to ActivityPub, Nostr, or other representations, and serve an embedded (and moderated) comments section, without needing the content to originally be inside of some natively ActivityPub-based (or extended) platform.

Hell, even stepping even further: maybe could do it for an art gallery system too, that could do automatic cross-posting.

arcanicanis Mar 2

https://arcanican.is/blog/2026/no-fun.php

Had a stream of thought that I needed to get written down, as presented above. Just expressing a mix of thoughts I've had in recent years, and not to seek out sympathy or anything. I'm sure there's some other folks involved in hobbies or communities that feel the same.

It's Not Fun Anymore

arcanicanis Feb 25

Oh my. I think I've just hit a new revelation for a software architecture that should be a lot more servicable, stateless, and more practical to host with just static files, and possibly still be able to do federation (through a second layer atop, for converting NDJSON streams and ID references, into standard ActivityPub objects/collections).

I was working on a sideproject of a web-based yt-dlp frontend (and media platform), but may be able to 'kill two birds with one stone' with the idea.

Time to throw almost everything out again and see if this one sticks.

arcanicanis Feb 11

Movim Feb 9

You wan't to move from #Discord to #Movim and #XMPP, but you really miss one or two core feature?

I'll work the next few weeks on some of those missing features to help you and your community to migrate ✨

So what do you miss the most?

#migration #question

🎙️ Audio rooms (Teamspeak/Mumble like)

29.7%

📹 Video calls with several friends (like Jitsi)

15.5%

👾 Spaces (like Discord servers, grouped rooms)

52.7%

👀 Something else, add it in the comments bellow

2.1%

Poll ended at Feb 16 at 8:36pm.

arcanicanis Feb 11

I guess that's a random find today I hadn't known before:

There's an argument for showing more succinct outputs to the ip commands, using the -brief argument; e.g. ip -br link or ip -br addr

Show thread

arcanicanis Feb 10

Further further further (on fedi instead in this case):

I have not had to register on TikTok, Instagram, or a handful of other things, and yet: I can still enjoy the memes, culture, content and other things that bubble up on those platforms, because people will cross-post it anyway.

I don't have to wade through trash on TikTok to find something interesting, folks on fedi will usually cross-post only what's worthwhile anyway, and I never have to touch those platforms. I have absolutely zero FOMO from not being on those platforms.

Show thread

arcanicanis Feb 10

Further, as it came to mind after-the-fact: regardless of whether a platform has even had the purest of intentions and goals, it does not evade the fact that any mega-platform is a single point-of-failure.

That while even if some supposedly moralistic mega-platform comes about, it is still a single point-of-failure for regulatory and under-handed infiltration. They will have their hand forced in one way or another to kowtow to the wishes of government, or just shutdown entirely as the only other alternative.

You don't know what the future plan of any mega-platform is, whether they'll have a buyout to realize the value of the startup, or if they're going to cut off and paywall things to start turning any actual profit, after being a money firepit for so long (all in the agenda to farm a userbase). I don't understand why folks continue to build communities exclusive only to these platforms; meanwhile, I've been able to preserve a self-hosted forum, to still be online over 16+ years later.

When you have a broader expanse of disparate, independently owned servers, it's substantially harder to completely behead a multi-headed critter. When they exert force on a few to make examples out of, several more will end up taking it's place.

I believe people intentionally act stupid about the notion of federation, that just because communities and users are scattered between servers, doesn't mean they're unable to be discoverable.

Aside from first-party content you see on a social media platforms, what else do you commonly see? URLs. If there's something worthwhile to share, that isn't on the same platform, or just simply on a different server, we inherently share hyperlinks to resources of things worth sharing, and naturally interesting communities and platforms organically bubble up to the surface.

Whether it's XMPP URIs, Matrix URIs, URIs of posts on fedi, usually people will inherently share a canonical identifier that can lead people to something interesting, even when it's to a resource on a different protocol entirely. There is a whole natural, organic system of discovery, but people still intentionally act stupid to recognize it, and I still don't understand the confusion in it.

arcanicanis Feb 10

It's just so thoroughly, resoundingly demoralizing how normies keep taking the bait of centralized VC-funded platforms. Once one ship starts to sink, they crowd to the next one that appears on the horizon, like rats, just ever-continuing this cycle, and never learn.

In the time that I've been on the internet, just to keep up with "where everyone's at", I've been on: ICQ, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN/Live Messenger, Google Talk/Hangouts, Skype, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Wire, Signal, Discord, Guilded, and many several others, and the cycle just keeps repeating, just to re-skin much of the same concepts over and over again, with relatively minor variations.

I am so damn tired and have gradually dumped virtually all the above at this point (recently deleted Discord in November, deleted Telegram ~2 years before that, deleted Facebook ~10 years ago, etc).

This may come as a shock to viewers, but when I've dumped prior platforms, some friends have followed over to the alternatives (of those that weren't already there), such as XMPP.

Mentionably, also, nearly everyone has Steam in common, and Steam has actually made the voice calling system reasonably usable, and has a decent 'group' system, that's also filled the gap. For my more neckbeard-y friends, Mumble has continued to work too.

Nonetheless, in all of this, I guess there's another opportunistically new centralized VC-funded platform, that people are trying to crowd-wrangle people to next. I don't even know if some of this crap is some sort of set-up, if these influencers get kickbacks, or if people are just this retarded to keep repeating this cycle.

When I registered on Discord, about a decade ago, I already regretted it. Despite being yet another WebRTC application, that could be used in a browser, they still arbitrary forced people to install an Electron-wrapped version anyway by artificially walling off features you could do in a browser anyway (e.g. screenshare and others).

There was plenty of phobia about it watching all your running processes, but it still got adopted anyway. There's the warehousing of all your data, all your connection history since inception of your account, all your device metrics at every single individual interaction and thing you clicked on, perpetually tagged and catalogued, and much of that ran through neural nets to profile and categorize you, but still people cling to it anyway.

Now the cycle repeats again.

arcanicanis Feb 10

Boiling Steam Feb 9

Funny how suddenly people wake up to the idea that Discord is a hostile platform,, despite the warnings told again and again
#discord #toldyouso #hostile

arcanicanis Feb 9

@silverpill Possibly to your interest, if you haven't seen it already: https://autocrypt2.org Apparently only 25 pages long, with seemingly clear and specific steps and some code examples (at least in cursory skimming): https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-autocrypt-openpgp-v2-cert/

Autocrypt v2 - Post-Quantum and Reliable Deletion

Modern OpenPGP v6 certificate with post-quantum cryptography, reliable deletion, and transport-agnostic messaging for decentralized systems.

XMPP	[email protected]
Matrix (ejabberd)	@arcanicanis:matrix.were.chat