matt @matt@writing.exchange

Welcome to all our new #WritingExchange writers! 👋 Glad you've found our little spot in the fediverse.

If you ever need help, feel free to reach out to me or anyone else in the community. Also: an avatar, bio, and #introduction post will go a long way toward helping you connect with more people 😊

Sometimes you want to take a picture, capture how the morning light looks filtering through the trees; your cooled skin; the sound of birds.

But you can never smell the air in that photo. You can't look around to see the rest of the world from that spot you stood, capturing a split second of light.

The only way to remember it is to sit for a while; feel it as deeply as you can; accept that it'll never be as good as it is right now.

Looking forward to speaking at ActivityPub Conf 2019!

https://dustycloud.org/blog/activitypub-conf-2019-speakers/

On the note of fake followers, before I blocked gab.com on our https://m.abunchtell.com instance I noticed very bot-like behavior from seemingly real accounts on that instance -- very reminiscent of birdsite bots.

Definitely worth thinking about how we guard against misinformation and astroturfing in the #fediverse as this gets more prevalent. Domain blocks alone probably won't be enough -- the classic social media features we include or leave out matter, too.

@cj Hey CJ! Hope all is well.

We're looking to build a new AP application from scratch (details here: https://phabricator.write.as/T671) and wanted to do it on the latest go-fed version.

I was curious what the status of `apcore` is -- I know it says under construction, but is it possible to build on yet? Or should we stick with the `activity` pkg?

Know anyone who would like to join #WritingExchange? While public registrations need admin approval, anyone here can invite someone by generating a special invite link from this page:

https://writing.exchange/invites

We're keeping our 1,000-user limit, but we just freed up about 50 spots after clearing out old, unused accounts. So feel free to invite anyone you think would like it here!

Maybe there could be a new activity type that informs a list follower that there's a new account to automatically follow. But that would depend on changes to AP platforms that do the reading / following.

Ideally, whatever the solution is, it would work with existing platforms.

Is anyone in the #fediverse working on some way to follow a dynamic list of accounts? Thinking kind of like lists on Mastodon, except they're publicly shareable / followable.

Maybe I could create an #ActivityPub actor that follows the accounts in the list and automatically boosts / `Announce`s each post?

But it'd be nice to let a list follower follow accounts individually, so they could *start* following people automatically, but could manually unfollow any they didn't want.

Back in the tropics.
Moving away from this place.
Yet,
comforting.
this stifling, hot, thick air.

As we're up to 995 users here on #WritingExchange, I'm going to make room for new users by removing accounts that are at least two years old and completely unused (i.e. signed up, logged in, never came back).

One sucky part of using a ThinkPad while browsing Mastodon is that when my finger slips off the mouse nub, a random toot gets boosted.