Darius Kazemi

I made a little tool that lets you search the full text of all published Fediverse Enhancement Proposals.

https://fep-search.glitch.me/

It does so privately in your browser using a neat in-browser elasticsearch-type-thing called FlexSearch:

https://github.com/nextapps-de/flexsearch

[opens a private browsing window in Firefox, clicks the "Common myths about private browsing" link]

- private browsing goes to the underworld
- private browsing must answer a series of riddles posed by a monster in order to obtain treasure
- private browsing disobeys the gods and incurs their wrath
- private browsing sings the song that creates the heavens

I have a very long, possibly book-length take on LLMs that has been brewing since May 2015 but basically: wow humans love to take something that works extremely well in a certain narrow domain and then bend over backwards to insist it will solve every problem in the universe. (That's a nearly banal observation but the book length part would be tracing the technological, financial, historical, and psychological incentives that make it happen.)

Starbucks has proven to me this morning that if you use burnt coffee beans it is in fact possible to burn cold brew

Hi Fediverse denizens. I've been working on a project I hope will help Fediverse devs make software that federates across ALL services, not just Mastodon-plus-a-few-others.

It's called the Fediverse Schema Observatory and before launching it, I am opening up a public comment period re: safety and privacy.

This post lays out what the software does, what data it records, and why I think it's safe to deploy:

https://asml.cyber.harvard.edu/fediverseobservatory/

Please give feedback here or at the email in the post!

Damn... Fedify is really good. It seems like the ActivityPub library I always wanted for Node applications (rather than a reference server like the one I created for ExpressJS).

I love that it's built so you can take an existing app and quickly drop in the federation features you need (like oh okay I need my application to Follow/Accept/Reject/Undo and have the ability to Create an Article but that's it, cool, Fedify has me covered)

https://fedify.dev/tutorial/basics

Excited to announce that I will be at #fediforum today speed demo-ing my latest project: an ActivityPub data observatory!

This observatory does not collect any user data or metadata. Instead I am looking at the *shape* (aka schema) of data being sent around the fediverse. This will let software devs ask questions like "How is a Mastodon 4.2.0 image post formatted differently from a Misskey 2024.7.0 image post?"

And we'll get real answers based on data rather than on poor documentation.

A friend is raising money to help a Black trans person manage their chronic illness. I know they'd really appreciate any donations:

https://gofund.me/86e165a3

Since January, @kissane and I have been researching governance on Mastodon and Hometown servers of about 80-2000 people. That research is now available!!!

Blog post: https://write.as/fediversalist-papers/releasing-our-findings

Paper: https://fediverse-governance.github.io/

Special thanks to the participants we interviewed, you all were so great.

I am really pleased to announce that I will be joining the Applied Social Media Lab at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center! They exist "to reimagine, rebuild, and reboot social media to serve the public good" and I hope to use my time there to keep on building cool stuff that makes the internet a little nicer and better.

More here: https://tinysubversions.com/notes/joining-asml/