Time for a proper #introduction!
I'm an #HCI researcher with a CS background, working at UniBw Munich in Michael Koch's team. My current project is about people's social behavior in front of large #AmbientDisplays.
If academic articles are your jam, you can find all (!) of mine in full (!!) at https://fietkau.science/publications - and not just as PDFs, but as responsive web pages too. 📱
#OpenAccess
Detailed intro at https://fietkau.me/ and a bit more in 🧵
⬇
️ for the curious 😀
My personal Mastodon instance appears to be running! If I'm gonna go for it, I figure I better dive right into the deep end, as the part-time self-hosting enthusiast that I am. :) Let's see how this goes!
My intention for this place: Show slightly more courage to connect with people I respect, let myself be slightly more open about things I find interesting or joyful, and feel slightly less beholden to the no-fun-allowed kind of "personal branding".
@FediTips@social.growyourown.services We can't be telling people “don't worry too much about all that server stuff for now” and also “oh you don't know if your account was on mstdn.social or mas.to, then you're just outta luck sorry”.
We also know that asking fedi newcomers to pick their own server does not work. Your suggestion addresses this point.
My conclusion is that having a default server for all newbies (not invited by a friend) is the best practical approach. Somewhere people can get their bearings.
@FediTips@social.growyourown.services And yes, I understand the cons.
IMHO the path forward is to improve the scope & simplicity of the account moving process, and then encouraging people on m.s to use it after some time. Not to abolish the default server.
I've been holding my tongue on this since @andypiper@macaw.social said Mastodon may reply to this with a blog post. But I hope we can acknowledge that a “rotating servers” suggestion is incomplete without an idea to (unobtrusively but reliably) teach people about their own server.
@FediTips@social.growyourown.services I feel like when people ask for randomly assigned servers, there's a strange forgetfulness about which specific problem the default server was meant to solve.
Among people who signed up in 2022, the biggest reason (by far!) why people involuntarily left – that is, wanted to keep using Mastodon but failed to – was that they changed phones or browsers or just wanted to sign in on another device, and couldn't because they didn't know what server they were on.
@FediTips@social.growyourown.services We can't be telling people “don't worry too much about all that server stuff for now” and also “oh you don't know if your account was on mstdn.social or mas.to, then you're just outta luck sorry”.
We also know that asking fedi newcomers to pick their own server does not work. Your suggestion addresses this point.
My conclusion is that having a default server for all newbies (not invited by a friend) is the best practical approach. Somewhere people can get their bearings.
While reading FEP-044f, I had an idea for getting around that requirement. It's difficult to explain without getting extremely technical, but I think it could be interesting for platform implementers who want to offer blanket quotability to Mastodon users, but who have shied away from FEP-044f for its state management requirements.
Basically, a quote authorization stamp payload (see https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/044f/fep-044f.md#example-of-quoteauthorization) has to contain the IDs of the quoting post and the quoted post.
🧵 4/6
That's why it's not possible to simply reply “ya sure” to every quote verification request. The response has to affirmatively state which quote it is for.
So I thought, instead of keeping a list of prior quotes in a local database, why not embed them in the ID (URI) of the verification stamp? That way the code could simply echo them back out for any future request.
Turns out this works! You can see an example here: https://fietkau.software/daily_rucks/ap/quoteAuth?stamp=2025-11-08;https%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%2Fsome-post
🧵 5/6
This bureaucracy is necessary for verification of consent, but it is a bit of a pain for software implementers who want to give blanket quoting permissions, like bot authors.
Making your account quotable by Mastodon takes more than a simple declaration: it has to have the ability to respond affirmatively to quote requests, and to confirm or deny the legitimacy of existing quotes.
Generally this means having to at least keep track of everyone who has quoted you.
🧵 3/6
While reading FEP-044f, I had an idea for getting around that requirement. It's difficult to explain without getting extremely technical, but I think it could be interesting for platform implementers who want to offer blanket quotability to Mastodon users, but who have shied away from FEP-044f for its state management requirements.
Basically, a quote authorization stamp payload (see https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/044f/fep-044f.md#example-of-quoteauthorization) has to contain the IDs of the quoting post and the quoted post.
🧵 4/6
You may have read that Mastodon quote posts are technically opt-in. To give you the options to opt out of being quoted or to revoke a prior quote permission, each post that tries to quote you applies for an individualized “permission slip” behind the scenes.
This permission slip actually points back to your own server, allowing you to revoke a quote post permission without needing the cooperation of the server where you're being quoted.
Full technical details: https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/044f/fep-044f.md
🧵 2/6
This bureaucracy is necessary for verification of consent, but it is a bit of a pain for software implementers who want to give blanket quoting permissions, like bot authors.
Making your account quotable by Mastodon takes more than a simple declaration: it has to have the ability to respond affirmatively to quote requests, and to confirm or deny the legitimacy of existing quotes.
Generally this means having to at least keep track of everyone who has quoted you.
🧵 3/6
I have added Mastodon-style (FEP-044f) quote post compatibility to my @DailyRucks@fietkau.software bot. You can now quote post the daily voice lines as much as you want! 🥳
This would be noteworthy on its own if there weren't already a bunch of non-Mastodon implementations, but I'm actually late to the party. WordPress, Bonfire, micro.blog, dotmakeup, and ActivityBot all got there before I did.
However, I think my approach is novel for being stateless. Thread incoming.
🧵 1/6
#Fediverse #FediDev #ActivityPub
You may have read that Mastodon quote posts are technically opt-in. To give you the options to opt out of being quoted or to revoke a prior quote permission, each post that tries to quote you applies for an individualized “permission slip” behind the scenes.
This permission slip actually points back to your own server, allowing you to revoke a quote post permission without needing the cooperation of the server where you're being quoted.
Full technical details: https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/044f/fep-044f.md
🧵 2/6
I have added Mastodon-style (FEP-044f) quote post compatibility to my @DailyRucks@fietkau.software bot. You can now quote post the daily voice lines as much as you want! 🥳
This would be noteworthy on its own if there weren't already a bunch of non-Mastodon implementations, but I'm actually late to the party. WordPress, Bonfire, micro.blog, dotmakeup, and ActivityBot all got there before I did.
However, I think my approach is novel for being stateless. Thread incoming.
🧵 1/6
#Fediverse #FediDev #ActivityPub
Time for a proper #introduction!
I'm an #HCI researcher with a CS background, working at UniBw Munich in Michael Koch's team. My current project is about people's social behavior in front of large #AmbientDisplays.
If academic articles are your jam, you can find all (!) of mine in full (!!) at https://fietkau.science/publications - and not just as PDFs, but as responsive web pages too. 📱 #OpenAccess
Detailed intro at https://fietkau.me/ and a bit more in 🧵 ⬇️ for the curious 😀
My personal Mastodon instance appears to be running! If I'm gonna go for it, I figure I better dive right into the deep end, as the part-time self-hosting enthusiast that I am. :) Let's see how this goes!
My intention for this place: Show slightly more courage to connect with people I respect, let myself be slightly more open about things I find interesting or joyful, and feel slightly less beholden to the no-fun-allowed kind of "personal branding".
Julian Fietkau