Activity tagged "social media"

Read:
“Twitterlike is a Bad Shape”.
Coyote in its blog. Published .
Twitter and its imitators have adopted a structural design that is fundamentally bad for people. This isn't just a matter of who's in charge; it's a problem with the thing itself. Forcing users to adhere to a tight character limit, discouraging link culture, preventing people from editing their own posts, steering people into sharing things they hate, incentivizing rage bait with trending feeds, subjecting people to decontextualized encounters, encouraging conflict by discouraging tags, and leaving users powerless to clean up the resulting mess—all of this is bad shape.
Posted:

Great piece on BlueSky and enshittification by Cory Doctorow . “I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will.” I also really appreciate his point that it’s not the blockchain venture capital that leads to enshittification, it’s the venture capital.

Cory is a fellow POSSE-er (and major inspiration to me when I adopted the practice), and has opted not to use Bluesky. Personally, I’ve gone the route of using the platforms that interest me, even the enshittification-prone ones like Bluesky and Threads, but hedging my bets by plugging them into my POSSE system where they can just as easily be unplugged if need be.

“Bluesky and enshittification”.
Cory Doctorow in Pluralistic.
I'm not on Bluesky and I don't have any plans to join it anytime soon. I wrote about this in 2023: I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will.
Read:
“Coming home”.
Mandy Brown in A Working Library. Published .
Some weeks ago, I quietly shipped a new content type on A Working Library, such that I am now writing short, social-shaped posts on my site and then sending them off to the various platforms. This is not a novel mode of publishing, but rather one borrowed and adapted from the POSSE model (“publish on your site, syndicate elsewhere”) developed by the IndieWeb community. While one of the reasons oft declared for using POSSE is the ability to own your content, I’m less interested in ownership than I am in context. Writing on my own site has very different affordances: I’m not typing into a little box, but writing in a text file. I’m not surrounded by other people’s thinking, but located within my own body of work. As I played with setting this up, I could immediately feel how that would change the kinds of things I would say, and it felt good. Really good. Like putting on a favorite t-shirt, or coming home to my solid, quiet house after a long time away.
Posted:
Infra stack: from AWS to on-prem. AWS was becoming too costly, so Bluesky moved over to dedicated data centers and bare-metal machines.

That's not something you read every day.

“Building Bluesky: a Distributed Social Network (Real-World Engineering Challenges)”.
Gergely Orosz and Elin Nilsson in The Pragmatic Engineer.
Bluesky is built by around 10 engineers, and has amassed 5 million users since publicly launching in February this year. A deep dive into novel design decisions, moving off AWS, and more.
Posted:

Hosting Ozone behind nginx

Bluesky has released Ozone, a community moderation tool for the network. Although all Bluesky users get the default moderation out of the box, they can also subscribe to any of a number of user-created and run "labelers" (which you can see in this Bluesky list, or on this website).

Some of them label posts with content that could trigger various phobias, some label posts from Twitter, some label AI generated images, some hide spoilers, and some label... posts of beans. Others build an additional entire moderation layer on top of the defaults.

Honestly, I think it's a pretty cool approach to moderation.

So, of course, I wanted to try it out for myself. I've created a labeler to mark crypto spam: @cryptolabeler.w3igg.com. If you subscribe to the labeler, you'll see some blatant cryptospam posts marked with labels (or hidden, if you choose). You'll also see an option in the reporting screen to report posts to my labeler service:

Select moderator To whom would you like to send this report? Bluesky Moderation Service @moderation.bsky.app Crypto Labeler @cryptolabeler.w3igg.com

The setup guide is pretty straightforward, but because it's so new, it doesn't have much detail about running Ozone with different infrastructure. Because I'm running the labeler service on a VPS I use for a few different things, and because I already have nginx running there, I didn't want to stand up Caddy alongside it. So, in case it's helpful to others, here's how I got Ozone running behind nginx:

  1. Follow the HOSTING.md instructions, but skip the "Create the Caddyfile" step.
  2. After copying the compose.yaml file, delete the entire caddy: block.
  3. Configure nginx as a reverse proxy. Here's the relevant block in my configuration:
server {
    server_name ozone.w3igg.com;

    listen 443 ssl; # managed by Certbot
    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/ozone.w3igg.com/fullchain.pem; # managed by Certbot
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/ozone.w3igg.com/privkey.pem; # managed by Certbot
    include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf; # managed by Certbot
    ssl_dhparam /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem; # managed by Certbot

    location / {
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header Host $http_host;

        # WebSocket support
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";

        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3000;
    }
}

Lines 4–8 are autogenerated by Certbot and shouldn't be added manually. If you want to use Certbot/Let's Encrypt for your SSL certificates, the command is: sudo certbot --nginx -d ozone.w3igg.com (obviously replacing ozone.w3igg.com with your own domain).

I got tripped up while setting this up because I didn't realize Ozone requires a websockets connection. Lines 17–19 should handle that, and Ozone has added some instructions to HOSTING.md to describe how to verify websocket connections are working. Note that if your domain is behind Cloudflare/Fastly/etc. this may require more wrangling.

For more detail on labelers, check out this great blog post by Kairi !