Write.as Development @writeas_dev@abunchtell.com

Was wondering why #Pleroma wasn't working (i.e. finding Write.as accounts) -- looks like it doesn't include acct: in the webfinger request. Going to see if removing the requirement for that scheme on our end fixes it.

Once boosting is in there, things will be good enough to go.

I think I'm going to roll out federation slowly so I can catch any catastrophic issues early and before they affect more people.

I think I know how to implement boosting... doing that next.

Had forgotten to support deletion of federated posts -- that's in there now.

Also on the topic of #privacy, I'm building it so that readers get privacy by default, too.

Individual follows, boosts, and favorites are not shown to the author. In the future, if anything, authors will see a sum of each of these in their normal blog stats (e.g. "You have 46 followers in the fediverse")

Also because of this fact, federation will be opt-in.

Public blogs will automatically be discoverable via #webfinger and have their outboxes accessible. And since this is a paid feature and I want federation to be free, I'll add an option to let free users enable federation on their Unlisted blogs.

#ActivityPub implementation really is bare-bones, but more right now is unnecessary. There are many unanswered questions, especially around privacy.

For example, what happens when a user changes their blog from Public to Private or Password-protected? The existence of an account in the fediverse gives away information we don't otherwise divulge on Write.as.

Okay, going to try to kick this federation out the door tomorrow.

The robustness I wanted isn't worth setting things back as much as it's going to. Essentially, it'll mean some statuses won't be retried if an instance isn't available to receive them. But all data will be there, messages will be verified, etc.

Also in progress: automatic password resetting (finally)

Considering adding a simple dig tool in the web app to verify DNS settings for custom domains... Have noticed a couple domains set up with multiple A records, causing SSL activation to fail and other weird issues.

#notetoself

Working at a coffee shop in Munich today where the wifi apparently only supports IPv6. So much of the web is broken, including a few of our less frequently-used sites that I just noticed.

Fixed all sites except analytics, which won't affect anyone.

Maybe it's as simple as forwarding the object on to the actors mentioned in the event.

Hmm, apparently I need to do something on my end to handle boosting / "Announce"-ing. I just boosted a post that came in from @matt and several following instances pinged it, but it's not showing up anywhere else -- including on this profile.

Noticed https://fediverse.network crawling for stats, so I made a #golang library for adding NodeInfo to any federated site, and then added it in.

https://github.com/writeas/go-nodeinfo

Made a small script for generating simple avatars: https://code.as/writeas/text-graphic/src/branch/master/avatar.sh

Okay, knocking out ActivityPub support this week. First, generating avatars for everyone.

Working on some updates to albums/galleries on @snap_as today, including a new interface to manage them all.

As part of these changes we'll start tracking pageviews on albums, just like we do on @write_as blogs.

Adding some caching on the backend to better handle bursts of traffic.

Today Write.as serves over 1.2 million page views a month, plus another 2 million+ API calls -- all very manageable on their own, but hundreds of requests at the same second (e.g. from a new link shared on Mastodon) slows things down a bit.

Just sent out a small fix to the iOS app -- thought this was fixed before, but now it definitely is. Should be available to everyone in the next few days.

Also, added a new "Bugs" category on the forum for future reports.

https://discuss.write.as/t/write-as-ios-app/39