Adding Search
Tonight I started work on writing code to add a search function to this blog. However, not just posts on the blog, also posts I make on social media. So I wrote code for importing posts from Bluesky and Mastodon, the latter mainly for completeness as I don't post there much anymore. It imported my backlog and then I modified the same code to be usable for a nightly cron job.
The search itself is still something I'm wrestling with. Aside from the added sources of content, I am trying to figure out how to best do this.
It's no secret that search is complicated. Which makes this a fun mental challenge.
So I have the most basic parts done, and now it is the gritty details of adding logic for ordering these posts, as well as adding things like spam protection, caching, XSS protection, etc. And then it will be writing the client side code and display functionality.
I'd guess I'm like 30% done.... famous last words. We'll see.
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"Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy"
If it wasn’t already obvious, the last 72 hours have made it crystal clear that it is urgent to build and mainstream alternative, decentralized social media platforms that are resistant to government censorship and control, are not owned by oligarchs and dominated by their algorithms, and in which users own their follower list and can port it elsewhere easily and without restriction.
Relevant to this, I came across this excellent resource for helping people get onto Mastodon and find their community.
I am curious to find someone more knowledgeable than me to dive into the technological implementations of both fediverse and atprotocol infrastructure to understand the longterm prospects for both. My current (ill informed) belief is that fediverse has the better underlying protocol, but Bluesky has the easier onboarding which has given it the short term growth that makes it a more viable longterm option.
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Most popular feeds on Bluesky
I find this list interesting. Bluesky just recently crossed 28M users, and yet on this list the most popular feed has been liked just 35k times. Custom feeds are one of the marquee features of the platform, and yet it's so minisculely utilized by users.
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"Like ‘old Twitter’: The scientific community finds a new home on Bluesky"
In July 2023, Adam Kucharski asked his Twitter followers: What platform do you think you will be spending the most time on a year from now? Like many scientists on Twitter, Kucharski, a mathematical modeler of infectious diseases, was increasingly frustrated with changes to the platform since Elon Musk bought it in October 2022. But of the more than 1300 people who responded to his poll, the vast majority expected to keep posting on Twitter, which was renamed X just 2 weeks later. About one-quarter were banking on Threads, Meta's Twitter rival. Only about 7% chose Bluesky.
Now, that has changed, in a big way. Although academics mostly stuck with X in the year after the poll, Bluesky has rapidly emerged as the new online gathering place for researchers, Kucharski among them. They are drawn by its Twitter-like feel, welcoming features, and, increasingly, the critical mass of scientists in many fields who have already made the move. "The majority has spoken, and researchers are moving en masse" to Bluesky, says De-Shaine Murray, a neuroscientist at Yale University who has also migrated to Bluesky.
"It's just gone completely crazy," says Mike Young, a science communicator in Denmark who gives social media workshops to scientists. He and his colleague Lasse Hjorth Madsen did an analysis in August mapping science communities on Bluesky. They found more than 20,000 influential scientists—people on the platform who were followed by at least 30 other scientists in the same network. When they repeated the analysis last week with an increased threshold of 40 scientist followers, the new number of influential scientists was almost 40,000. It is likely to be many times that now, Young says.
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Finally found a web client which combines Mastodon and Bluesky into a single interface! https://bsky.statuzer.com/
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Behind the ATprotocol design
(I'm still working on properly generating Bluesky embeds automatically, so I'm just linking to it and posting a screenshot for now.)
This thread was an interesting look at some of the thinking that lead to the ATprotocol (the underlying system for Bluesky) decisions.
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This is a test of making posts from my blog to both Bluesky and Mastodon.
Edit:
Success!
I intend to give myself control over which to post to, but right now it defaults to both. I'm not bringing the bot posts over to Bluesky because I feel strongly about being able to delete them automatically, but we're on our way.
The base PHP came from James Cridland's blog. It's rudimentary for just posting text for now, but we'll get there for the rest.
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I spent yesterday trying to get the DNS change needed to verify a domain name account change for Bluesky. The issues were all on my end, but I eventually figured it out.
The biggest issue was that I forgot that I no longer managed DNS for this domain with the domain registrar, and so when I made a change there it wasn't actually a public thing. Once I realized that, I made the change on my own domain and kept waiting for it to proliferate, only to realize this morning I had typoed the subdomain for the DNS verification. It's 'atproto' but I had typed 'atphoto'.
As soon as I realized that, it was just a minute before I could get the domain verified.
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Testing Bluesky embeds
It's a lovely simple structure, if it works. I had a post for this before but pulled it down while triaging some of the site oddities this morning.
<iframe src="https://bsky.link/?url=[Post URL]"></iframe>
