otl

My replies via Mastodon to Lemmy posts don't get distributed as expected. For example:

• Original post: https://lemmy.ml/post/11552444
• A reply via Lemmy: https://ttrpg.network/comment/4965852
• My reply to that: https://hachyderm.io/@otl/111887721960075860

It seems my reply only shows in these Lemmy servers:

• lemmy.ml (the server of the group to which the post was made)
• lemmy.world (the server of the post's author)
• ttrpg.network (the server of the comment's author)

From some other lemmy servers, my comment is not present:

• lemmy.sdf.org: https://lemmy.sdf.org/comment/8124910
• lemmy.one: https://lemmy.one/comment/6912806
• aussie.zone: https://aussie.zone/comment/6414209

I expected that my reply would show on any other Lemmy server with subscriptions to [email protected]. Does that make sense? I'm hoping to help troubleshoot federation like this as I'm super excited about ActivityPub and what it means for the internet! :)

One of my favourite talks on programming. Just wanted to share for others who haven't seen this before.

https://www.crikey.com.au How is it?

Last year I gifted a news junky friend a year subscription to the New York Times. That was cool but they are more interested in Australian stories. Normally they browse the ABC and BBC apps.

With Github so popular now, not everyone is aware of the workflows that git provides out-of-the-box for collaboration. Thought this may pique some people's curiosity :)

Let’s share stories where your automation efforts have been rejected and you can’t quite understand why! Here’s mine.

Hello, world!

I’m in Indonesia at the moment and my internet connections are poor. So having an app that weighs just 20MB is fantastic!

That’s all I really wanted to say. Congrats to the devs on the progress so far!

The design goal of Pikchr is to enable embedded line diagrams in Markdown or other simple markup languages.

Cool project. Created by the same group as SQLite. The scripting language is based on pic(1) but outputs SVG instead of troff.

TL;DR Seeking any advice on making documentaries about things around me!

I've done a couple of short videos as a hobby between jobs. I'm a programmer by trade. It was really fun to make these in particular:

• a short documentary Backpackers In Cairns, Australia During the COVID-19 Pandemic
• a group profile of the NSW Carriage Driving Society.

But these take time that I don't really have any more; I've got a girlfriend and we don't want to spend all that time on the road! I tried to shoot a couple of 90-second news packages for a local news website but it was really hard. I hate politics and I hate that breaking news cycle.

Off the top of my head, here are some things that I think would be fun to shoot and edit:

• Documenting local organised events. Not just the highlights; from setting up and packing down again, mishaps along the way.
• From bin to...? Where our rubbish goes
• Cancelled buses: why bus drivers are so hard to find

I feel embarassed to speak to people about these things. The word "imposter" comes to mind. I don't have any political agenda and I don't care about getting clicks via outrage. It's about discovering how things work - how things really are - and sharing that discovery.

Alternatively I thought about shooting footage and uploading it "raw" to YouTube and/or editorial footage stock sites. From there I could pass it on to local news publications.

Keen to hear any advice on what I could do next. Any YouTube channels which cover this kind of thing in a similar tone?

Lemmy uses the packages olowe.co/lemmy (source), which provides a io/fs filesystem interface to a Lemmy instance, and 9fans.net/go/acme to interact with acme. What you get is an Acme Mail inspired program for Lemmy. As you can see, it's a work in progress!

But it's been fun so far. Sorry that this isn't running on Plan 9 (running on OpenBSD). I'm on the road at the moment and don't have a way to connect to a server right now!

I recently wrote a command-line utility lemmyverse to find communities indexed by Lemmy Explorer. A quick count shows almost 14%(!) of all communities indexed by lemmyverse are junk communities created by a single user @LMAO (reported here):

% lemmyverse . | wc -l
  30376
% lemmyverse enoweiooe | wc -l
   4206

Here's a python script, using no external dependencies, which uses Lemmy's HTTP API to delete all communities that @LMAO moderates:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import json
import urllib.parse
import urllib.request

baseurl = "https://lemmy.world"
username = "admin"
password = "password"

def login(user, passwd):
	url = baseurl+"/api/v3/user/login"
	body = urllib.parse.urlencode({
		"username_or_email": user,
		"password": passwd,
	})
	resp = urllib.request.urlopen(url, body.encode())
	j = json.load(resp)
	return j["jwt"]

def get_user(name):
	query = urllib.parse.urlencode({"username": name})
	resp = urllib.request.urlopen(baseurl+"/api/v3/user?"+query)
	return json.load(resp)

def delete_community(token, id):
	url = baseurl+"/api/v3/community/delete"
	params = {
		"auth": token,
		"community_id": id,
	}
	body = urllib.parse.urlencode(params)
	urllib.request.urlopen(url, body.encode())

token = login(username, password)
user = get_user("LMAO")
for community in user["moderates"]:
	id = community["community"]["id"]
	try:
		delete_community(token, id)
	except Exception as err:
		print("delete community id %d: %s" % (id, err))

Change username and password on lines 8 and 9 to suit.

Hope that helps! :) Thanks for the work you all put in to running this popular instance.