User:Bw3.dev
My Setup
My website is running a community fork of microblog.pub (with some custom modifications), which is, as its documentation describes, "a self-hosted, single-user, ActivityPub powered microblog" with IndieWeb features. In other words, it is sort of like running a personal Fediverse instance and using it as a blog.
- My website directly functions as my ActivityPub profile (as can be seen on other instances). Unlike some techniques I've seen for layering an ActivityPub profile on top of a personal blog (microblog.pub works sort of the other way around), my username isn't also my domain name (@bw3.dev@bw3.dev), but is separate (
@0x3b0b@bw3.dev ). I might have done things differently if I had come across either the Bridgy Fed approach or some of the proposals for how to handle domain-as-actor sooner.
- The documentation describes it as the profile being exposed as a microblog, but in context of how profiles look on most mastodon-alikes, it's really more like the local timeline in some ways: unlisted posts don't appear there, and there are separate views for notes and articles, but not for notes and "notes and replies."
- It uses microformats, and sends and receives webmentions.
- It shares some infrastructure with my personal Matrix instance, which has the side effect that sometimes updating one may affect the other.
- I have modified the software so that I can use permalinks derived from newbase60-encoded Unix timestamps (currently with precision to the minute, although that prevents me from posting twice in the same minute), which is shorter than the default of using UUIDs, and lets me determine a permalink in advance if I really want to - potentially necessary if I wanted to syndicate to somewhere I couldn't control the URL and then include a syndication link in the canonical post.
- I found where microblog.pub's initial support for custom routes was added, and figured out how to use it to host non-federated arbitrary pages if I want (such as About, License, or Site). This also gives me a way to host content that is accessible to the public, but not federated. It doesn't automatically send webmentions, but I could do that manually (until it hurts) if I wanted.
Itches
- This is sort of a meta-itch, as it concerns my wiki page here at least as much as it does my website. I feel like the history of my scratched itches is almost as potentially relevant and useful as my current itches, hence the section below, but I am still not sure whether either I or the community think this is the best place to capture them.
- I might want a way to publish something that is handled like a normal post, that will be accessible to anyone who has the permalink, but that does not clutter my followers' feeds. I think official support for this is planned (in conjunction with more convenient support for posting an IndieWeb reply to something that isn't an ActivityPub object), but I may try my own riff on it before official support lands. I am pretty sure one way I could do it would be bypassing the check for whether the actor viewing a Mentioned Actors Only post is allowed to see it, based on a custom indicator in the content - possibly an emoji or a tag. I think it would be more appropriate in an ActivityPub context if I could do this by addressing it to the public pseudo-actor, but I'm not sure I could figure out how to do that before it became too tedious to be worth it.
- The home page, articles page, and tag pages are marked up as h-feeds, but the RSS and Atom feeds include everything I post as Public (notes and articles both) with no ability to subscribe separately to a post type or tag.
- I am thinking of trying to make it more clear how people can interact with my posts. Currently it works fine for Fediverse natives encountering me from their instances, and there's guidance on my individual post pages for doing that if such people are looking at my site instead (although that relies on their instance having its remote interaction endpoint working correctly, which at one point the instance where my other account is didn't), but the "Remote Follow" link is often the only indication this is possible from my main feed, and my Webmention compatibility isn't readily evident.
- Replies via commentpara.de are displayed as webmentions but not threaded as comments, and I'm not sure why yet, since a reply from https://webmention.rocks did get threaded.
Done/Scratched/Deferred
- I now have a convenient way to include pages on my site - things that aren't notes or articles, that I may want to edit regularly, that shouldn't be in my feeds, and that I have to send webmentions for if I want to (and I'm not sure what would happen if someone sent a webmention to one of those pages).
- With Twitter's API changes, backfeed is now prohibitively expensive, and Bridgy syndication is no longer a thing. The free API would be sufficient if I wanted to syndicate, so I might consider that someday, but for now I don't consider the audience worth the effort. The lack of editing support on both ends means the only way I could include a u-syndication link in the original post is to plan the exact minute I will publish the post, tweet a link to it first (which will be broken for a few seconds until I finish the process), add the twitter link to the original, and then post it during the correct minute.Without backfeed it's even less appealing.