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 !privacy@lemmy.ml. 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.

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

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!

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?

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.

lemmyverse: search lemmy communities from the command-line. Thanks to the data HTTP API from lemmyverse.net! This is not really as polished as I like but, hey, in the interest of having a lively Lemmy I thought I'd share anyway :)

Usage

lemmyverse searches community names and descriptions using a regular expression:

lemmyverse pattern

Find communities about motorcycles:

$ lemmyverse motorcycle
120024@lemmy.world      All Things motorcycles
20hirnzelle@feddit.ch   All Things motorcycles
7810322@lemmy.world     All Things motorcycles
bmwmotorrad@lemmy.world Community for BMW motorcycles. A place to share
bootstrappable@slrpnk.net       A community to discuss all things BMW cars & motorcycles.\nFeel free to show off your new vehicle/parts
buell@lemmy.world       A discussion area for Buell motorcycles.
motorcycle_logistics@lemmy.world        A community for pictures and videos of people using motorcycles to transport things in a creative manner.\n\nThis includes
motorcycles@feddit.de   This community is for all things motorcycle related. At a later point and with enough traction gained
...

Find communities for the Plan 9 operating system:

$ lemmyverse '(plan9)|(Plan 9)'
plan9@lemmy.sdf.org     Discussions on the Plan9 operating system.

Why?

I run relatively slow hardware and I'm travelling in Bali, Indonesia at the moment. Loading lemmyverse.net in a web browser takes ages and gets the laptop fans spinning (it's hot here!). So I had some fun creating a tiny command-line program to find Lemmy communities using classic UNIX tools awk(1), tr(1), grep(1) etc.

More info

See the man page:

LEMMYVERSE(1)               General Commands Manual              LEMMYVERSE(1)

NAME
     lemmyverse - find lemmy communities

SYNOPSIS
     lemmyverse pattern

DESCRIPTION
     lemmyverse finds Lemmy communities indexed by lemmyverse.net using the
     given regular expression as interpreted by grep(1).  Both the names and
     descriptions of the communities are searched.

     On first run, a local community database must be generated.  The full
     community index is downloaded from https://lemmyverse.net using curl(1),
     transformed, then stored in the user cache directory.  To regenerate the
     database, remove the file and run lemmyverse again.

FILES
     communities
             Community database from lemmyverse.net.

ENVIRONMENT
     lemmyverse uses the following environment variables:

     XDG_CACHE_DIR
             The directory to store the community database.  If unset,
             $HOME/.cache/lemmyverse is used.

EXAMPLES
     Find communities for the Plan 9 operating system:
           lemmyverse '(plan9)|(Plan 9)'

     List all communities from the instance lemmy.sdf.org:
           lemmyverse '@lemmy.sdf.org'

EXIT STATUS
     The lemmyverse utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

SEE ALSO
     grep(1), curl(1), https://lemmyverse.net

Go project tech lead Russ Cox talks about a technique to make programs clearer using concurrency.

An OpenBSD developer and the one-man-band behind Pushover gives some advice after 10 years of running a public HTTP API. It's interesting as big companies are happy to publish articles about all the fancy stuff they developed to run some API, but you don't always hear from a sole developer running a service for such a long time.

There's something about the consistency that is missing nowadays.