In between seasonal illness and work, I've been doing a quiet #DecemberAdventure ! The goal of which is to figure out how to do ActivityPub on a static site. This is my third attempt. I'm also not the first to do it, but the plot twist is that I consider a static site a bunch of files on a server, and not cloud gitlab CI vercel firebase hocus pocus. So I'm doing it a little differently.

First few days were about getting an AP "actor" for my site. Meet @actor

Its a static site, so you can not interact with it (follow it). Think of it as another read-only representation of this site. It already does HTML and RSS, now it will have ActivityPub.

Then I spent some days getting posts to show up through ActivityPub. That now also "works". (There is a bug with image handling that I am too lazy to fix. Or, more accurately, Hugo's templating language is too discouraging for me to look into it.)

Try it by searching for one my blog entries in the Mastodon search: https://test.roelof.info/log/pdc24-make-friends-not-art/

This worked super inconsistently until today I realized I had to do some so-called content negotiation on the web server. So now if you ask for a page on my site in your browser, you get an HTML representation. If something speaking AP asks, it gets AP.

Now the adventure presents me with forking paths. Where should I go next?

"At once time there were over 50 alternative funds operating in the U.S. to serve as repositories for money which is not paid in taxes to the federal government. Today, there are still several around the country that are still active. A portion of the money in each fund is given away each year by its members for a broad range of positive, life-affirming purposes.

In 1971, war tax resisters in the San Francisco Bay Area formed the People’s Life Fund (PLF). Every year PLF members put out a call for proposals and select local projects that are doing the work we wish our taxes were supporting."

Northern California War Tax Resistance
https://www.nowartax.org/

"Hi, what can I get you?"

"I'll try one of your slopjitos!"

"I'm so sorry, we just ran out of WHITE LIME LAIVES LIME ULCE SODA SODA"

"Oh, just a sparkling water then."

#ai

A few years ago there was an interesting essay where the author retraced how "web design" split in to "front-end" and "back-end" and with that the labour also split along gender lines with corresponding differences in compensation and status. I did not save it for some reason and this is impossible to find with search.

Anyone recall this one?

#askfedi #hivemind

That terrifying realization when "the terrifying realization that a critical thing in society/technology/life depends on the efforts of just a few" applies to more domains than you thought:

"In the Netherlands there are many species of plants and animals whose condition is so critical that their survival is dependent on the efforts of one person or working group. These species go extinct if this person stops."

Via https://mastodon.green/@sanderturnhout/115297930472551174

What do people use to keep track of visual references?

Tomorrow Malmö based #hackerspace Lodis is organizing a meetup to write physical postcards to MEPs to oppose #chatcontrol

Join us or organize your own postcard writing session with friends!

More information at https://nej.lodis.se

#StopChatControl

The Plastic Bag: From a Mundane Swedish Innovation to the World’s Oceans

"The plastic bag is a mundane consumer product. It consists of just one inexpensive material, intended to carry other, more important, items. It is one of those objects that becomes more visible when it is out of context. But the plastic bag easily ends up there, out of context, demanding our attention. This essay explores how the plastic bag became an iconic symbol of environmental degradation, with a special focus on Sweden, the very place where the bag was invented. By combining perspectives from marketing and new materialism, this essay deepens our understanding of how the plastic bag was institutionalised."

https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/whpeh.63861480327361#core-fn14-1

#plastic #bag #sweden #history