#dev 2023-04-29

2023-04-29 UTC
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[0x3b0b] When a post links to things, MBP picks one of them (I haven't actually figured out exactly how) and renders a link to it under the post (with an icon to the left, sometimes) but what it uses for the text of the link seems to be the title of the destination page
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[tantek] yeah maybe I'll repurpose my tweet POSSE code for my post permalink page titles
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[tantek] what's a good length of summary text for a link preview?
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[0x3b0b] I found 200 characters to be short enough I don't find it overwhelming, long enough it seemed adequate, and at the font and window sizes I usually view my own site it's about three lines which is around the same height a preview will take if it finds an image to put next to it. So that's my take on it as a consumer, I guess.
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[tantek] cool. roughly summarized here: https://indieweb.org/link-preview#summary_text_limits — feel free to edit/improve upon that!
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@HeeySora ↩️ well it's not a beta for nothing no DMs, no blocks, lacking a lot of things (understandably!) the protocol is super interesting though and has less opportunities for negativity than even mastodon/WebMention/etc (twitter.com/_/status/1652121476982530054)
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gRegor [citation needed]
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aaronpk Bridgy twitter is totally gone now right?
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aaronpk i just realized that my own twitter bot that sends things to my reader is still working so I should probably hook that up to backfeed replies to my website
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[tantek] yes and yes
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[0x3b0b] I haven't yet broken the habit of thinking DID means...well, technically in the context I was thinking of it means "Direct Inward Dial," until just now when I went to make sure I had it right I was thinking it means "Dial In Direct"
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[snarfed] aaronpk are you signing up for the $100/mo? otherwise that bot will die tomorrow, right? same with Loqi, etc
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[KevinMarks] DID means "Doesn't Interoperate, Dorks"
gRegor, IWSlackGateway, oodani, [KevinMarks], [KevinMarks]1, jan61, gerben_, Kaja_, wagle_, [TMichelleMoore], [tantek], gxt__, geoffo and [snarfed] joined the channel
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[snarfed] today's the big day! Twitter API apocalypse day. nothing new has happened yet as far as we can tell though. maybe Elon forgot about it? https://twittercommunity.com/t/t-minus-6-days/191342/4
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aaronpk huh
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ludovicchabant hey here, I'm using mf2py to parse my website, and I see that if I write an `alt` description for an image, it gets included in the post's `name`
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ludovicchabant I assume it's because of the mf2 rules, and not a bug: http://microformats.org/wiki/microformats2-parsing#parsing_a_p-_property
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ludovicchabant but I'd like to, well, not do that and keep the `alt` description separate... is that possible?
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ludovicchabant (context: I want to use the `alt` attribute on images to use as the "description for the visually impaired" when I syndicate over to Mastodon)
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[snarfed] Hmm! alt text is a somewhere newer mf2 parsing feature. Background: https://github.com/microformats/microformats2-parsing/issues/2
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Loqi [preview] [aaronpk] #2 image alt text is lost during parsing
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[snarfed] Based on https://github.com/microformats/microformats2-parsing/issues/2#issuecomment-392608361 , it should be separate from your h-entry's name
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Loqi [preview] [kartikprabhu] Here are the proposed changes to the spec to account for `alt` attribute. Add a new section 1.5 with title "parse an `img` element for `src` and `alt`" with the steps - if `img[alt]` - return a new `{}` structure with - `value`: the `src`...
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ludovicchabant [snarfed]: ah right that looks indeed like what I want, thanks. It looks like it was approved a few years ago? So the problem is mf2py not having implemented it yet, or is there something else?
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[snarfed] mf2py has implemented it, but it's behind an opt in feature flag sadly. try passing img_with_alt=True to mf2py.parse()
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[snarfed] https://github.com/microformats/mf2py#experimental-features
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Loqi [preview] [microformats] mf2py: Microformats2 parser written in Python
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ludovicchabant Ah thanks [snarfed] ! Didn't spot that :D
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[snarfed] lucivocchabant I filed https://github.com/microformats/mf2py/issues/182
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ludovicchabant [snarfed]: thanks!
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Soni do we have search yet?
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Soni webring-like search
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Soni being search pals with someone sounds fun
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bkil https://indieweb.org/IndieWeb_Search https://indieweb.org/discuss#Search
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bkil You mean creating web rings where all search queries would be limited to returning pages from member websites?
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bkil For search pals in general: https://indieweb.org/YaCy
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[snarfed] Soni https://snarfed.org/2018-11-30_indieweb-google-custom-search-engine
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Soni you index your own website, and then you share that index with your search pals/webring. the webring doesn't have to crawl your website and you still get effective search. and the fact that it's shared means there's a way for folks to find your website through search.
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Soni (honestly fuck crawlers. waste of resources tbh. we should change how this whole thing works tbh.)
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bkil I like your idea. It would play well with my concept of a backend-optional, client-side search & indexing system.
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bkil One limitation that you need to keep in mind is that you should expect a "normal", popular thematic web ring to contain hundreds of web sites, and even if a single fetch per index was somehow sufficient, a hundred HTTP requests is pretty expensive to answer a search result, especially as you iterate on it. I'd hence probably implement some form of volunteer mirroring as well to better scale it.
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[snarfed] Soni is proposing that each site build a snapshot index of itself and exchange that with other sites in the background. user searches on a given site then search all of those snapshots locally
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[snarfed] definitely an interesting way to handle the fanout explosion of naively designed distributed search
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[snarfed] I don't really buy decentralized search ideas in general, I don't think I've ever seen a meaningfully decentralized search engine that actually works, Yacy notwithstanding. but I'm all for trying this one!
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bkil I think YaCy is designed to query all of its peers in the federation in real time as it is implausible to replicate a whole WAN-crawler - it's more about physics than being naive. The reason it failed to gain traction was more about how it handled ranking and compositing results. It could probably be easily adjusted for this Small Web use case to always replicate the index and only query locally.