#dev 2026-02-03

2026-02-03 UTC
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[Al_Abut] Now that I think about it, I was more keying off of the idea of explaining decentralization. That was the cardinal sin of Mastodon when they had all the initial Twitter exodus attention. The idea that they needed to “educate users” by forcing them into picking a server (without a default fallback option that didn't come until later) is a breathtakingly bad piece of UX. One that they recognized and publicly admitted but it was too little
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[Al_Abut] too late.
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[Al_Abut] If I remember the timeline correctly, Bluesky was still a private beta and so they got to quietly watch Mastodon drop the ball hard so hard that their niche trajectory was practically set in stone. That's why I'm not surprised that they're orders of magnitude larger than Mastodon despite coming on the scene later.
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[Al_Abut] There might be a parallel to be made there with telling people interested in having their own site to pick a domain name or hosting provider.
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[tantek] btrem, I hear your point about "arguably a misuse of css" and behavior vs presentation. it's a boundary I have struggled most of my entire career with CSS. over time I have had more mixed feelings about it, not less. I don't have a good answer.
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osteophage ulhar4409[d]: Re: Bluesky, there are some links on the wiki page expanding on that (in agreement with you).
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osteophage [Al_Abut]: Re: growing fast despite launching later, Bluesky had a lot of other PR advantages, but yeah I do think having only one website to choose from was (in a way) one of them.
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osteophage Not sure how coherent those last two posts were for folks across the bridge, but the first was a reply to Ulhar and the second was a reply to Al_Abut.
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[jeremycherfas] Ha. And a propos of that, I really do like WithKnown as one of the most competent IndieWeb-ready CMS around, but lawks! is it a mess to tinker with. Having successfully migrated to a new host and persuaded it to use the CSS stylesheet it always used in the past, it still cannot find photos. Maybe later.
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[jeremycherfas] I wonder, again, how portable “my” data really are, with no export available. Maybe from the RSS? Or scrape the HTML? Or maybe Jottit will have an importer.
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[simonbc] No importer yet, but I've been thinking about it. Jottit stores everything as markdown in git, so importing is really just converting to markdown files. If your site has an RSS feed, that's probably the easiest path.
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[simonbc] I'd be happy to script a conversion. Of course totally up to you if you want to import it into Jottit or some other platform 🙂
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[jeremycherfas] Right ow, I would leap at the chance, although the honest truth is that I have not yet looked into Jottit in any depth. Off to do that.
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[jeremycherfas] One of the great things about WithKnown is that it is easy to have a distinct feed for each type of post, which could make importing easier.
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[jeremycherfas] Linking to my existing custom domain is obviously great. And from what I see, I could host the built site in my S3-compatible storage. Is that right?
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[Al_Abut] [jeremycherfas] I don't know much about withknown (pun intended) - what do you like about it?
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[simonbc] Distinct feeds per post type would make importing cleaner: we could map each to a separate collection (a collection in Jottit is just a folder of pages sorted by date, typically used for a blog).
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[simonbc] Custom domains: yes, supported.
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[simonbc] Fair warning: Jottit is still experimental, but stabilizing quickly.
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[simonbc] S3: Jottit hosts your site, but you can export anytime, both the source markdown and the built HTML. So you could self-host on S3 if you wanted. You always own your files.
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[jeremycherfas] Thank you [simonbc]++
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Loqi [simonbc] has 1 karma in this channel over the last year (4 in all channels)
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[jeremycherfas] I’m doing the best I can to diagnose, and will soon publish a plaintiff cry for help. I may well give up and take the plunge with something experimental. The issue now is that I have no idea where all my uploaded images are, and I suspect even the RSS feeds would not find them (though I have not yet tried that).
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[jeremycherfas] [Al_Abut] It is a lovely CMS made by [benatwork] of this parish that is fully equipped for IndieWeb goodness and works out of the box and is no longer supported. It also has a database structure that is way beyond my pay grade.
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khurtwilliams Fixed IndieNews submissions issue. Issue was content negotiation between ActivityPub plugin and XRay parser. Solution: mu-plugin based on David Shanske's workaround, updated for current plugin version.
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khurtwilliams https://github.com/Automattic/wordpress-activitypub/issues/2857
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IWDiscord <k​hurtwilliams>
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Loqi [preview] [khurtwilliams] #2857 ActivityPub plugin injects competing h-entry markup that may break microformats2 parsing
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[tantek] Wow
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[tantek] Cc [pfefferle] ^
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[pfefferle] we discussed that some years ago already...
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[pfefferle] not trivial 😞
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[tantek] conneg--
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Loqi conneg has -10 karma in this channel over the last year (-11 in all channels)
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[morgan] Indiewebify++
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Loqi Indiewebify has 2 karma over the last year
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[pfefferle] 🙂
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[morgan] This is something I'm about to Google search more... but basically I wanted to ask if anyone uploaded a video to their own website anytime recently and had any experience making their own captions and WebVTT stuff, if anyone had any indie experience with that
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[morgan] Context , currently there's a video of me on YouTube that I actually like a lot, and I feel weird though that I've resorted to letting YouTube auto dub it for captions and seem to rely on it when YT is not really optimal for many considerations
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[schmarty] [morgan] i have a couple of posts from experiments i did for the This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition some years ago: https://martymcgui.re/tag/captioning/
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[morgan] Perfect, great reference material. If I have any interesting experiences I'll try and document it for the blog about what it can be like. Seems that it's possible to export vtt stuff from YouTube so I can potentially use the text from it and make some corrections
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GWG Wondering next steps for Micropub post pop-up again
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[tantek] GWG, were any issues resolved at the pop-up? Or were any other decisions made? or any design principles established by consensus? Documenting those explicitly in a summary section on the wiki archive of the notes would be a good next step
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GWG [tantek]: I thought you watched it? And yes, I think there were and I opened some issues.
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GWG Just trying to decide order of things
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[tantek] I did watch it, I am answer your "wondering next steps" by giving you explicit next steps of answering those questions in written form, which is searchable, quotable, citable, unlike a video
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[tantek] standards move forward by discussions plus writing things down. if you skip either of those steps, you typically fail to make any progress.
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GWG [tantek]: I was asking if you watched it because I thought we came to conclusions.. I was wondering if others read into it differently
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[tantek] sure, what I'm saying is, if you thought you came to conclusions, you need to write down those conclusions before asking / "wondering if others read into it differently" because you want people to judge based on what you've written, not observations from a video
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[schmarty] morgan: there are tools for converting various subtitle formats, like SRT, to WebVTT, too. here are a couple of links to subtitle editing tools i didn't get around to trying out: https://aegisub.org/ and https://sourceforge.net/projects/gnome-subtitles/
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btrem [morgan] I did closed captioning (as well as a translation and description) for a video on my site https://btrem.com/2021/02-sledding
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[tantek] GWG, and if you find yourself unable to write down conclusions, even as a participant and facilitator, then it is highly unlikely anyone watching the video will be able to
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btrem The source code will show links to 3 .vtt tracks.
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btrem NB for Firefox/No Script users, apparently you have to grant some permissions for video cc to work. #TIL
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gRegor In browser dev tools, is there a way to force state on a select element so it's open for a screenshot? I thought it was either :focus or :focus-within but don't seem to be expanding the select.
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[morgan] Thanks all regarding the vtt and cc question. I also had a brief demo website to share that I made today, the idea is to share some HTML5 boilerplate, it's my initial edition of it I just tested it now
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gRegor I'm selecting the <select> element in inspector > force state for those options. Best I get is a highlight of the select field
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[morgan] I'll share it later when finished with the vtt stuff
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[artlung] I typically will force a delay on the screenshot then hold it open unit I'll it fires [gRegorLove] … my practice is because I remember thinking of select elements as “windowless” — the browser offloads rendering to the OS. I have no idea if that's still true.
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gRegor Ah, that makes sense
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[artlung] So to see the options, you can't rely just on OS
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gRegor Smart fix, delay works great! thanks
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[artlung] One other trick I've used is to induce a `debugger;` to fire when I'm holding something open which will block the whole browser from anything.
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[artlung] Good deal!
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btrem With regard to using <textarea> for text that you want to offer to users to copy: there might be a bug in Firefox. When I tried using a `<textarea readonly>` for my public key -- styled with `user-select: all` -- not only does it not highlight all text on click, it seems to block any highlighting at all. On Chromium, it doesn't block highlighting, but it also doesn't highlight all on click. I'm on Ubuntu fyi.
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btrem It all works a charm if I substitute `<pre>` for `<textarea>`.
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btrem Maybe it's my setup. Or maybe a clash between `readonly` and `user-select`?
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[Mike_Mai] why not just regular text with a "copy to clipboard" button?
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[Mike_Mai] i always stick with "if it's not a form, don't use form elements".
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btrem Me too. In fact, I started with <pre> which I think is the correct element for a public key. But someone here suggested using <textarea>, so I thought I'd at least try it.
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btrem I think the idea for <textarea> was that it indicates to the user that the enclosed text is something special because the background is white and there's a border around it. I'm using css to style my <pre> to offset it.
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[Mike_Mai] i disagree with that. a screen reader user going through would be pretty confused about a rogue textarea that they can't even type. everybody already knows how to highlight regular text and copy.
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btrem Once nice thing about <textarea> is if `user-select: all` doesn't work, a user can click inside it once, then choose select all (`ctrl-a` on Ubuntu) and it selects the contents of the <textarea>, and not the whole page. Inside a <pre>, `ctrl-a` selects the entire page, so pretty useless.
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[Mike_Mai] as far as i know pre also doesn't communicate semantics to certain screen readers, so you are not really getting that "this text is special" consistently. if you were to provide that context, you should provide that context to everyone. design some surrounding context.
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btrem But in general, I agree with you. As I said, I started with <pre>. I'm just trying things out in my dev environment and reporting what I found here.
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[Mike_Mai] i'll mention this but i haven't tested myself with screen readers, but `contenteditable` on a regular text element also can allow someone to click inside to select all.
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[Mike_Mai] that is my https://mikemai.net/mcds/components/accordion/ of providing code snippet for people to copy 😄
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btrem [Mike_Mai] re: context, there is a paragraph above that says "You can encrypt an email to me with my public key, which is published below." Also, the key itself is prefaced with "-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----" and followed by "-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----.
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[Mike_Mai] that seems like enough context to me. you don't need textarea or pre.
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btrem I definitely don't want `contenteditable`since a public key is not something to be edited. And I think <pre> is correct, since, again, the key should be copied as is, no white space collapsing. BICBW because I don't know the detailed mechanics of public/private keys.
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[Mike_Mai] gotcha. that makes sense
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[artlung] This got mentioned the other day (using `user-select: all`) and it's been bugging me since the last time I tried it in Safari (a while back) it didn't work. I notice I need `-webkit-user-select: all` as well. Made a codepen with some demos. I have no particular use for this but I was, you know, curious.
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[artlung] https://codepen.io/artlung/pen/gbMKxWO
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[tantek] [artlung] indeed both are necessary for maximum compat with current browsers. However that should change by the end of this year as "unprefixing user-select" looks like it will be part of Interop 2026
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Kupietz Hey, is anyone here experienced with python's yfinance or yahoo finance api? I'm trying to find a list of available keys for the ticker.info dict but documentation appears sparse.
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Kupietz NVM. Apparently different tickers return different dicts, there's no standard answer. I'm trying to reliably get the current day session close during the PM session and it's looking like it's going to involve a little more than just grabbing a key from API data. Off to fetch and parse some history...
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[tantek] btrem, your observations re: textarea are what I see too. I filed https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2013428 last week accordingly
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btrem It appears to also affect <input>. (I cannot copy the url at the bottom of your pages.)
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btrem Ah, that's already in the bug report. NVM.
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btrem Does anyone know where popover fits in the events order? I know that click events fire before a submit event in a form. What about popover show/hide? After click events like submit?
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ruta123 hello~
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KE0VVT Hi.
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neoruta :)
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KE0VVT Using mdBook and Zola for generating my site. Still need to add webmention stuff. Sigh.
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neoruta > Using mdBook and Zola for generating my site. Still need to add webmention stuff. Sigh.
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neoruta interesting, my blog is also zola based, idk how webmention work still. is ur website open source any chance?
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