#meta 2025-07-09

2025-07-09 UTC
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paologabriel.com created /User:Paologabriel.com (+455) "Mabuhay ~ Paolo Gabriel です。よろしくお願いします！" (view diff)
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paologabriel.com edited /chat-names (+125) "Add chat-name for paologabriel.com" (view diff)
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paologabriel.com edited /User:Paologabriel.com (+79) (view diff)
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paologabriel.com edited /User:Paologabriel.com (-4) (view diff)
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paologabriel.com created /Template:palol (+164) "Created page with "<span class="h-card" style="white-space:nowrap">{{sparkline|1=https://paologabriel.com/img/user/_static/images/profile.webp}} [[User:paologabriel.com|palol]]</span>"" (view diff)
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aaronpk hmm
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[aaronpk] hi
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doesnm hi
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aaronpk "New contacts mean new opportunities to grow your business. Now that your audience is over 500, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan."
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[tantek] aaronpk, is that indieweb newsletter subscribers alone? I thought when you checked that was everything you had on that account
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aaronpk my other list is 1500, the indieweb list is 500
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aaronpk the limit seems to be 2000
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[tantek] right, from https://chat.indieweb.org/meta/2025-05-30#t1748613024714000
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Loqi [preview] [aaronpk] ok i got my mailchimp account under 2000 contacts https://media.aaronpk.com/2025/05/30065023-8258.png
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aaronpk hmm i am suspicious of some of these recent email subscribers
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[tantek] heh
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aaronpk there's an awful lot of weirdname50293@gmail.com
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[tantek] as in LLM scrapers perhaps?
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[tantek] lol
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aaronpk i wonder if i can remove any subscribers that haven't opened an email in a year
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[tantek] uncovering evidence of LLM scrapers signing up for mailing lists as another source of raw material would be amazing
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[tantek] if it removes people who have "load embedded images" turned off explicitly for anti-tracking purposes, that may get you some false positives
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[tantek] i.e. that's me on 99% of lists that I'm on (I think IndieWeb may be the only one that I load images automatically)
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aaronpk i don't even know if mailchimp surfaces that data to a free plan
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[artlung] [aaronpk] what’s your recommendation for the community to make the mailing list work?
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aaronpk 🤨 https://media.aaronpk.com/2025/07/09085617-7777.png
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aaronpk i think the actual sustainable answer to this is to decentralize the email sending
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aaronpk if you personally want email delivery of the newsletter, find an rss to email service and point it at the newsletter feed
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aaronpk yep i just scrolled through a dozen pages of subscribers and I am pretty sure 90% of these are fake
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[artlung] We had a person who barely made it to Create Day because lack of sending, and Ana asked about the lack of the newsletter a month ago. There are valid users on the mailing list who we as an org agreed to send emails to.
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aaronpk i know, but this just isn't sustainable
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[artlung] It sounds to me like your recommendation is to shut down the mailing list, is that not accurate?
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aaronpk anyone who wants to can use any of the dozens of services that will send an email to you from an rss feed
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aaronpk the point is to avoid creating a single point of delivery that attracts spam
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aaronpk i'm going to try this myself with https://feedrabbit.com/
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aaronpk the signup process was very quick
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[artlung] Definitely I am in sympathy for the significant admintax and COST in time and money it will take to revivify the list. I think the list must continue and am willing to contribute to that.
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aaronpk i don't think there is a good way to actually run an email list these days
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aaronpk and since the content of the list is actually from a public feed anyway, there isn't any technical advantage to running it centralized like this
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[artlung] There’s no good way to run any software these days. We do it anyway.
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[artlung] Software is hard.
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[tantek] Shouldn't MailChimp be handling the problem of fake subscribers or is that not in their business interest (prompting you to upgrade to a paid plan)
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aaronpk this is nearly the same end user experience:
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aaronpk https://feedrabbit.com/subscriptions/new?url=https%3A%2F%2Findieweb.org%2Fthis-week%2Ffeed.xml
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[tantek] Huh
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[aciccarello] aaronpk, do you have the double opt-in enabled? The one where you need to open a link in an email.
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[tantek] Maybe a $1/year indieweb Patreon for emails?
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[tantek] That's likely enough of a barrier to stop fake signups but may also block some current valid subscribers
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capjamesg aaronpk FeedRabbit has restrictive caps?
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capjamesg https://feedrabbit.com/pricing
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capjamesg [edit] https://feedrabbit.com/pricing
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aaronpk capjamesg: the point is that feedrabbit works the other way, there is no account as a *publisher*
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capjamesg Ah, I see!
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capjamesg Never mind.
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aaronpk [aciccarello]: omg I didn't have double opt in enabled on this somehow
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aaronpk apparently it's a per-audience setting, not an account setting. it's enabled on my other list
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aaronpk well that will help
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[aciccarello] 🎉
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aaronpk tho my other list that does have double opt in still has a lot of suspicious emails
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[tantek] and then it's a one-time annoying task to scrub the existing list?
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aaronpk yeah, don't know how to begin approaching this
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[tantek] "hey chatgpt, here's a list of email addresses, return me a list of only the non-fake ones"
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[tantek] 😉
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aaronpk maybe any recent gmail addresses with numbers at the end get deleted
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[tantek] can artificial intelligence detect artificial email addresses?
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aaronpk ok i just removed everyone who has unsubscribed. apparently they count "contacts" not "subscribers" and people who have unsubscribed still count as contacts
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[social] A good approach is a few triage rounds with a “claim your email address” for those who are active, approve those with domain names that match user IDs, then for the remainder, respond to this email to keep your account.
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[social] I know the idea is to weed out invalid accounts early. So, maybe send a couple rounds of emails to those with gmails with numbers to reply to validate.
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aaronpk theoretically my account is down to 1850 contacts now
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aaronpk well this explains it [aciccarello] https://media.aaronpk.com/2025/07/09092307-9587.png
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[aciccarello] Interesting. I wonder why they changed it.
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aaronpk me too, that seems really weird
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aaronpk yes, AI will definitely solve all our problems https://media.aaronpk.com/2025/07/09092652-5658.png
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[tantek] haha yeah site-specific chatbots are notoriously bad
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aaronpk oh shoot, at some point mailchimp also changed the free plan to only include 1 "audience", that might also be the problem here
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aaronpk i think i need to make a new account and move all the subscribers over to it
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aaronpk oh wait, the "sending paused" banner went away
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aaronpk i think it will work again
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[social] Is there also an RSS feed for the newsletter?
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aaronpk yes, that's what drives the email list
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aaronpk h-feed, RSS, and mastodon https://indieweb.org/this-week-in-the-indieweb
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aaronpk mailchimp pulls the RSS feed in and sends that as the email body
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aaronpk which is why i was saying it's not a huge deal to get people to use their own personal rss-to-email service instead
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[social] Excellent. I’ve been using the items pop-up in stream and heading to the page.
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aaronpk ok i think this is fine for this week
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aaronpk but i think i want to move off of mailchimp to something else
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aaronpk and in the process, get everyone to re-subscribe to clean up the list
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bjoern.stierand.org created /events/2025-07-09-hwc-nuremberg (+1325) "initial version" (view diff)
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kaja.sknebel.net edited /User:Kaja.sknebel.net/upcoming-hwcs (+10) "update from events.indieweb.org" (view diff)
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bjoern.stierand.org uploaded /Special:Log/upload "uploaded "[[File:2025-07-09-hwc-nuremberg.jpg]]" https://indieweb.org/File:2025-07-09-hwc-nuremberg.jpg"
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gRegor From HWC convo right now, zachary suggested maybe /buttondown might be interested in sponsoring/sending the TWII emails
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gregorlove.com created /buttondown (+24) "r" (view diff)
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aaronpk oh that'd be interesting
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gregorlove.com edited /88x31 (+102) "/* How to */ +silkscreen font" (view diff)
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loqi.me created /waffle (+124) "prompted by aaronpk and dfn added by aaronpk" (view diff)
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aaronparecki.com edited /waffle (+155) "indieweb examples" (view diff)
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[tantek] wat
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tantek.com edited /waffle (+41) "SA" (view diff)
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tantek.com edited /waffle (+18) "emojicon" (view diff)
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tantek.com created /🧇 (+20) "r" (view diff)
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[tantek] do we need a category:food? cc gRegor
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aaronpk hehe
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tantek.com edited /waffles (+2) "more specific redirect" (view diff)
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tantek.com edited /food (+215) "How to section-stub, new Foods section to link more specific pages" (view diff)
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[tantek] ok this is pretty funny, the only specific pages for food & drink we have are bread, waffle, tea, coffee. what is that saying about the IndieWeb diet?
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[tantek] and the only food vendors we have specific pages for are Chipotle and Starbucks
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[tantek] documented here: https://indieweb.org/food#Foods
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aaronpk haha
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gRegor we have /pancake_stack as we realized during HWC
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gRegor created by you in 2019 :)
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gRegor But no /pancake yet
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gRegor waffle << [[waffle.js]] meetup
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Loqi ok, I added "[[waffle.js]] meetup" to the "See Also" section of /waffle https://indieweb.org/wiki/index.php?diff=102713&oldid=102709
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gRegor waffle.js << [[waffle]]
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Loqi ok, I added "[[waffle]]" to a brand new "See Also" section of /waffle.js https://indieweb.org/wiki/index.php?diff=102714&oldid=28495
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loqi.me edited /waffle.js (+30) "gRegor added "[[waffle]]" to "See Also"" (view diff)
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[tantek] yeah no indieweb relevance in ~6y so that's not worth keeping
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tantek.com deleted /pancake_stack "content was: "{{emojicon|🥞}}", no indieweb relevance in ~6y"
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[tantek] waffle << [[wikipedia:waffle]]
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Loqi ok, I added "[[wikipedia:waffle]]" to the "See Also" section of /waffle https://indieweb.org/wiki/index.php?diff=102715&oldid=102713