Ungovernable Love

We have a problem on our GoToSocial server: the local timeline is dead, even when we are posting regularly. That is because the default posting visibility on GTS is Unlisted, which does not appear on Local (or Federated) timelines. This is good for privacy, but not building the local community.

I don't know how to fix this. I put my ramblings in an issue on the GTS issue tracker, and I would welcome any input or suggestions: https://codeberg.org/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial/issues/4783

#GoToSocial #LocalTimeline

The Ungovernable Love Blog is back online! Not much content yet, but we'll write more as our tech collective expands / becomes more active.

The website is currently statically generated with Makko, an SSG written in Zig. Both Makko and Zig have taken strong stances against LLM slop, which is in line with our mission of keeping computing knowledge and tools in the control of communities rather than corporations.

We are hosting the blog on OnlyJunk.Fans, which is a free hosting service for protecting websites from LLM scrapers using iocaine.

All of these projects are featured on this excellent No-AI List.

We seem to be back from our hiatus, after moving the server from dear departed K&T Host to FediHost.

When the server came back up it was in blocklist mode instead of allowlist mode, and since it's managed hosting FediHost had to futz with it for us, but we seem to be in allowlist mode again. Something to watch out for when moving an island server to a new host!

Does anyone know how to confirm that a GoToSocial server is in allowlist mode without access to its internals?

Our webhost K&T Host is shutting down. This server will go offline today Jan 15. We intend to move to Fedihost and bring the server back up, but I do not have a timeline for when that will happen.

I apologize for not having been able to organize a smooth transition, due to having a baby and health problems. @violetvole is in communication with Fedihost and hopefully we'll be back soon.

@gotosocial Hey do you have a preference between Liberapay and Open Collective for receiving donations? I somehow ended up doing both and that seems inefficient due to payment processor fees.

Today @violetvole and I tested out Delta Chat and Jabber/XMPP to see if we might want to try hosting either as an instant messaging service for our members.

The highlight of our Delta Chat test was the little web apps that can run in the chat client. We played tic-tac-toe and chess against each other (encrypted!), and it worked flawlessly. https://webxdc.org/

Thanks @durian for hosting the chatmail server we used for testing!

We also began poking at Jabber via Quicksy, and it did live up to its name with us getting accounts and clients set up very quickly. The highlight was video chat working smoothly.

Just finished testing FOSS calendar server Radicale with @violetvole, as a possible service for our members. We found it inadequate because it does not fully implement sharing calendars privately.

According to their documentation (and GitHub discussions), you can:

• share calendars privately with other users on the same Radicale server with a symlink(!) workaround, but the other users will have read/write access, so they can add and delete events from your calendar. Useful in some circumstances, but not what we want. I trust violetvole to read my calendar but I don't want him to have the capacity to delete my events, even by accident.
• share read-only calendars publicly with the open web, using WebCAL

What we want is sharing calendars privately, but read-only. And it seems we can't get that with Radicale. We need more features for controlling access between different users.

We intend to test Baikal next.

#calendars #Radicale

A mallard family resting together on a rock! There was a turtle sunning to the left of them, but it jumped into the water when I stopped biking to take a photo.

#ducks #ducklings

lovebirds by the train station

#Catbird eating native Virginia #strawberries from my yard! It was smacking the strawberries against the ground, to break a piece of the strawberry off in its beak.

Uh did Masto.host just go offline? Jawns.club and every small Mastodon server I can think of off the top of my head seems down.

Status page says nothing yet: https://status.masto.host/

Good thing I have another fedi server, but it got a bit quiet on here when Mastodon vanished.

#MastoHost #MastoAdmin

One of the more annoying aspects of an allowlist server is that if people move accounts to a server that isn't on our allowlist, the usual automatic re-following does not happen. First we must add their new server to the allowlist.

To some extent, we can avoid this issue if the same single-user or mod team is simply relocating to a new address, and they update their own entry in an allowlist that we subscribe to. Then we don't need to take action or even be aware of the server move. This is a huge benefit of Pelago, and the island network infrastructure (both technical and social) that we're experimenting with on ION.

But if the user is moving to a new server that isn't exactly the same in terms of membership and moderation, then there's no way to escape our mod team manually reviewing the new server, I think. We would have to allowlist the new server before the move for the automation to work, or followers must manually re-follow if/when we allowlist it. Which means they must notice and remember to re-follow, and any requests for re-follows from the moved account would be invisible until the new server is allowlisted.

Is there a quick way to tell if any of the servers we're federating with have open registration? I know GoToSocial always has manual approval for new accounts, so this is more of a concern if you federate with servers running Mastodon or other software. @oliphant?

We have a logo now for Ungovernable Love! Made by https://mastodon.art/@NiwlCraft on commission

I wrote a blog post to introduce people to the Ungovernable Love tech collective and lay out some of our philosophy:

https://blog.ungovernable.love/2025-02-17-what-is-love.html

I'd appreciate any feedback! Do you think it helps explain our motivations?

For #FollowFriday, I'd like to recommend some accounts on servers with an expiration date. Follow them now or you might miss your chance!

Octodon.social will close on April 3rd. https://octodon.social/@CobaltVelvet/112897672123037837 Until then, consider the following accounts:

• @kg6gfq - building solar-powered #ebikes and other fascinating mobility devices
• @wim_v12e - #solarpunk researcher, deep thinker (one of multiple accounts they have, this one is more personal and less professional)
• @alienghic - uspol, #ClimateJustice, computer nerdery, LGBT

1.6.0.0.8.0.0.b.e.d.0.a.2.ip6.arpa is a server that exists due to some weird DNS hack that I don't understand. https://1.6.0.0.8.0.0.b.e.d.0.a.2.ip6.arpa/@domi/statuses/01JJS6BMXVDJTQFTRVX4ZKR2GW

They say "planned instance lifetime: 6 months", so if you want to figure out what they're up to, it may be good to take a look soon: https://1.6.0.0.8.0.0.b.e.d.0.a.2.ip6.arpa/about

• @fraggle - has been posting interesting tech history trivia
• @domi - promised they'll write a blog post explaining what the heck is going on with this server. I assume this would appear on their blog: https://sdomi.pl/weblog/

Time for my #introduction!

I co-founded the Ungovernable Love technology collective with @violetvole, who I met while volunteering with Sunrise Movement to fight for #ClimateJustice and a Green New Deal. (I haven't given up on governments funding good things that help people, despite the current political moment, but I am becoming more of an #anarchist.) Thank you for joining us!

I sing while doing dishes or bicycling, or really whenever my body is moving. I drink hot loose leaf #tea (with lots of #honey) to recover.

I am interested in simpler tools that can be maintained indefinitely and handed down as heirlooms. I write with #FountainPens and #typewriters. I want to learn to use #SlideRules, #abacuses, and treadle sewing machines. I read https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ and seek #solarpunk vibes.

I love identifying #birds, bugs, plants, and other wildlife with the help of #iNaturalist and Merlin. Why not bring binoculars and a magnifying glass, just in case? I take photos with my smartphone and my dad's old Konica film cameras.

Here's a photo from my first roll of slide film, I just got the scans back!

• film: Flic Film Chrome 100 (bulk loaded Kodak Ektachrome)
• camera: Konica FS-1 SLR
• lens: Konica Zoom-Hexanon AR 80-200 mm / F4

#BelieveInFilm

On a #GoToSocial server in allowlist mode, how can a member see what servers are allowlisted?

API

I see that there is a setting instance-expose-peers: false, which will:

Allow unauthenticated users to make queries to /api/v1/instance/peers?filter=open in order to see a list of instances that this instance 'peers' with. Even if set to 'false', then authenticated users (members of the instance) will still be able to query the endpoint.

https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/configuration/instance/

I do not know how to make queries to /api/v1/instance/peers?filter=open. If I go to https://go.ungovernable.love/api/v1/instance/peers?filter=open I get a message saying "Unauthorized: peers open query requires an authenticated account/user". I'm pretty sure I'm logged in. Can anyone walk me through how this works?

Normal webpage

At https://go.ungovernable.love/about#moderated-servers there is the line "This instance does not publically share their list of blocked domains." That makes sense, since we are running an allowlist, not a blocklist. But could we publish our allowlisted domains there? How do we do that? Is there any compelling reason not to?

#allowlists

hi folks, I wrote an FAQ for our GoToSocial server. Could you please give me feedback on the content before I invite more people?

https://blog.ungovernable.love/faq.html

Please ignore the website presentation for now, I just wanted to get the text online.

Why the FAQ website looks like that

... If you can't ignore the website presentation because you're super curious about the blog itself, I'm testing out blogging software called Sutter, which publishes to both the Web and the Gemini protocol at the same time. If you have a Gemini client, you could access it here instead:

gemini://blog.ungovernable.love/faq.gmi

If you haven't heard of Gemini, that's because it's even less popular than the Fediverse ;-) And it's unGoogleable, because first a cryptocurrency and then Google's own AI took the same name. But I think it's a really interesting minimal alternative to the web, simple enough that random hobbyists can quickly write their own servers and clients, which I think is really empowering as a concept even if Gemini itself is flawed and doomed.

We don't have to suffer the modern internet and bloated Web; we could just start over at any time, so long as we keep things simple enough. You could just write another protocol at any time. Like Robin Sloan did with the Spring '83 protocol.

Anyway don't get too attached to this blog software or these URLs, because I could get annoyed by it and start over with something less janky at any time. Writing something to be published on both Gemini and the Web is an exercise in frustration at either too many features or too few.

And allow me to wrap back around to the original point, which is, how's my FAQ?

On GoToSocial, is it possible to change the defaults for new accounts so that:

- Posts are public by default
- Public posts are *not* published to the web by default

If yes, would this be a good idea for an island network server?

When we're trying to introduce newbies to fedi, discovery and community-building feels too difficult when the local timeline is quiet; but I'm leery of encouraging people to post publicly on the open web, when part of why we're running an island server is to preserve the privacy of our members and avoid harassment.

One issue with defaulting to no web presence is that if a member needs to broadcast something important on the web, like crowdfunding for a health issue, there's no escape hatch if even public posts are not visible without an account. This may not be an issue if you're a fediverse veteran with multiple accounts, but this could be confusing and disappointing for inexperienced users.

If you show no posts on the web, and then change your settings so public posts are once again on the open web, does that immediately publish all your old posts on the web as well, or only new posts going forward?

#GoToSocial