fietkau.me - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

I'm finally unveiling the #ActivityPub project that has been consuming my weekends: Encyclia, an #ORCID bridge that will make ORCID records followable and interactable on the fediverse. 🙂 It's early-stage and the ORCID following function is not publicly available yet. We're seeking community […]

submitted 1 day ago • 2 comments

First term CS: Build a calculator app. Third term CS: Build a client-server system. Sixth term CS: build a high performance distributed computing system. PhD in CS: Build a calculator app. https://chadnauseam.com/coding/random/calculator-app 🤯

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

As mentioned in Trunk & Tidbits earlier this week, we're sharing our approach to building quote posts for Mastodon. More to do here, but this is the background. https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/02/bringing-quote-posts-to-mastodon/

submitted 20 days ago • 1 comment

A cursed #ActivityPub idea. Problem: Remote profiles sometimes look empty on Mastodon because only the stickied posts are synchronized on profile update. Observation: Neither the ActivityPub nor Mastodon specs limit the number of sticky posts on a profile. Nothing says you can't have 100 000 […]

submitted 26 days ago • 2 comments

Made a little bit of progress on my #Fedify project yesterday. Spun my wheels testing a few #TypeScript ORMs and running into compatibility problems with each of them. By the time I went to bed, the preferences page was capable of storing and loading account-local form data for the first time […]

submitted 31 days ago • 1 comment

Latest FOSS Academic: Introducing the Network of Alternative Social Media Researchers! https://fossacademic.tech/2025/02/01/asmNet.html This is a new hub for academic researchers who study alternative social media. Pretty apropos for Global Switch Day! #FOSSAcademic #AlternativeSocialMedia […]

submitted 32 days ago • 1 comment

I made a small change to my list of academic profile links at https://fietkau.science/publications earlier this month. Kicked out some Elsevier stuff in favor of OpenAlex. Their profile of me was already pretty good, all I had to do was let them know that […] [Original post on fietkau.social]

submitted 41 days ago • 2 comments

The other day when @misnina posted about the game we made together for @fedi_jam last September, it reminded me that I never revealed any of its secret easter eggs. 😮 So if you were going to play “Up in the Air” but the feather wasn't customizable enough yet, try typing “transrights” on your […]

submitted 43 days ago • 0 comments

Fresh, hot-off-the-digital-press: "Giving the outrage a name – how researchers are challenging employment conditions under the hashtags #IchBinHanna and #IchBinReyhan" https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2025.2452273 1/🧵 #PhD #ECR #Wissenschaft

submitted 43 days ago • 2 comments

I hesitate to add to the atmosphere of dread, but Meta's increasingly unfettered acceleration of the kinds of messages that precede genocides is so alarming. And—how to say this… Avoiding Meta platforms doesn't confer a get-out-of-atrocities-free card. This is why I'm so focused on the need […]

submitted 49 days ago • 5 comments

Today Mastodon is taking another step towards its founding ideals: independence and non-profit ownership. We're transferring ownership of key assets to a new, European not-for-profit entity, ensuring our mission remains true to a decentralised social web, not corporate control […]

submitted 52 days ago • 20 comments

If you were to write a more inclusive history of #HCI, whom would you include? Context: prepping for my user-centered interface design course, the day on historical foundations is ALL WHITE DUDES: Vannevar Bush, Ivan Sutherland, Douglas Englebart, J.R. Licklider, Alan Kay, Ted Nelson, etc etc […]

submitted 57 days ago • 1 comment

The last "big" code thing I need to get done before the alpha test of my current @fedify project is the task queue - make sure routine data updates happen, consider individual importance and urgency, respect external API rate limits, etc. But that's super […] [Original post on fietkau.social]

submitted 60 days ago • 0 comments

Wrote a blog post about a small ActivityPub project I'm working on that bridges my Steam screenshots to the social web https://tomcasavant.com/untitled-gaming-social/

submitted 61 days ago • 3 comments

It's past midnight where I am. Happy new year! 🙂 I've spent Christmas with my close family and have returned well-fed and well-rested. My last research funding application got denied (we will retry), but the new year still looks busy as ever. I have locked in two opportunities to teach my […]

submitted 64 days ago • 0 comments

A few weeks ago, @informatik asked the German-speaking computer science community how they got started with computers. I replied about my first-ever (non-trivial) program, a small game written in Turbo Pascal. My response, along with a number of others, made it into issue 8 of the “.inf” […]

submitted 77 days ago • 1 comment

Our #GivingTuesday campaign is officially LIVE! We’re raising $75,000 to fund a new hire: ✨ Trust & Safety Lead ✨ A crucial role in protecting Mastodon’s growing community by strengthening our trust & safety tools incl. #moderation & server blocklists […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

submitted 92 days ago • 5 comments

I've been running @thunderbird on a current @gnome desktop and for months now I've been annoyed by a separate launcher icon labeled “thunderbird-esr” next to the normal Thunderbird one. I checked around again for whether a solution had been posted anywhere by now, and sure enough, it's a […]

submitted 95 days ago • 0 comments

📣 New article from me, @tstruett, @paufder & @rwg, available free & #openaccess in the International Journal of Communication: Can This Platform Survive? Governance Challenges for the Fediverse In this article we identify six potential pitfalls for federated social media: 1. Distributed […]

submitted 96 days ago • 0 comments

I have added my concept for how to implement starter packs in today's AP-verse, extending @dansup's spec proposal: https://github.com/pixelfed/starter-kits/issues/1#issuecomment-2480729430 If you have thoughts on how starter packs should be structured, come chime in. The details require some […]

submitted 110 days ago • 0 comments

Last Week in #Fediverse - ep 92 This week's news: - New updates on @loops and more information about further plans for their For You Algorithm - @Flipboard is taking over the automated accounts on press.coop - An ActivityPub bot+server that consists of only 2 simple files Read at […]

submitted 114 days ago • 0 comments

Last night one of my PC monitors broke, and the remaining one is showing some uncanny intermittent flickering. So that's a pretty bad distraction from most things I could be doing this week. 🙄 But I'm using the opportunity to make some overdue changes to my home PC setup. May dive into 144Hz […]

submitted 114 days ago • 0 comments

Excerpt from an email I got this weekend. On the one hand I like that people are looking out for pitfalls, but it's also a shame that such a simple technology as QR codes is so rife with scams and exploitative products that caution is necessary.

submitted 115 days ago • 1 comment

It is commendable that the German funding agency DFG wants to change the way research assessment works. They aim to remove quantitative indicators such as the number or prestige of publications from their assessment criteria. The hope is that a slow, cultural shift will bring about such change […]

submitted 119 days ago • 0 comments

The research project I was part of for the past three years published its final report today: https://fietkau.science/untersuchung_honeypot_ambient_displays If you can read German and project reports are your jam and/or you want to know what I've been doing for work lately, here you go. 🙂 […]

submitted 125 days ago • 0 comments

I followed 34 new people this month. 🙂 A partial list: @accesstech HCI research group from Vienna @anasti art & games, academic interest in Mastodon @elias RecSys academic at @tibhannover @EscGoat pixel art and variety boosts @lokistriker indie game dev @mibyledraws art & game dev @njamster […]

submitted 125 days ago • 0 comments

I am publishing a small #ActivityPub / #fediverse project: https://fietkau.software/webfinger_canary and @canary 🙂 It is a tiny bot showcasing a split-domain WebFinger setup, where the handle domain is different from the ActivityPub server domain. This is supported by Mastodon and some other […]

submitted 127 days ago • 1 comment

I do all official correspondence via email when possible, but I live in a country that relies a lot on paper. Luckily I'm also passionate about physical filing systems and very good at bureaucracy. 😄 Here's part of my physical folders. LTR: Job, finances, medical, clubs, insurance, apartment.

submitted 128 days ago • 0 comments

The little #FediJam browser game I directed and coded, “Up in the Air”, has just been updated to version 1.0. It's playable in these two places: :fietkau_media: https://fietkau.media/up_in_the_air 🌐 https://jfietkau.itch.io/up-in-the-air Compared to the game jam version from last month […]

submitted 140 days ago • 0 comments