Deborah Pickett

/ˈfʌtsl̩/, she/her. Rated PG [some adult themes]. Wurundjeri land aka Melbourne, Australia. Singer-songwriter; sysadmin; quilt tragic; cartography geek; synth nerd; queer elder. Once programmed a time zone library in Forth and an XSLT processor in XSLT. On Fediverse since 2018. BDFL of old.mermaid.town. #nobot

Last Notes

2026-08-11 17:18:33 UTC

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@nprofile…w4ya Reluctance is already an electromagnetic unit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_reluctance

2026-06-28 02:28:24 UTC

I’ve got Evan Prodromou blocked so I didn’t see https://tags.pub when it was announced. If you missed it too: it’s a service that listens on relays for hashtags, and boosts posts containing them, to followers following any given hashtag. To give hashtags much more reachability despite the horizon of federation.
I proposed something like this in the context of natural disaster response. Users could come to a consensus on what hashtag to use for, say, # HurricaneFoobar, and posts containing the hashtag could spread far and wide. But because I care about safety, I suggested that it needed selective outbound relaying, so that only posts containing a list of opted-in hashtags were sent to the relay. I see that managing what gets sent to relays is out of scope for tags.pub.
I also don’t see any mention on the github issue list about tags.pub being able to defederate known bad actors, so I guess there’s nothing stopping your posts from reaching poast and friends, due to ActivityPub’s nontransitive defederation behaviour.
User-to-user and user-to-instance blocks will similarly get laundered, so if you let tags.pub boost your posts you may find unwelcome people reading your posts.
So, this is a cool idea, it could be helpful, but it’s not ready yet IMO.

2026-05-16 03:55:59 UTC

Dear Melbourne,
We’re writing to let you know that your free 7-day trial of Autumn™ ends tonight at midnight. If you do not sign up for a subscription, your plan will revert to either Summer Extended Free™ or Winter With Special Offers™.
We value your custom and welcome your continued commitment to Weather.
Warm regards,
Southern Oscillation, Inc.

2024-12-18 23:17:58 UTC

I’m quietly encouraged that corporations still need to give AI away for free. It demonstrates that not enough people are willing to pay for it even at fairly low price points. I believe we are winning this game of chicken with the venture capitalists. Keep it up!