a bleak little furrow in Creation – a high wall and a shadow – an evolving Thing... – new fiction twice monthly, plus poetry, criticism, assorted ephemera. Click to read Garden Scenery, by david c. po...

A writer who got to know Norm remembers a generous, kind human being who also happened to be the funniest person on earth

Writing for the viral social media-driven culture is hell.

I’m a software designer with 10+ years of experience based in Portugal.

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Recently, many publishers have noticed an increase in bulk signup-spam from SMS services such as txt.att.net – leading to large numbers of fake member accounts being registered on their websites. On ...

Happy Monday! This week's edition comes to you a little later than usual, hot on the heels of a bunch of different work we're excited to tell you about. So grab your favorite sweater and a cup of coffee as we dive back into all that's bold and beautiful from across the open social web. Last week we shared Pixelfed's crowdfunding campaign with you. They're doing great, so far, and every little helps. If you haven't already backed the campaign, please consider doing so! It makes such a huge difference to indie teams doing their best to go up against giant corporations with minimal resources. ## What's new with ActivityPub? First and foremost, ladies and gentlepugs, we have achieved a great innovation within the hallowed halls of social networking. A technical feat so staggering you'll be forced to steady yourself like an FAA employee who just got back from vacation. Are you ready? Forget AGI. We have achieved the unfollow: 0:00 /0:09 1× Yes, it's true. For the past 6 months you could follow people in Ghost, but it was pretty much an until-death-do-us-part situation. Not ideal in those cases where you find out that your casual acquaintance Nigel turns out to hold some rather extreme views that are only now coming to light and you realize you made a huge mistake. Oh Nigel. Unfollows are kind of interesting because, on the face of it, they seem simple: Just stop following a person and getting new posts from them. Under the hood, though, there's a little more work to do. For instance, after you unfollow someone, you probably expect to stop seeing their posts in your feed — which means we need to figure out how to go and find all their posts that are _in_ your feed, and then remove them. What's hard about that? _[All together now]_ The database! Unless you've stored things neatly then it's hard to query, retrieve, process and delete the right things. So this is the first little feature-release we're getting out as a result of shipping our new database architecture. More of that on the way. This also feels like an opportune time to remind a few of you that if you don't like AI generated images of pugs, you should feel free to unfollow _us_! AI pugs make us happy, if they don't make you happy then that's totally ok. We can like different things. * * * In other news, John spoke at FOSDEM 2025 this weekend and gave a more detailed look into what we've been working on with ActivityPub. The official video hasn't been released yet by the conference, but as a subscriber to this newsletter we're sneaking (read: leaking) you an early copy. Shh. Unfortunately, the video has a few issues. John is mostly not on the screen, there's a bit of footage missing around the 20-minute mark, and the end of the Q&A is cut off. You can see the slides and hear all the audio easily enough, throughout, though! So what's coming up next? **Reposts.** Helping your most voracious visions go viral across an ultimately infinite plane of existence via technologically tenuous means of mass multiplication.