social media platform users are going to link offsite. the only question is how obnoxious the platform will make it for them and everyone else.

(For context: Instagram prohibits links in post text. This, plus the incentive to inflate comments, has led to the proliferation of tools where creators instruct their followers to comment with a specific word to receive a link in their DMs — in this case, to a pie crust recipe)

Great piece on BlueSky and enshittification by Cory Doctorow . “I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will.” I also really appreciate his point that it’s not the blockchain venture capital that leads to enshittification, it’s the venture capital.

Cory is a fellow POSSE-er (and major inspiration to me when I adopted the practice), and has opted not to use Bluesky. Personally, I’ve gone the route of using the platforms that interest me, even the enshittification-prone ones like Bluesky and Threads, but hedging my bets by plugging them into my POSSE system where they can just as easily be unplugged if need be.

just noticed that tiktok muted the audio on a video of mine because of a copyright strike based on... silence

oh no (h/t Robert Stephens)

I had such a great chat with Mike McCue on his Dot Social podcast, where we talked about the future of the web and why I'm a web optimist, why everyone should be a blogger, digital ownership, and decentralized social media.

The full episode is available here and on PeerTube/YouTube/the usual podcast feeds!

That's not something you read every day.

Bluesky has released Ozone, a community moderation tool for the network. Although all Bluesky users get the default moderation out of the box, they can also subscribe to any of a number of user-created and run "labelers" (which you can see in this Bluesky list, or on this website).

Some of them label posts with content that could trigger various phobias, some label posts from Twitter, some label AI generated images, some hide spoilers, and some label... posts of beans. Others build an additional entire moderation layer on top of the defaults.

Honestly, I think it's a pretty cool approach to moderation.

So, of course, I wanted to try it out for myself. I've created a labeler to mark crypto spam: @cryptolabeler.w3igg.com. If you subscribe to the labeler, you'll see some blatant cryptospam posts marked with labels (or hidden, if you choose). You'll also see an option in the reporting screen to report posts to my labeler service:

The setup guide is pretty straightforward, but because it's so new, it doesn't have much detail about running Ozone with different infrastructure. Because I'm running the labeler service on a VPS I use for a few different things, and because I already have nginx running there, I didn't want to stand up Caddy alongside it. So, in case it's helpful to others, here's how I got Ozone running behind nginx:

1. Follow the HOSTING.md instructions, but skip the "Create the Caddyfile" step.
2. After copying the compose.yaml file, delete the entire caddy: block.
3. Configure nginx as a reverse proxy. Here's the relevant block in my configuration:

server {
    server_name ozone.w3igg.com;

    listen 443 ssl; # managed by Certbot
    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/ozone.w3igg.com/fullchain.pem; # managed by Certbot
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/ozone.w3igg.com/privkey.pem; # managed by Certbot
    include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf; # managed by Certbot
    ssl_dhparam /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem; # managed by Certbot

    location / {
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header Host $http_host;

        # WebSocket support
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";

        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3000;
    }
}

Lines 4–8 are autogenerated by Certbot and shouldn't be added manually. If you want to use Certbot/Let's Encrypt for your SSL certificates, the command is: sudo certbot --nginx -d ozone.w3igg.com (obviously replacing ozone.w3igg.com with your own domain).

I got tripped up while setting this up because I didn't realize Ozone requires a websockets connection. Lines 17–19 should handle that, and Ozone has added some instructions to HOSTING.md to describe how to verify websocket connections are working. Note that if your domain is behind Cloudflare/Fastly/etc. this may require more wrangling.

For more detail on labelers, check out this great blog post by Kairi !