I wrote my own terminal and you won’t believe what happened next. I called it vertigo.

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It’s been four years since honk 0.1. Before that, the preview, and shortly after the followup. But finally, after a long journey, we’ve reached honk 1.0. (Narrator: honk is a microblog server that federates with other servers via ActivityPub.)

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Reddit is deddit. Everybody needs to write a replacement. Mine is called azorius.

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A while back somebody posted some “amazing” images which were black and white except for the stripes that were colored. So, not black and white, but the point was to demonstrate that vision is highly perceptual and the brain will interpolate from what’s there. I thought this might be fun to play around with. I guess it kinda works, but I think some of the demo images were selected carefully.

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Sometimes I want to send some mail. Sometimes I want to receive some mail. (Much less often than it typically happens, as it were.) But mostly I want to not think too much about it.

Alas, the history of email is rife with people thinking about it, and inventing new problems for their solutions. My needs are much simpler than that. I want to have email that arrives at port 25 go in my maildir. I want email that I send to port 587 to go wherever it should go. That’s about it. I don’t need fancy filtering before it goes in the maildir; I can always do that later. I don’t need fine grained authentication to send; it’s my computer, if I want to send it I’m going to send it.

But nobody makes a mail server just for me. The self hosted email market is kinda small already, because Big Evil has decided that’s bad for you, but it’s also quite a chore just reading the documentation for even simple server setups. How about an smtp server that doesn’t require documentation because it doesn’t have any features? If it doesn’t do anything, it can’t do anything wrong.

Enter the reliverator. It receives email. It delivers email. It’s a deliverator, not written in D.

When an email is received, it goes in the user’s maildir. If there is no maildir, it doesn’t.

When an email is submitted, it goes in the database until it goes somewhere else. There’s no access control because it only listens on localhost and I’ve already got an ssh tunnel open from my laptop.

Mostly I just wanted to see how hard can it possibly be. And after some bludgeoning and tear soaked stackoverflow copy pasta, it kinda came together. There’s a fine mess of a little of everything. It’s about 25% unsafe, though that’s not the part that worries me most. I even used some tokio for bonus points, though it seems overkill for sending and receiving a single UDP packet, but I don’t pack the crates.

If I really wanted to write an smtp server, I’d have made some very different decisions.

gerc (good enough revision control) is a partial reimplementation of mercurial. Between got and bitbucket, it seems source control is back in the news. Here are some scattered notes about gerc and its development. It’s not complete or recommended for use, so don’t expect much.

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It’s been a little while, so a few more notes about ActivityPub implementation, federation, and other odds and ends. There’s no real order to these notes, just things that have come up in the past two months.

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honk is my take on a federated status updater. One might say it’s opinionated software. Since my opinions are correct, this makes honk the world’s first provably correct social media application. Here’s a formerly brief rundown of things that work, things that don’t work, and things that won’t work. Plus some complaints about how other people do things. The version number, 0.1, indicates your expected level of satisfaction.

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Some people tweet. (Me, previously.) Some people toot. (No, thank you.) I have decided to honk.

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Imagine, if you can, a smaller version of the web. A web without dickbars, or scroll jacking, or chum boxes, or popup video, but still a web filled with informative articles about the 27 blockchains you need to be using right now. The good news is this web exists, but unfortunately your browser doesn’t connect to it by default. For that, you need the miniwebproxy.

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