Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 03, 2022

• OpenIKED 7.2 released

  This release includes the following changes to the previous release: [...]

• Surviving a Mastodon stampede

  Here’s how Mastodon works. Its servers (instances) operate semi-independently of each other, and users register with servers geared toward communities that interest them. But users can follow and interact with others from across the Fediverse — users hosted on other Mastodon instances as well as other services utilising the open-source ActivityPub protocol from the Worldwide Web Consortium.

  Active users of Mastodon nearly doubled between October 27 and November 6, according to the company’s CEO Eugen Rochko, causing some growing pains. The distributed nature of Mastodon and ActivityPub have strengths in terms of keeping the service community driven both at the instance and Fediverse level, but some users are starting to notice a warts here and there that seem related to their architecture.

  Decentralisation: Robust, not necessarily efficient

• Scaling Mastodon: The Compendium

  This is honestly a very hastily written selection of various snippets, with text extracted, and notes. No real editing thought was put into this, so I hope it’s not too confusing. This blog post will be kept up to date as I find out more information and publish my findings.

  It’s currently organized in no particular order with a bunch of micro fragment thoughts split out in a row.

• That's a wrap! Thanks everyone for Linux Plumbers 2022 - Linux Plumbers Conference 2022

  Thank you to everyone that attended Linux Plumbers 2022 both in person or virtually. After two years of being 100% virtual due to the pandemic, we were able to have a very successful hybrid conference, with 418 people registering in-person where 401 attended (96%), and 361 registered virtually and 320 who actually participated online (89%), not counting all those that used the free YouTube service. After two years of being 100% remote, we decided to keep this year’s in-person count lower than normal due to the unknowns caused by the pandemic. To compensate for the smaller venue, we tried something new, and created a virtual attendance as well. We took a different approach than other hybrid conferences, and treated this one as a virtual event with an in-person component, where the in room attendees were simply participants of the virtual event. This required all presentations to be uploaded to Big Blue Button, and the presenters presented through the virtual platform even though they were doing so on stage. This allowed the virtual attendees to be treated as first class citizens of the conference. Although we found this format a success, it wasn’t without technical difficulties, like problems with having no sound in the beginning of the first day, but that’s expected when attempting to do something for the first time. Overall, we found it to be a better experience and will continue to do so in future conferences.

  We had a total of 18 microconferences (where patches are already going out on the mailing lists that are results of discussions that happened there), 16 Refereed talks, 8 Kernel Summit talks, 29 Networking and BPF Summit track talks, and 9 Toolchain track talks. There were also 17 birds-of-a-feather talks, where several were added at the last minute to solve issues that have just arrived. Most of these presentations can still be seen on video.

• Decentralized Website Communication with Webmention (Talk Announcement)

  Being able to post social interactions on your own site and have them show up on another website excites me. You can retain ownership over the interactions you post and curate them in a way that you would like. For instance, I have a separate website where I publicly show my comments. There's so much I can do with this information. I could start adding tags and curate by tag. I could use some natural language processing to understand what categories of content I consume and bookmark the most.

• Minimum support for webmentions

  I just now realized I've released a version of mod_blog during the holiday season going back as far as 2016. With that in mind, and with the fact that I finally received my first webmention on my blog couple of days ago, I have just released the latest version for this Christmas season. The big change this release is that I now show webmentions per post, even though I've only so far received one.