Blog

After almost half a year of development, it's finally here: IndieConnector 2 has arrived with numerous new features.

The main goal of this version was to make IndieConnector independent from external services. Therefore, I wanted to start by detaching IndieConnector from webmention.io in the first step.

I quickly fell down the rabbit hole into Webmentions, as one might expect. Unlike what I initially thought, receiving Webmentions is not just about listening for a request and processing it.

The journey into the world of Webmentions is more like a journey into the world of microformats. IndieConnector could always display which type of Webmention was being sent - whether it's a Like, Bookmark or Response. The majority of this work has been handled by webmention.io so far.

A few months ago, I published an article on crossposting from Mastodon to Bluesky in the Hub. Since then, it's been the most frequently visited article.

Crossposting is about posting something on Mastodon and having that post automatically published on Bluesky as well. Because Bluesky has another character limit than Mastodon, the tool will split up long posts and create threads on Bluesky. The tool was built as a NodeJs script.

For many people, implementing this is too complicated or they don't have the possibility of running a NodeJs scripts or Docker images. Very few hosters offer these possibilities.

I've been thinking about this topic for some time now and, aside from other features that would be great, I've had my eye on the central goal of making it even easier to use. This includes signing up via Mastodon, entering Bluesky credentials without a .env file, etc.

Since my week only has seven days, I decided to bring this topic to the konzentrik team and we're now setting out to build a small service around it. We plan a simple sign-up process through a web interface, connecting it with additional services/networks/platforms, and making everything bidirectional.

Hurray to the table layout!

While cleaning up and reorganizing old data, I stumbled upon a few screenshots of my old website. Back then, I had a Linux news site - today, one would probably call it a blog. At that time, I still used my own CMS, and if I look at these screens, it was likely with a classic table-based layout.

The Darkvisitors plugin now supports the new tracking feature. This way you can watch crawlers and bots on your site.

In recent days, I've noticed a surge in posts on my timeline complaining about bots and crawlers, wondering how to block them. A good opportunity to bring attention to the latest update of the Darkvisitors plugin.

I published this small plugin a few months ago. It delivers a robots.txt that can be used for various purposes:

The main function of the plugin is to block AI crawlers, such as those that supply data to ChatGPT. It's possible to block different types of crawlers. For example, ChatGPT should not be allowed to access the site, but Perplexity can.

As I'm writing these lines, an update from iTerm just popped up. iTerm is a terminal I use on my Mac. The big announcement in the update: We've now integrated ChatGPT!

A few days ago, we got the news that Slack is now providing all data to OpenAI: chats, files, everything... It's creepy, and while I'm still writing plugins to block AI bots, the ground is being pulled out from under us almost everywhere.

Will we even be able to resist in the future, ensuring that everything we enter and store digitally doesn't become a training dataset?

What does this mean for me professionally? How can I ensure that this doesn't happen when I work with sensitive data, while it might be quietly monitored without my knowledge? What impact does it have on us if we constantly worry about this possibility, even if it's not happening?