I don’t want to brag but I finally added a follow button to my static jekyll blog. Because it uses Activity Intents, a visitor can remotely follow my fediverse account regardless of where their host server lives as long as their server supports Activity Intents. The good news is that mastodon.social already supports this as it is running the nightly build. It will be included in the next major release (4.6) as mentioned in Trunk & Tidbits, March 2026 so that other Mastodon servers will support it.

Usually, the idea is suppose a visitor Alice from home server A.com visits Bob’s account on server B.com. Alice would like to easily follow Bob. Alice clicks on the follow button and is prompted for her fediverse address and she submits alice@A.com. Her browser makes a CORS webfinger request to A.com so that the web page at B.com can discover what url to redirect Alice to so that she can follow Bob from her home server where she is logged in. My setup is slightly different because my follow button is on my blog instead of on my fediverse server.

The code was added to Mastodon in Add support for FEP-3b86 (Activity Intents) (#38120) and it seems there are 2 different values for “rel” a home server may offer to accept a follow: 4.10 Follow Intent and 5.1 Object Intent so my button accepts 2 different values.

var rels = ['https://w3id.org/fep/3b86/Follow', 'https://w3id.org/fep/3b86/Object'];

Intents are for all activities but it seems there is a tendency for fediverse home servers to support just a subset of activities at the moment. Earlier this week, I added support just for follow and like for my home server. Since my webfinger identifier has a different domain than my fediverse server, I also had to add intents to webfinger in my jekyll software as well as allow webfinger to respond to CORS request.

Cindy Cohn, executive director for EFF was on the Daily Show.

We need better options and people are developing them, right? There’s the whole Mastodon universe. I know it’s not very big yet but it’s a decentralized place where people can build safe communities for themselves.

We could take in a hockey game.

Distraction (1998)

Yesterday, I checked in some code so that my Fediverse server can respond to requests to the api/v2/instance endpoint so that code of conduct rules can be fetched.

Although the code is already running, I plan to add more on this feature so that the server can better communicate the code of conduct to its peers. This is related to what Robert W. Gehl calls the “covenantal fediverse” in his book Move Slowly and Build Bridges. I still have the last third of the book left to read but I have noticed that Gehl does not mention Bluesky until the epilogue. People on the Fediverse can communicate with people on Bluesky through Bridgy Fed and about a year ago, I added Bluesky support through Bridgy Fed to my Fediverse server.

Although it seems Bluesky does not have API support for requests to fetch code of conduct rules, it does have Community guidelines and it seems there could be consequences including account termination when an account does not follow the guidelines. This weekend, people on the Fediverse have been sharing instructions to block Bluesky since Bluesky gave a blue check to ICE. Considering the history of behavior by X accounts related to ICE, this is a completely reasonable response. It will be interesting to see if this new Bluesky account can last a week without breaking Bluesky’s community guidelines. If they do misbehave and Bluesky does not aggressively respond to the infraction, Bluesky will be blocked on my server.

I was glad to hear this week that Texas A&M and Houston will finally be playing each other on September 12 at Sugarland Ice Center. I attended UofH’s first game in 80 years 2 years ago and they’ve done a great job building up the team since then and I expect them to be competitive for the first game of the season.