lesser daemon
brent bailey's personal weblog
06
Oct

Breaking everything; did:web CLI Tool

When it rains it pours, I guess. After yesterday's period of recovery from Saturday's debauchery, I am taking a sick day for a severe case of stummy hurty. Being in your 30s sucks, man. I brought this on myself: the compounding interest on a night of drinking followed by a day of eating poorly is fairly predictable but I still make this kind of mistake once every few months. Oh well. Live and learn, or don't, whatever.

Anyway, I'm using this as justification for today's lazy project, which was 90% vibe coding with Claude Code. I've been meaning to try

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2 min read
05
Oct

Adding A did:web to A Self-Hosted PLC

I was at friend's bachelor party last night so this is going to be a short one. A kind stranger sent me this tool for setting up did:web on a self-hosted PDS after I finished creating mine yesterday. This type of thing is a simultaneously fun and annoying thing about atproto right now: the ecosystem is being build piecemeal and by a wide variety of people with varying degrees of attachment to the actual org behind it, so there's not a create-react-app type starter kit for a lot of things yet. I think this is my first time seeing

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3 min read
04
Oct

Creating Your Own did:web

We're in day 3 of the ongoing Bluesky crashout, which is making my desire to figure out how ATProto works (or doesn't) outside of Bluesky as a company feel more urgent. I remain somewhat sympathetic on both sides here. Tech people saying "you can build your own thing if you don't like it" feels dismissive and generally if you find yourself on Jesse Singal's side of a moderation argument you're probably doing something wrong. On the other hand, the levels of brigading and general nastiness of the userbase are real problems that make the site unpleasant to use. I dunno,

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4 min read
03
Oct

Setting Up Your Own PDS Is Frighteningly Easy

A PDS, or Personal Data Server, is kind of the core thing behind atproto. The idea is that it's a server that stores all your atproto data and cryptographic keys. Most people just use Bluesky's PDS right now, but this is probably the most commonly self-hosted part of the ecosystem: you can store all your data for any atproto-compliant app on your own server which, in theory, keeps it from getting walled off in an adversarial scenario.

I'm not quite ready to risk moving my own data off of Bluesky's PDS, but I figured today I'd take the first step

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5 min read
02
Oct

Getting Collections From The Bluesky API

Yesterday almost immediately gave me pause about spending a month learning more about ATProto. Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is having a bit of an ongoing crashout about moderation and the general culture of Bluesky, in this case about the mods' ongoing work to appeal to right-wingers and alienate trans and other marginalized users. To some degree I'm sympathetic to the broader culture problems that Graber takes issue with. Bluesky is full of the type of people who are willing to leave Twitter for moral reasons, which results in a lot of people getting into each other's mentions being upset or

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4 min read