If you'd like to preview the #tutorial I'm writing on building a small federated image sharing service, similar to @nprofile1q..., with @Fedify: ActivityPub server framework and @nprofile1q..., here it is:

https://pr-731-0.fedify.pages.dev/tutorial/content-sharing

If you'd like to give feedback after reading it, please leave a comment on the following PR:

https://github.com/fedify-dev/fedify/pull/731

#Fedify #fedidev #ActivityPub #Nuxt #Pixelfed

Writing a #Fedify tutorial on creating #threadiverse software…

BOJ (Baekjoon Online Judge), a big competitive programming site in Korea, says it's shutting down on April 28. It has been around since 2010 and, as far as I know, has mostly been one person's work the whole time. The notice doesn't say why. The rumor is that the server bills finally got too high.

What caught my eye is that some people in the Korean #fediverse, including @nprofile1q..., are already talking about whether a federated replacement could work, with #ActivityPub coordinating things and volunteer nodes doing the judging. I have no idea if that can really work, since timing differences between machines are a serious problem in competitive programming, and I'm not the right person to help with it. Still, I like that the first reaction was to try building something.

The hashtag problem in CJK languages

I keep thinking about how fediverse hashtag advice assumes English.

In English, you can drop #coffee into a sentence and it still reads fine. The spacing already does most of the work.

In Korean, Japanese, or Chinese, that feels much less natural. Chinese and Japanese have no spaces between words. Korean does, but particles and endings stick to the word, so putting a hashtag mid-sentence often just looks awkward or breaks the flow.

So people tend to dump hashtags at the end, or skip them.

That changes the usual “follow hashtags to find your community” advice. If people tag less, there's just less there to find. And the fediverse's discovery is already shaky enough without that.

Not sure whether it's a UI problem or just hashtags fitting space-delimited languages better. But it seems like one of those small frictions that makes the fediverse harder to get into for CJK users.

My spouse still uses X heavily. They don't like Elon Musk either, but they check in on the fediverse occasionally and always come back saying the same thing: it feels like a space only for software engineers.

They're right, and I don't have a good answer for it.

You can say it's network effects, and that's part of it. But that still doesn't explain why the place feels closed off even when people do try it. X has an algorithm that surfaces content from people you don't follow, so even if you open it at random, there's always some shared background chatter: memes, game reactions, celebrity nonsense, whatever people are mad about that day. The fediverse has none of that. You see what the people you've deliberately followed have posted. So when non-technical people do show up, they often land in silence. And a lot of what they do see is fediverse talk, Linux talk, ActivityPub talk. Which is fine for me—I spend most of my waking hours thinking about ActivityPub—but I can see why it would feel alienating to someone who just wants to talk about films or cooking or K-dramas.

Then I look at Japan and think maybe this isn't impossible after all. Misskey and its forks developed a culture that pulled in illustrators, anime fans, people who had no interest in self-hosting or federation protocols. The reactions help. Some instances feel playful instead of dutiful. That seems to matter. I'm not sure exactly what made that work, or whether anyone could build that on purpose.

This feels especially hard in Korean. The pool is smaller, and communities like K-pop fandoms or webtoon readers have so much gravity on X that there's no obvious reason for them to leave. And even if some of them did, discovery is broken enough that they might not find each other in time—enough people that the place stops feeling empty.

When my spouse says the fediverse feels like it's for software engineers, I mostly just sit there, because I don't know how to tell them they're wrong.

I don't own a car. I take public transit everywhere, and I do think personal vehicle use has real environmental costs. But I don't think driving is inherently unethical.

I live in Seoul, and the city makes transit easy for me. That's not a virtue. It's a condition I happen to benefit from. Some people live where transit barely exists, or where it doesn't get them to work, school, or care. In those places, driving is not optional.

The same is true of flying. In parts of Europe you can cross borders by train. In island nations, or in places with weak land connections, flying may be the only realistic option. “Just fly less” means very different things in those places.

A lot of what gets called my ethical choices comes from the conditions I live in. That makes me wary of turning structural failures into personal morality. If the alternative is missing or unusable, shaming people for not choosing it solves nothing.

When environmental harm gets framed as individual moral failure, attention shifts away from the structural changes that would actually matter. It's not an accident that oil companies spent decades popularizing the idea of the personal carbon footprint.

Hello! I'm Hong Minhee (洪 民憙), an open source software engineer in my late 30s, living in Seoul, Korea. I'm bisexual and non-binary (they/them), and an enthusiastic advocate of free/open source software and the fediverse.

I work full-time on @Fedify: ActivityPub server framework, an ActivityPub server framework in TypeScript, funded by @nprofile1q.... I'm also the creator of @Hollo :hollo:, a single-user ActivityPub microblog; @BotKit by Fedify :botkit:, an ActivityPub bot framework; Hackers' Pub, a fediverse platform for software developers; and LogTape, a logging library for JavaScript and TypeScript.

I have a long interest in East Asian languages (CJK) and Unicode. I post mostly in English here, though occasionally in Japanese or in mixed-script Korean (國漢文混用體), a traditional writing style that interleaves Chinese characters with the native Korean alphabet. Wanting to write in that style was actually one of the reasons I joined the fediverse. Feel free to talk to me in English, Korean, Japanese, or even Literary Chinese!

#introduction

I've wanted to build a mixed-script Korean input method for more than ten years, and I finally started building it.

The project is called Bibim. Korean, Japanese, and Chinese share a lot of Sino-derived words written with Chinese characters, even when the readings differ. Bibim uses those characters as the bridge: if you're writing Japanese and can't remember the Japanese reading of 博物館 (“museum”), you can type the Korean reading (bangmulgwan) instead, and it will recover the characters for you.

I finished the design doc today. If you're into CJK writing systems, East Asian languages, or input method development, I'd love feedback.

https://codeberg.org/hongminhee/bibim-prototype

BotKit is a TypeScript framework I've been building for creating ActivityPub bots that run as their own independent servers—no platform account needed, no Mastodon or Misskey instance to log into. You write a bot, give it a username, and it federates directly with the rest of the fediverse. It's built on top of Fedify, so the low-level protocol work is handled for you: HTTP Signatures, WebFinger, JSON-LD, all of it. What you're left writing is just the bot logic itself.

Version 0.4.0 is out today, with a PostgreSQL repository for production deployments, a remote follow button on the bot profile page, and a few other additions.

Release notes: https://github.com/fedify-dev/botkit/discussions/20

Everyone in tech talks about moats like they're achievements. I keep reading “moat” and thinking: so the idea is to make leaving expensive. Maybe it's just me, but that feels a little grim.