My personal short posting site

I had a dumb idea yesterday - create something like a twitter/x or mastadon, but require all users to signup via ssh.

Here is the first version, hacked together last night: https://blog.bolsen.org/short.

If for some weird reason you want to post to it or you are curious (because curiousity is a valid excuse!), send me your public key. For what it's worth though, this basically means I have to really trust you and then also, you have to know what a "SSH public key" is for this to make any sense.

I have another dumb idea - make this a "distributed" social network with rsync - the idea being you can get an SQLite dump of database (users would just sign up on your instance. Let's not get nuts here!) It's not "federated", unless you consider raw bytes pulled down by rsync "federation".

I will link later to the code. I need to fix some issues and add some silly features. It's just some simple Python code.

Just a tangent: The idea of just posting little tidbits and such is fine, but there is too much of a big deal made around twitter. I understand it's reach, but there is an assumption that "reach" is essential. People have learned that reach is probably the opposite of what they wanted. If I feel OK about putting this in my project page and places on the web that actually matters, places that people can click into this page and look at, that's about enough reach I need at the moment.

Just like the blog, this is another thing that sends mostly just text, formatted in some way, to communicate my random ideas. Text is /hard/ when you start dealing with displaying it, printing it out, making it accessible, etc. BUT - it's just text. I can write a site with text ... and maybe some picture, to communicate my scatterbrained thoughts.

Just like anything that one would write: if you are worried about me tracking you, then you should be /really/ concerned - I mean, I /can/ just look at my web server log! Web tracking can get really sophisticated - I mean, I have a vague, rough idea on how some of that stuff works.