mastodon

6 Articles

Pager Lives Again Thanks To Python And Mastodon

March 4, 2024 by 6 Comments

Pagers were a big deal for a while there, even if they never quite made it into the pantheon of excellent sitcom plot devices like answering machines did. Anyway, [Finnley Dolfin] had some pagers and gave them a refresh for the modern era, using them to receive message alerts from Mastodon.

The project is laced together with a bunch of Python code. It uses the Mastodon library for interacting with the social media website. When it detects an incoming direct message, it hooks into DAPNET – the Decentralized Amateur Paging Network.  Via this network, a message is sent out over the airwaves to [Finnley’s] pager, serving as a notification that someone’s reached out to chat on Mastodon.

It’s neat that the amateur radio world is keeping pagers alive, using distributed base stations to share messages. Unfortunately, given the existence of smartphones, we don’t quite see pagers catching on again any time soon. And yet, [Finnley’s] setup has a certain level of old-school cool that no modern phone could match.

We’ve seen only a handful of pager hacks over the years, but they’re still pretty neat. If you’ve got your own cooking up in the workshop, drop us a line, yeah?

MS-DOS Meets The Fediverse

August 9, 2023 by 30 Comments

By now, most Windows users are set up with decently functional machines running Windows 10 or 11. Of course there are a few legacy machines still lagging behind on Windows 7 or 8 and plenty of computers in industrial settings running ancient proprietary software on Windows XP. But only the most hardcore of IBM PC users are still running DOS, and if you have eschewed things like Unix for this command-line operating system this long you might want to try using it to get online in the Fediverse with Mastodon.

The first step is getting DOS 6.22, the most recent version released in 1994, set up with all the drivers and software needed to access the Internet. At the time of its release there were many networking options so the operating system didn’t include these tools by default. [Stephen] first sets up an emulated NE2000-compatible networking card and then installs the entire TCP/IP stack and then gets his virtual machine set up with an IP address.

With a working Internet connection set up, the next step on the path of exploring federated social media is to install DOStodon (although we might have favored the name “MastoDOS”) which is a Mastodon client specifically built for MS-DOS by [SuperIlu]. There are pre-compiled packages available on its GitHub page for easy installation in DOS but the source code is available there as well. And, if this is your first time hearing about the Fediverse, it is mostly an alternative to centralized social media like Facebook and Reddit but the decentralization isn’t without its downsides.

End Of An Automation Era As Twitter Closes Its Doors To Free API Access

February 3, 2023 by 40 Comments

Over the last few months since Elon Musk bought Twitter there has been a lot of comment and reaction, but not much with relevance to Hackaday readers. Today though that has changed, with an announcement from the company that as of February 9th they will end their free API tier. It’s of relevance here because Twitter has become one of those glue items for connected projects and has appeared in many featured works on this site. A week’s notice of a service termination is exceptionally short, so expect to see a lot of the Twitter bots you follow disappearing.

Twitter bot owners have the option of paying to continue with Twitter, or rebuilding their service to use a Mastodon instance such as botsin.space. If the fediverse is new to you, then the web is not short of tutorials on how to do this.

We feel that Twitter will be a poorer place without some of the creative, funny, or interesting bots which have enriched our lives over the years, and we hope that the spam bots don’t remain by paying for API access. We can’t help feeling that this is a misguided step though, because when content is the hook to bring in the users who are the product, throwing out an entire category of content seems short-sighted. We’re not so sure about it as a move towards profitability either, because the payback from a successful social media company is never profit but influence. In short: social media companies don’t make money but the conversation itself, and that can sometimes be worth more than money if you can avoid making a mess of it.

If the bots from our field depart for Mastodon, we look forward to seeing whether the new platform offers any new possibilities. Meanwhile if your projects don’t Toot yet, find out how an ESP32 can do it.

Header: D J Shin, CC BY-SA 3.0.

This Week In Security: Mastodon, Fake Software Company, And ShuffleCake

November 18, 2022 by 15 Comments

Due to Twitter’s new policy of testing new features on production, the interest in Mastodon as a potential replacement has skyrocketed. And what’s not to love? You can host it yourself, it’s part of the Fediverse, and you can even run one of the experimental forks for more features. But there’s also the danger of putting a service on the internet, as [Gareth Heyes] illustrates by stealing passwords from, ironically, the infosec.exchange instance.
Continue reading “This Week In Security: Mastodon, Fake Software Company, And ShuffleCake” →

Mastodon Comes To The IBM PC

November 15, 2022 by 49 Comments

Elon Musk has bought Twitter for an eye-watering sum, and his live adventures in chaotic mismanagement of a social media company have become a compelling performance for the rest of us. As we munch on our tasty popcorn and enjoy the show, many Twitter users have jumped ship for the open-source alternative Mastodon. It offers much to the escapee including instances tailored to particular communities, but aside from all that it’s got something Twitter never had. You can now use a Mastodon client on an IBM PC.

Many of you are no doubt looking askance at us, as you have been Tooting for years from behind the keyboard of a PC. But it’s likely that the PC you’re using is a generic modern x86 machine running an up-to-date operating system such as a GNU/Linux flavour or Microsoft Windows, by contrast here we’re referring to the original, the daddy of them all. Because the client we’re talking about is DOStodon, designed to run on a real IBM PC as though it’s the early 1980s again.

Stunt hacks aside, whether or not you fire up DOStodon on a 16-bit machine to get your Fediverse fix, it’s an interesting piece of software because it’s written in Javascript. Which in turn brings us to DOjS from the same author, a DOS Javascript canvas with sound. Not everyone will be raring to run their Javascript code on an early 1980s PC, but its existence proves that there’s plenty of life in the old platform yet.

Need more Mastodon on unexpected platforms? How about the ESP32?

Header image: Ruben de Rijcke, CC BY-SA 3.0, and Jin Nguyen, AGPL .

The demo toot screenshot, showing a text-only message sent from the ESP32 using the library.

Moved Off Twitter? Make Your ESP32 Toot

November 9, 2022 by 75 Comments

Since Twitter was officially taken over by Elon Musk a few days ago, there’s been significant staff cuts, a stream of questionable decisions, and uncertainty about the social media platform’s future. So it’s little surprise that a notable number of people, those in the tech and hacker scenes in particular, have decided to move over to (or at least bridge their accounts with) the distributed and open source Mastodon service.

Of course, the hacks would follow closely, and [Toby] shares a simple ESP32-based Mastodon client library for us to start with. Instead of “tweets”, messages on Mastodon instances are called “toots”, in line with the platform’s mammoth-like mascot. The library, called Luyba, is able to send toots and includes a demo firmware. Built using C++ and with support for Platform.IO, it should fit into quite a few projects out there, letting you easily send toots to whichever instance you find your home, as the library-aided demo toot shows.

What could you do with such a library on your MCU? Turns out, quite a few fun things – a home automation interface, a critter trap, an online BBC Basic interpreter, or, given image support, a camera that tweets whatever it’s pointed at. There’s quite a bit of fun hackers can have given a micro-blogging service API access and a bit of code that works with it. That said, for all the good that Twitter brought us over the years, there’s a lot that Mastodon can easily do better, between easily game-able “Trending” sidebar, bias found in auto-cropping algorithms and disarrayed internal security policies.