Federation Bot (@Federation_Bot)

Stephen Cox talks about his personal journey from trad-pub to self-publishing, and shares a lesson he learned the hard way: never make your happiness and contentment rest solely on the writing; have a hinterland.

https://britishfantasysociety.org/be-route-curious-a-publishing-journey/

#selfpublishing #selfpublished #indieauthor #author #authors #books #fantasy #mystery #occultdetective

The background image shows books piled on a table in front of a full bookshelf.

Federation Bot

@Federation_Bot last wk.

Coding Is Over. Get over It

https://blog.pitermarx.com/2026/09/coding-is-over.-get-over-it./

#HackerNews #Tech #FutureOfTopic

Federation Bot

@Federation_Bot last wk.

Show HN: Liniora - Ever thought about replacing your project manager?

https://liniora.com/

#HackerNews #Tech #Productivity

Federation Bot

@Federation_Bot last wk.

"A letter is circulating among House members urging Speaker Mike Johnson to bring back the House immediately and keep it in session until Congress passes #AI safeguards. Such drastic action has been proposed by members of both parties this week after current and former Anthropic researchers went public with warnings that AI could kill off humanity in the next decade":
https://www.axios.com/2026/09/11/mike-johnson-house-recess-ai-doom-warnings
#emergency #priorities #tech #solutions copy: @renewedresistance #politics

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Federation Bot

@Federation_Bot last wk.

Am I out of the loop, or is there a gap in people using Gen #AI to create amazing music videos, as eg Kutiman did in the "dog hallucination" era? @jeromeherr.space@bsky.brid.gy

Kutiman - Fresh Haze (Official...

Federation Bot

@Federation_Bot last wk.

Fuck it, make it anyway

https://www.joelotter.com/posts/2026/09/make-it-anyway/

#HackerNews #Tech #Motivation

Federation Bot

@Federation_Bot last wk.

🆕 blog! “ActivityPub - How to send an updated user profile to Mastodon and the Fediverse”

Let's suppose you've updated the description of your ActivityPub account from "World's Number 1 Taylor Swift Fan" to "This account is now a Nickleback Truther". How do you let the rest of the Fediverse know that you've…

Federation Bot

@Federation_Bot last wk.

ActivityPub - How to send an updated user profile to Mastodon and the Fediverse

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/09/activitypub-how-to-send-an-updated-user-profile-to-mastodon-and-the-fediverse/

By default, most Mastodon instances won't periodically poll your account information just to see if you've updated it. So how does the information get from your server to your followers' servers?

This wasn't immediately obvious to me, but I got a clue from reading Evan Prodromou's book on ActivityPub:

The Update activity type is for updating the properties of an object represented by the object property.
The most common types of objects that can be updated are content objects, like Note or Image. Actor types (like Person) and Question activity types can also be updated.

Aha!

You need to craft an Update message which has as its object the new user information. That needs to be sent to the inbox of all your followers.

Something like this:

 JSON{
"@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
"actor": "https://example.com/user",
"id": "6a9162a6-a8e5-ca0f-9c08-8e6b814acef8",
"published": "2026-08-31T12:34:56+01:00",
"to": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public",
"type": "Update"
"object": {
"@context": [
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
"https://w3id.org/security/v1"
],
"id": "https://example.com/user",
"name": "My new name",
"summary": "A brand new description!",
…
},
}

Obviously the full user information is a bit more than that - it will include inbox details, public keys, avatars, etc. The published property in the Update activity should be when you changed your details - not when the account was created.

Once that was sent, Mastodon immediately reflected the changes.