After quite some time, I’m finally ready to share this.

MastoBlaster is now available in public testing on TestFlight.

It is a lightweight, privacy-first Fediverse client for iOS, built around a simple idea: fast, small, predictable behavior, and first-class support for snac.

What makes it different:
• snac-first by design, not "compatible by accident"
• Works with all Mastodon API compatible software, including Mastodon, snac, GoToSocial, Akkoma, and others
• EXIF stripping on upload (HDR and orientation preserved)
• Optional on-device alt text generation via Apple Intelligence for your uploads and for images in your timeline
• Markdown posting for snac
• Granular notifications, grouping, multi-account
• Blocking and moderation tools
• Very small footprint, very low RAM usage

Alt text generation happens entirely on device via Apple APIs on supported hardware. Nothing is sent to external services.

It is built around my own workflow and priorities. It may not be for everyone, and that is perfectly fine.

Important note:
MastoBlaster will always be free for BSD Cafe users, illumos Cafe users, and for anyone connecting to a snac instance, including self-hosted ones.

The app is already usable, but this is still a test phase. I am looking for feedback, bug reports, and real-world usage insights.

TestFlight link:
https://testflight.apple.com/join/Pkxa5R1k

Stay tuned.

#MastoBlaster #iOS #Fediverse #Mastodon #snac #snac2 #Akkoma #GoToSocial #ActivityPub #OwnYourData

EDIT: Build 68 should also run on iOS 18.x but it currently crashes. I'll see if I can fix it.

After quite some time, I’m finally ready to share this.

MastoBlaster is now available in public testing on TestFlight.

It is a lightweight, privacy-first Fediverse client for iOS, built around a simple idea: fast, small, predictable behavior, and first-class support for snac.

What makes it different:
• snac-first by design, not "compatible by accident"
• Works with all Mastodon API compatible software, including Mastodon, snac, GoToSocial, Akkoma, and others
• EXIF stripping on upload (HDR and orientation preserved)
• Optional on-device alt text generation via Apple Intelligence for your uploads and for images in your timeline
• Markdown posting for snac
• Granular notifications, grouping, multi-account
• Blocking and moderation tools
• Very small footprint, very low RAM usage

Alt text generation happens entirely on device via Apple APIs on supported hardware. Nothing is sent to external services.

It is built around my own workflow and priorities. It may not be for everyone, and that is perfectly fine.

Important note:
MastoBlaster will always be free for BSD Cafe users, illumos Cafe users, and for anyone connecting to a snac instance, including self-hosted ones.

The app is already usable, but this is still a test phase. I am looking for feedback, bug reports, and real-world usage insights.

TestFlight link:
https://testflight.apple.com/join/Pkxa5R1k

Stay tuned.

#MastoBlaster #iOS #Fediverse #Mastodon #snac #snac2 #Akkoma #GoToSocial #ActivityPub #OwnYourData

#Phanpy failed at saving alt-text to an image on a new post for a logged in #WordPress #ActivityPub account. I must do more testing and investigate why tomorrow. It may be my settings or it could be Phanpy. I shall see.

Also, thanks to: byte, dandelions, oxzi, davidrv00, ag-eitilt, pmjv, zen, daltux and anyone else I may have missed for contributing to this release!

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' snac to 2.90 here:

https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/31230

1 of 3 GitHub Continuous Integration checks completed successfully.

Fingers crossed the other two go off without a hitch. If so, it's up to someone else with commit access to merge it.

#snac #MacPorts #OpenSource #ActivityPub #Mastodon #NoDatabaseNeeded
#NoJavaScript #NoCookiesEither #NotMuchBullShit #snacAnnounces

Before I drive myself mad and try to build something I'm incapable of…

Has anyone built an #ActivityPub server for embedded devices?

Not a Raspberry Pi, but like one of those tiny ESP32 devices which can run MicroPython or similar.

I built a *full* AP server in around 64KB of PHP
https://gitlab.com/edent/activity-bot/

Now I'm wondering if a tiny sensor could be a fully-fledged ActivityPub node on the Fediverse.

#snac2 #fediverse #frugalfediverse

Minor tweak to improve signature key retrieving for some Wordpress configurations.

Fixed web UI incorrect links to actor public pages for some configurations.

Fixed mismatch in the accounts being followed number in the public and people pages.

Notifications can be filtered by category (contributed by byte).

Dates are shown adjusted to the account's time zone (contributed by dandelions).

Configurable limit for poll items (contributed by dandelions).

Fixed incorrect scope when editing a post (contributed by dandelions).

Change the strip_exif logic to work with the already existing OpenBSD sandbox (contributed by oxzi).

Mastodon API: Add poll creation (contributed by davidrv00), fixed a voting bug (contributed by davidrv00), added a fix to verify_credentials (contributed by ag-eitilt).

Updated Czech, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish translations (contributed by pmjv, zen, daltux).

https://comam.es/what-is-snac

If you find #snac useful, please consider buying grunfink a coffee or contributing via LiberaPay.

#snacAnnounces #FrugalFediverse

#weeklyreview 07/2026

February 8th – 14th, 2026

Summary

Somehow super hectic week. That’s why I only got to post last weeks review yesterday. Struggling with project management or the lack thereof in the office. More AI fiddling that I’m rather happy with. Good progress on #project25 and the China vacation plan. Also still enjoying the book about the Vienna Circle a lot.

AI, AI and more AI

This is a big topic for me right now. At the office of course but also in personal experiments.

Fediverse journaling plugin

With help of AI coding I’m getting to realise many small ideas I had but would never have had the time to realise. This week I’ve create a little WordPress plugin to use the fediverse as a journaling assistant.

I spent a lot of time in my fediverse clients (mostly Mona, IceCubes or the Mastodon web interface). So why not use that as an input channel for my weekly blogging. I tried different other approaches over the last few months to recollect what I was busy with during the week. Having scripts collecting my Mastodon posts over the weeks and compiling them into a weekly overview page for instance. So I thought it might be useful to just sent message in the Fediverse to my blog for journaling.

I’ve got the ActivityPub plugin installed and thus my Blog is just a normal account in the fediverse that I can mention or sent messages to. I’ve wrote a plugin in which I can authorise specific fediverse users in a WordPress author profile. If these fediverse users mention the WordPress author profile, that post gets appended to a weekly draft post on the Blog.

Now whenever I have something noteworthy, I’ll mention my blog account in my fediverse post and it gets automatically appended to a weekly review draft. At the end of the week I already have a list of things that bothered me during the week.

The code can be found here.

Some snippets from this weeks journal:

2026-02-11 17:37:06

I’d call it “vibe project management” where you just pretend to have a project plan. It visually looks like project plan. But factually it doesn’t make any sense because it has been created with Photoshop for Powerpoint …@falko

2026-02-12 12:59:10

@Nico prinzipiell läuft es. Genutzt wird das Modell jetzt von einem Pi Coding Agent der in einer Debian VM läuft 🙈 @falko

I’ve tried my luck with an open weight coding model and the Pi Coding agent. Downloaded the qwen3-coder-next:latest model for Ollama. That’s a whopping 51GB in size as barely fits into my physical memory. The Pi coding agent was running inside a virtual machine. It works in principle… but is so slow that a reasonable test wasn’t really practical for the moment. Have to play a bit more with it. With that setup one could theoretically realise a fully offline coding agent. But I guess some more beefy hardware is needed. Although an Apple Silicon M2 Max isn’t really a slow machine.

Project Management in the age of vibe everything

To be honest, this has started much before AI and vibe coding became popular. The tendency to make up project plans with tools that are not meant for project planning. Most notorious in this field are Project Plans in Excel, Powerpoint or JIRA.

Why am I so upset about it? In my eyes a project plan helps you prioritise and visualise work by listing the tasks and milestones and putting them in chronological order. You define dependencies between tasks and maybe even resources. Once that has been established (and I don’t say this is trivial to collect) you can use proper project management software to identify the critical path of your project. That is the one sequence of events that you have to focus on. All the others will not move you necessarily closer to your project end (because they’re not on the critical path) until the items on the critical path are not finished.

It will also help you assess the effects of time lines slippage. How does that the affect to overall project timing? Or you can identify bottlenecks in your plan due to resources overload. So all good things that you management usually wants to see and from you as a project manager.

Yet, many project plans are just vibe fiddled with the likes of office software. So it just looks similar to a project plan visually. But these tools don’t help you actually manage your project. They just visualise what you think your project plan is. Not backed by hard data.

The most hilarious experience in this context was my conversation with the Atlassian Rovo AI assistant on the topic this week. Asked whether JIRA can be used for project management it of course answered that JIRA is actually best for this. Then probed how chronological order and critical path can then be managed it needed to back off and admit that you can’t do that in JIRA without lots of add-ons and/or paid extensions.

What puzzles me is, that this kind of “let’s just wing it” project management is accepted in many companies. My theory is, that management knows precisely that their demand for speed, quality and resource usage is completely unrealistic. Too much work get’s committed with too little resources. Milestone be set before the actually planning happened because it was promised to a customer or C-suite guy. Proper project management would proof with hard data that the timeline is totally unrealistic.

But with just vibe coded project plans they can just press and demand. And people obey with over-hours and compromises in quality and features.

Rural restaurants

On Sunday we’ve been at the lovely Kastanienhof in Flieth. A traditional village restaurant with traditional German food. It was really delicious and at a very affordable price range. For the three of us we payed something around 60 EUR in total including drinks and my starter. That’s about as much as I pay for me alone in Berlin when having BBQ ribs at Chicago Williams 😉

That Sunday morning I was helping a friend to put a new hard disk into his laptop. I needed more space and fortunately bought the new NVMe SSD already back in November. The same 4 TB disks now costs more than 100 EUR more thanks to the AI hype.

It had to be a Windows 11 installation as that’s what he had to use for his work. I’m not judging. It went surprisingly smooth. We’ve created a bootstick from the existing installation with the Windows 11 installer. He had already looked up a video on how to disassemble the laptop. That was a huge timesaver as the HP Laptop had 5 hidden screws that we had to uncover under the rubber feet.

New disk in, booted from USB and started the installation. After about 15 min the new OS was running and could start to install the needed software from scratch. He knew all his accounts and password and so we were done in a few hours with the whole setup. I honestly expected more fiddling needed.

China here we come

The planning of the upcoming China trip progresses. I’ve contacted a few friends in Beijing and established communication via WeChat with them now. We had stayed in contact loosely via Facebook and LinkedIN. Both services are just bad … for various reasons. But we switched to Chinas most popular chat app. They immediately offered pick up service and are generally excited to meet again. We’ve also got the rest of the schedule mostly sorted and now need to book the hotels and tours. It’s getting real.

#project25 update

This week the insulation material for the attic arrived and work is supposed to start next week. We quickly unloaded the stuff and placed partially into the attic and living room for convenience.

Unfortunately I noticed that the heating seemed to have stopped. It’s hopefully “just” because of low fuel level in the oil tanks. I had initially only bought 1000L back in June 2025 expecting this to last about a year.

I really have no experience with this kind of heating system. We didn’t spent much time in the house yet so the heating was set to winter mode most of the time. But then we also had a pretty cold winter so far and not insulated attic is kind of open to the lower floor norw. I’ve tried to seal it as good as possible with styrofoam plates. Still the heating seems to guzzle a lot of oil… that soon needs to be replace by a proper heat pump system.

still ice on the lake

14 at last

Kiddo turned 14 this week … of course they grow up so fast 🙂

Learning

Learned (rather got it confirmed) this week from our doctor that ADS & depression is much harder noticed in women because they’re much better at blending in and make an effort to just play along to expectations. That of course is taxing and taking lots of energy which makes their symptoms even worse.

Reading

no changes over last week

Alt...

screenshot der MacOS Activity App welche die RAM Auslastung anzeigt. Von 64GB physischem Speicher werden 62,18GB genutzt und ca. 17GB SWAP

Der Ghost Blog https://BLOG.BAYERWALD.SOCIAL hat inzwischen auch sein Fediverse Handle bekommen.

@index

und ist damit als Instanz vollständig ins Fediverse eingebunden.

#fediverse #activitypub #ghost
#bayerwaldsocial #blog

There's a lot of energy on the #Fediverse right now to discuss/find a #Federated alternative to #Discord using #ActivityPub.

@strypey suggested that I put this out there to anyone who's thinking about it. We could probably rebuild most of Discord's features as an #Emissary inbox without doing a lot of back end code.

I'm too swamped to start on this right now. But if you're a great HTML+CSS designer, I'm able to give some time to a team who wants to take this on.

Recently, there was a question by @taylorlorenz about how you explain the Fediverse to someone who doesn't use it.

And usually, what we tend to do is we talk about servers and decentralisation and federation and ActivityPub and all these highly technical concepts.

I've been thinking about it, and all that technical stuff is really impressive work by people far more clever than I'll ever be.

But for me, that technology is a facilitating thing. It's like trying to describe how a bicycle works, rather than why you ride it.

Instead, what the Fediverse is, is a place to have conversations online without algorithms, AI, and ads getting in the way.

Which is increasingly a rare thing online.

Almost the entirety of the internet, from SEO on the web to YouTube to TikTok to Spotify to Instagram and X and Facebook, has been turned into a race to game an algorithm designed to sell ads.

What makes the Fedi unique is that it's not that.

And I suspect if you're trying to persuade someone to try Mastodon (or Lemmy, or Pixelfed, or GtS, etc), you'll get a lot further explaining it as algorithm-free, ad-free, AI-free conversations, rather than trying to describe a decentralised protocol.

#Fediverse #Mastodon #ActivityPub

https://fedi-relay.gyptazy.com is a tech related relay instance that connects over 100 instances, focussing on things like #FreeBSD, #BGP, #IPv6, #Proxmox, #Homelab, #Linux and many other things! You can easily add a really when using #snac / #snac2, #mastodon, #pleroma and many other ones!

#community #activitypub #socialmedia #fedi #fediwall #relay #opensource #tech #federated #social

Alt...

Overview of the fedi-relay gyptazy instance for the Fediverse