Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Monday, 19th February 2024

ActivityPub Server in a Single PHP File (via) Terence Eden: “Any computer program can be designed to run from a single file if you architect it wrong enough!”

I love this as a clear, easy-to-follow example of the core implementation details of the ActivityPub protocol—and a reminder that often a single PHP file is all you need.

# 12:20 am / php, mastodon, activitypub, terence-eden

Spam, and its cousins like content marketing, could kill HN if it became orders of magnitude greater—but from my perspective, it isn't the hardest problem on HN. [...]

By far the harder problem, from my perspective, is low-quality comments, and I don't mean by bad actors—the community is pretty good about flagging and reporting those; I mean lame and/or mean comments by otherwise good users who don't intend to and don't realize they're doing that.

dang

# 3:57 pm / hacker-news, moderation, socialsoftware