You can find the index and other parts of this series here.
We are almost done! Thank you for coming all the way into this journey. In this part we will learn how to broadcast (aka federate) your site posts to your folowers.
Overview The federation of your posts (aka. sending your posts to live infitely in the fediverse) is pretty straighforward:
sequenceDiagram BroadcastTool->>Storage: Retrieve followers (actor uris) BroadcastTool->>Follower-instance: Get actor info (including inbox uri) BroadcastTool->>Filesystem: Get note json (post) BroadcastTool->>Follower-inbox: Send a create action (wrapper of note) In a few words, you will iterate your list of followers, get their inbox url, and send a request to such url to create an fediverse object (note, article, etc.).
Back in May, while commuting the few miles from the rural area where I was staying in Mexico to the city for virtual meetings, I listened to a podcast episode about whales. It focused specifically on how scientists are leveraging technological advancements to understand and decode the complex language of certain whale species. The ultimate goal is to create a translator that would allow humans to communicate with these creatures. However, the most challenging aspect lies in grasping the context of their communication — in other words, their world.
My relationship with coffee probably began in my mother’s womb. She may deny it, but I am pretty sure she drank more coffee than was advised or allowed in the 1980s. My mother is from a very small town in the middle of the mountains on the Pacific side of Mexico, very close to a semi-active volcano. My memories of visiting my grandmother are actually memories of smells: the smell of ashes and burnt food cooked with wood, ashes in the meat and the tortillas, and coffee.
I am incredibly grateful to the people who have helped shape me into who I am today. Their support and guidance have been invaluable.
But advice, like wisdom, can be tricky. It’s not always suitable for everyone, and any phrase can become wisdom with the right context. Generic advice from sources like LinkedIn can often be too broad or superficial, and should be taken with a grain of salt. While I have a wealth of wisdom to share, I will save that for my one-on-one conversations.
“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” I often say when someone tells me they’re mad because someone stole their idea or post. It’s a poor consolation, I know. There’s real anger when you pour effort into something, and someone else takes credit. I’ve felt that anger many times. Just a few weeks ago, I saw someone on LinkedIn lamenting that another person had stolen their idea, got 40k likes, and then blocked the original author. It’s unfair, yes—a reflection of the world’s inherent unfairness.
I used to write a lot when I was younger, even as a kid. There was no Gen-AI, no Grammarly, no advanced tools to assist with spelling or grammar. It was just me, a pen, and paper, pouring out my thoughts. I would lose myself in the worlds I created, and I would revisit some of them. I used to write speeches, poems, and essays. Words were my world, a tiny one-person world. Code became a form of expression. Writing has always been my sanctuary, a place where thoughts can flow freely, and ideas can take shape.
Today was a historic day for Mexico, as the country elected its first woman president. I love Mexico—the culture, food, friends, and family—but it has always been a country with deep-rooted toxic masculinity. This event is truly historic and unexpected.
I don’t expect much to change immediately in terms of politics, although I hope for significant progress. It won’t erase machismo overnight. Women all over Mexico are not only still underpaid and undervalued but also face violence and disappearances. They are getting killed and mistreated. I am not physically violent, but I used to embrace that toxic masculinity without realizing it. Each time I return to Mexico, it becomes evident to me how normalized such behaviors are, sometimes even among my close friends and family, in work settings, and in general society.
You can find the index and other parts of this series here.
Let’s dig in into the most controversial part of my guide: the inbox. As far as I know, there is no way to make this inbox static. However, thanks to the fact that ActivityPub does not require the inbox to share the same domain as the other elements, we can host it anywhere.
I believe it could be controversial for two reasons. First, it is not truly static; you require a backend somewhere running on some kind of server. The second reason is that I am using Azure, and I know from the get-go that will put some of you off. But I believe this guide is still valid, as you can easily deploy to AWS, GCP, or even Vercel. I am writing this in .NET, but as you may already know, translating the logic should be trivial for most modern languages. I will actually encourage people to contribute these implementations to my repo and make it our repo.
Reflecting on Seven Years: A Revisited Perspective I’ve chosen to revisit this post, originally published in 2017, which was likely the second entry on this blog. Much has unfolded since then: it was my first year in the US (still thinking in getting back to Mexico), my brother was still in Mexico, the onset of Trump’s presidency, and the world was not expecting a pandemic yet. Seven years later, I’m appending Part 2 following a recent visit to San Francisco. What changes have transpired, and what might I have overlooked? Let’s delve into it.
I was 11 years old when I became an accessibility advocate in software products thanks to Bill Gates. I did not know the term at the time, and it certainly was not planned. My parents bought a second-hand (or maybe third?) computer from a relative (thank you tío Rafa!), a fragrant IBM PS1 that now included screen colors. This was my second computer; the first one had a retina-damaging green monitor (verde chinga-pupila in Mexico), hacker-style, running DOS and Pascal.
