microcosm

Weekly 2025-08-22

cut fibre optics, incident response, infra resilience was the (unplanned) order of the week

August 27, 2025

note: this was an earlier draft version of this post, which is unfortunately missing some sections, many links, and some edits that i had added before publishing! atproto growing pains for publishing, <3 leaflet, content sync is hard!

What I thought this week would be:

  • Finish the microcosm website update

  • Sketch out the atproto linked-data post and spec

  • Review a big exciting UFOs client data handling contribution (deferred: she's still working on it!)

  • Constellation API updates

  • Get slingshot running under process supervision 😬

  • Chase some potential funding

  • Hopefully work a bit on at://advent

But someone cut the fibre internet cable to my house on Monday, so this week was more like:

  • Incident response

  • Resilience work and planning

Which, hey! Also important things 🙂

~

Building on microcosm

Conversations

~

below are the rough notes from the week as i went (super ignore-able)

monday

  • home internet died. got constellation onto cellular backup after a few hiccoughs, kept status timely public status updates. nothing to do until the ISP tech comes tuesday (earliest they had).

tuesday

  • internet restored

  • rerouted fibre so modem is next to router

    • bunch of homelab physical stuff, wall mounting etc

  • rented a small vultr vps for a secondary gateway (executing on previous resilience planning)

  • wrote a postmortem: https://updates.microcosm.blue/3lws6pkugu22k

  • purchased EasyDNS's DNS Pro for microcosm.blue

    • found out that namecheap doesn't have a zone export booo

wednesday

  • week reassessment :D

  • UFOs client data model contribution quick review (PR still pending)

  • website progress!

    • little logos for constellation, spacedust, and slingshot

    • quickstart code snippets for each, in python, bash, and javascript respectively

      • runnable! (with a little js magic)

thursday

  • fix the whats-hot feed on UFOs

    • fig (aka:[phil])'s avatar
      fig (aka:[phil])
      8mo

      how do you rank the "hotness" of something that started from zero? small tweaks to UFOs app: lexicons starting from zero are no longer removed from whats-hot, and get sorted by *magic* (aka log10(uniques) - 1) compared to the others' %-growth

      What's hot today 1. stream profile (101 active, +1163%) 2. stream message (69 active, +763%) 3. bibliome bookshelf (50 active, +Infinity%) 4. bibliome book (44 active, +Infinity%) 5. popsky review (9 active, +29%) 6. bsky verification (32 active, +23%)What's hot *this week* 1. shinolabs oekaki (49 active, +227%) 2. anisota session (1251 active, +Infinity%) 3. anisota log (1250 active, +Infinity%) 4. anisota progress (552 active, +Infinity%) 5. stream profile (123 active, +162%) 6. anisota inventory (367 active, +Infinity%)What's hot *this month* 1. anisota session (1251 active, +Infinity%) 2. anisota log (1250 active, +Infinity%) 3. anisota progress (552 active, +Infinity%) 4. anisota inventory (367 active, +Infinity%) 5. anisota pack (252 active, +Infinity%) 1. tangled profile (265 active, +121%)

  • website progresssssss

  • debugged sync problems for 3rd party pds on relays (microcosm and bsky both!)

    • fig (aka:[phil])'s avatar
      fig (aka:[phil])
      8mo

      yeah it's super weird! i also just confirmed that on the pds directly, pds.dollware.net/xrpc/com.atp... @bnewbold.net is there an easy way to kick a relay and have it re-check account activation status?

friday

  • debugged more deactivated state stuff, ran a large survey of the network

  • fig (aka:[phil])'s avatar
    fig (aka:[phil])
    8mo

    did a scan of all non-bsky (+non-bridgy) accounts (ie active self-hosters) 12% are in a bad state with sync1.1 relays 7% if you only consider the bsky sync1.1 relays not great news for self-hosting, but definitely fixable

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Weekly 2025-08-29
Postmortem: 2025-08-18