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Bluesky has been making waves recently, both on its own merits and how it contrasts implementation-wise with ActivityPub/the fedivese. There are a bunch of ways it differs from other implementations of decentralized social media, but there’s one in particular I want to focus on: portable identity. The idea that I should be able to take all of my data, everything that my identity consists of, and move wholesale to a new instance/server/PDS/whatever you call it. Bluesky permits this^[1]. Mastodon and most (all?) other ActivityPub implementations do not. But that doesn’t have to be the case, nothing about ActivityPub—architecturally speaking—is incompatible with this vision.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. Last year, Christian Selig wrote a blog post about the annoyances of theming iOS apps. I won’t retread his entire article, but the gist of it is that there is no nice way to easily apply a theme to an entire iOS app. Either every view/controller has to listen for theme change notifications and update itself, or you have to resort to hacky workarounds to force all colors to update^[1].

From the person that brought you calling Rust from Swift comes the thrilling^[1], action^[2]-packed sequel: calling Swift from Rust! For a recent project, I found myself needing to call into Swift from a Rust project (on both macOS and Linux) and so am documenting here in case you, too, are in this unenviable situation.

I am very excited to announce that after almost four and a half years of development, Tusker, my iOS app for Mastodon is now available on the App Store!

If you follow my blog or follow me on the fediverse, you’ve no doubt heard me talk at length about it before, so I’ll spare you the details here. Suffice it to say that Tusker is a completely native iOS app that supports many of the latest features of both Mastodon and iOS.

This is not the end of development, there are still lots of features I plan to add—including push notifications and the ability to edit posts. If you’re already in the beta via TestFlight, you’re more than welcome to remain there. It will continue to get beta updates with new features and bugfixes ahead of the App Store releases.

So, about six months ago I decided I wanted to rewrite my perfectly-working blog backend in Rust. Why? Because I was bored and wanted an excuse to use Rust more.