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by Blender Dumbass

Aka: J.Y. Amihud. A Jewish by blood, multifaceted artist with experience in film-making, visual effects, programming, game development, music and more. A philosopher at heart. An activist for freedom and privacy. Anti-Paternalist. A user of Libre Software. Speaking at least 3 human languages. The writer and director of the 2023 film "Moria's Race" and the lead developer of it's game sequel "Dani's Race".

Petitions turned out to be a failure. The idea was to develop some way for people in the Libre world to make something from their effort. You can read my article, where I explain the whole thing in details to see what exactly was the thing.

How AI broke Petitions?

The way I was doing my petitions was rather simple. I would find an API call to some webserver ( usually related to the Fediverse ) and would give my website this API call and a data-point to look for. For example: In the Dani's Race v2025-03-17 Petition, the petition is referencing the amount of followers for @rowdyjoe@mastodon.social.

I give it this link:

https://mastodon.social/api/v1/accounts/lookup?acct=@rowdyjoe

If you try to actually go there you will see that this is just a simple JSON thingie with data. And so I tell my server to look for followers_count. Which is ( at the time of writing ) sits at 31. Because @rowdyjoe@mastodon.social has 31 followers.

The webserver is trying to load this link every once in a while ( every 10 minutes or so ) to update the counter and with it to update the progress bar of the petition.

The problem is, it fails to load this API call.

Yes, you and I can just click on the link and it will work just fine, but my webserver fails to even load it. And I tried anything. I tried making it pretend to be a browser. It didn't work. I tried using curl. It didn't work. Nothing I try seems to work. And I think I know why.

Those pesky AI scraping bots, OMFG!

The petition idea cannot work unless I can systematically tell my server to check some API call. And due to AI companies wanting to scrape everything for the sake of IDK what, those API calls are getting harder and harder to access, because the web-devs of platforms are taking security against AI scraping bots more and more seriously.

Forget about me setting up a petition for a person that seems to not even care about his mastodon account, due to low number of followers. Forget that I try to shove an unknown account into people's faces for a gimmick related to a game that nobody wants to play. All of those things are kind of okay, in some silly way ( even though the current petition would be running for a year soon ) if the damn thing worked in the first place.

A new Fediverse gimmick?

Here is something that I might try to do though. One thing I didn't try is to refactor the petition system, such that it will use ActivityPub specifically ( which will make some things un-petition-able, but would probably work fine, while the server has the rest of ActivityPub working as well ).

But thinking about ActivityPub gimmicks specifically I thought that maybe I can try to develop a separate gimmick for single unlocks of single files. Or something.

Here is how in theory it could work:

If you ever seen an Owncast Livestream you know that you can "authenticate" yourself with an existent Fediverse account. You give it your Mastodon handle. It sends a private message to you ( to your mastodon ) with a code. And you copy-paste this code into Owncast, to authenticate.

It is not very secure, yes. But it is a cool concept, for not so important things.

How about using it for something like petitions?

Let's say I make a button somewhere for you to "authenticate". Which will work the same exact way. The website will treat it as a sort of soft-login. Maybe people with actual accounts could authenticate once and for all. While other people might periodically re-authenticate.

In any case. As soon as my server knows who you are on the fedi, it can play games with you on the fedi.

For example, I could setup a list of posts on the fedi, boosting which, gives people points of some-kind. We can make a silly gamification token or something for this sort of thing.

Say I want you to follow @rowdyjoe@mastodon.social. If you are following @rowdyjoe@mastodon.social you can claim say 10 FA ( Fedivese Actions ). And those 10 FA you can spend on petitions or unlockables or anything else on the server.

Now obviously this is not a secure thing to do. These fedivese actions probably should not be transferable ( so it is not a currency ). And I should put a huge warning saying that there is absolutely zero security involved with this.

But... This could be a fun little thing to code.

Happy Hacking!!!

3

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  FOSS Dev c:0


@blenderdumbass Click bait headline bingo.

  Troler c:1 January 14, 2026



All I can it's one step away from a fediverse casino. Just allow users to buy Fediverse Actions for cash, and you're basically set!

On serious terms, can I use puppet accounts to boost rowdyjoe's follower count to the moon?

... replies ( 1 )

  Blender Dumbass c:2 January 14, 2026



@Troler technically you can follow him. But the damn thing will not update, for reasons stated above.

  Blender Dumbass c:2 January 14, 2026

... c:1

  Troler c:1 January 14, 2026

Say I want you to follow @rowdyjoe@mastodon.social. If you are following @rowdyjoe@mastodon.social you can claim say 10 FA ( Fedivese Actions ). And those 10 FA you can spend on petitions or unlockables or anything else on the server.

All I can it's one step away from a fediverse casino. Just allow users to buy Fediverse Actions for cash, and you're basically set!

On serious terms, can I use puppet accounts to boost rowdyjoe's follower count to the moon?

@Troler technically you can follow him. But the damn thing will not update, for reasons stated above.

  cptbichez c:3 January 15, 2026


I'm not sure AI killed petitioning system, and gladly Mastodon's and fork-of are working as intended.

but is that the same system as twitch viewing points? (watching a stream gives you points you can spend on the stream you're watching, you cannot keep those on someone else's stream, and they're perishable and you get like extra chat commands like highlighting your message, display special emotes and such), some "silly gamification" to create engagement during the stream.

or is that a "gamified client for mastodon" because if you log on using your AP-based account, and give points-per-x and x being toot/like/retoot (mastodon functions) that might end like a casino a bit or a silent grind to get everything available for sake of collection and achivements or just stacking points.

i think i remember some people talking about doing the same when NFTs were popular, like engagement is giving crypto points and with those crypto points you could buy NFTs and access new stuff on the website. on paper its grinding casino 101

But i'm still curious about it.

... replies ( 2 )

  Blender Dumbass c:4 January 15, 2026



@cptbichez I'm thinking the best way to do this is kind of like this:

Let's say I want to publish the 3D model of the honda. Or make a tutorial, but only for the true fans. ( kind of like people are doing with patreon ). Or something like that. I could make it show up as:

this item is only for the fans Unlock

Or something.

And when you click unlock it asks you to authenticate with your mastodon. And then shows you a page of your fandom-hood.

On the background it will look for your ActivityPub account in the website's metadata. If you have liked / boosted / commented / followed anything on the site. Or anything related to the author specifically. ( I need to think about it ). And add all those things together into a sort of Fandomhood Metric. "Fediverse Actions" if you will...

Basically you technically you don't need to do anything if you are a fan. You can simply use your Fandomhood points to "purchase" or "unlock" this one post. But if you don't have enough. It will just tell you that your are not a good enough fan. And it should be self-explanatory why.

  Blender Dumbass c:5 January 15, 2026

I'm not sure AI killed petitioning system, and gladly Mastodon's and fork-of are working as intended.

@cptbichez it didn't kill ActivityPub, but what I was doing was not activitypub. It was more like scrape the data every 10 minutes kind of thing. Which could have enabled not ActivityPub related petitions.

But now I need to rewrite everything to be just ActivityPub.

  Blender Dumbass c:4 January 15, 2026

... c:3

  cptbichez c:3 January 15, 2026


I'm not sure AI killed petitioning system, and gladly Mastodon's and fork-of are working as intended.

but is that the same system as twitch viewing points? (watching a stream gives you points you can spend on the stream you're watching, you cannot keep those on someone else's stream, and they're perishable and you get like extra chat commands like highlighting your message, display special emotes and such), some "silly gamification" to create engagement during the stream.

or is that a "gamified client for mastodon" because if you log on using your AP-based account, and give points-per-x and x being toot/like/retoot (mastodon functions) that might end like a casino a bit or a silent grind to get everything available for sake of collection and achivements or just stacking points.

i think i remember some people talking about doing the same when NFTs were popular, like engagement is giving crypto points and with those crypto points you could buy NFTs and access new stuff on the website. on paper its grinding casino 101

But i'm still curious about it.

@cptbichez I'm thinking the best way to do this is kind of like this:

Let's say I want to publish the 3D model of the honda. Or make a tutorial, but only for the true fans. ( kind of like people are doing with patreon ). Or something like that. I could make it show up as:

this item is only for the fans Unlock

Or something.

And when you click unlock it asks you to authenticate with your mastodon. And then shows you a page of your fandom-hood.

On the background it will look for your ActivityPub account in the website's metadata. If you have liked / boosted / commented / followed anything on the site. Or anything related to the author specifically. ( I need to think about it ). And add all those things together into a sort of Fandomhood Metric. "Fediverse Actions" if you will...

Basically you technically you don't need to do anything if you are a fan. You can simply use your Fandomhood points to "purchase" or "unlock" this one post. But if you don't have enough. It will just tell you that your are not a good enough fan. And it should be self-explanatory why.

  Blender Dumbass c:5 January 15, 2026

... c:3

  cptbichez c:3 January 15, 2026


I'm not sure AI killed petitioning system, and gladly Mastodon's and fork-of are working as intended.

but is that the same system as twitch viewing points? (watching a stream gives you points you can spend on the stream you're watching, you cannot keep those on someone else's stream, and they're perishable and you get like extra chat commands like highlighting your message, display special emotes and such), some "silly gamification" to create engagement during the stream.

or is that a "gamified client for mastodon" because if you log on using your AP-based account, and give points-per-x and x being toot/like/retoot (mastodon functions) that might end like a casino a bit or a silent grind to get everything available for sake of collection and achivements or just stacking points.

i think i remember some people talking about doing the same when NFTs were popular, like engagement is giving crypto points and with those crypto points you could buy NFTs and access new stuff on the website. on paper its grinding casino 101

But i'm still curious about it.

@cptbichez it didn't kill ActivityPub, but what I was doing was not activitypub. It was more like scrape the data every 10 minutes kind of thing. Which could have enabled not ActivityPub related petitions.

But now I need to rewrite everything to be just ActivityPub.

Post