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Gregory

@grishka@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06
  • Open on mastodon.social

Software developer who's almost lost faith in the modern IT. Used to work at VKontakte, then Telegram. Currently building my own fediverse project to save our online social lives from greedy corporations. Follow the progress: #smithereen

Also working on the Mastodon Android app.

Русскоязычный аккаунт — @grishka

0 Followers
0 Following
50 Posts
Joined September 13, 2019
Website:
https://grishka.me
:mastodon: team:
https://joinmastodon.org/about
Smithereen website:
https://smithereen.software
Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago

The absolute worst thing about modern customer support is when a bot, or even worse, a human, doesn't answer the exact question you asked, but instead answers another, tenuously related question, for which there's a canned response.

I can somewhat get it for mainstream services (see my whole idea that the society should not force people to use technology, it should be a choice), but I've also ran into this with Google Play developer support.

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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 4w ago
Replying to
@dansup@mastodon.social where does the places database come from?
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to
@quad@akko.quad.moe @vtrlx@mastodon.social browsers have always been intentionally very forgiving. You could even omit some closing tags and it'll render just fine.
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to
In particular, I always drooled over newer phones. Someone, somewhere, always had a cooler phone than I did. More features, more interesting form factor, cool gimmicks, all that. Modern phones are just locked-down slabs of glass and metal that are awkward to use because ergonomics went out the window a long time ago. Nothing exciting about them whatsoever. I bought my current phone not because it's a good one, but because it was the least shitty offering on the market at the time.
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago

One thing I dislike about Java is these kinds of arbitrary null restrictions in the standard library. I don't get this. Why can't you have null elements in an unmodifiable collection? What if you need to? What would break if this would be allowed? I've already had a few bugs and crashes because of this.

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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to
Ok what if... One of these old Instagram versions as a Pixelfed client @dansup@mastodon.social
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to

Newsfeed now works as well. This needed some object unwrapping because I did the sensible thing and just made feed entries contain post objects, not this atrocity with type and a bunch of different fields depending on what that type is

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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
I'm adding support for multiple public keys per actor in Smithereen for future-proofing purposes. Are there any signature algorithms other than RSA currently in use on the fediverse? ECDSA maybe? #ActivityPub #mastodev
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
"You should target the latest Android version" but at the same time no instructions on how to do that, lol. A classic case of Google being Google.
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to

Thankfully, I didn't have to decompile it. I just asked the guy who worked on it back then 🙃 It turns out it does support sizes. After I removed that key, photo attachments started showing up.

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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to

And by the way. It uses execute A LOT. Like, more than half the API requests it makes are the execute method. This exposed some more bugs and corner cases in my interpreter.

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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to
I feel like I'll have to decompile the app to see what exactly it expects in a photo object... Maybe something undocumented? Maybe it expects some numbers to be strings? I remember the developers having problems with that (because, naturally, I know both people who worked on this app)
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to
@dansup@mastodon.social oh and it can also read some public transit cards and display the remaining balance. But there exist Android apps that can do the same, so again, quite useless in real life
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to

@dansup@mastodon.social I have one too (seemingly everyone working in tech has one) but somehow I hardly ever use it. So far I used it to:

  • enter the service menu on my TV, but there's nothing interesting there
  • read my building intercom key. Emulating it also works but it's awkward. I suppose I can also make extra copies too if I buy some blanks
  • receive the signal from my remote for the yard gate, but it has an anti-replay counter so that's quite useless
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to
@silverpill@mitra.social @mariusor@metalhead.club I did use a library (I copied that class out of some Java Bitcoin implementation), it's the single-character prefix that really tripped me up.
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to
@silverpill@mitra.social @mariusor@metalhead.club ughhhhhhhh. So that's what the "multibase" thing is.... There's ANOTHER spec (https://www.w3.org/TR/cid/#multibase-0) that says that the first character of the string specifies which encoding it uses because it can be different (but not for this FEP). Amazing format. Very convenient to debug. After that change, it turns out that the RSA key is encoded as "the weird Misskey format" that Java can't parse natively, but I already have the code to handle that at least.
w3.org

Controlled Identifiers v1.0

A controlled identifier document contains cryptographic material and lists service endpoints for the purposes of verifying cryptographic proofs from, and interacting with, the controller of an identifier.

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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to
@silverpill@mitra.social @mariusor@metalhead.club huh, interesting, I tried fetching your actor and it turns out one of the contexts uses a JSON-LD version that's too new for my JLD processor... Also probably the first time ever I'm seeing @ graph used in the wild. Not really a problem for me as I was going to put these two contexts into my resources anyway and I could as well edit them.
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to
@dansup@mastodon.social of course, I'm just asking how you handle it for Mastodon DMs. Because I myself have given up on trying to group messages into conversations entirely, I display them like emails.
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Android 17 has this nice feature where if you update an app (even via adb) while it's open, it'll relaunch it automatically after the update is done installing.
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to
@dansup@mastodon.social how would you do federated global search tho? It's a requirement for dating apps. I've never used Grindr, but Hornet that we use in Russia shows a grid of profiles sorted by distance as one of its main views. There is a social component to it (you can follow people and post) but it's very much secondary.
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to
@dansup@mastodon.social it's not like iOS development is any less of a mess
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to
@dansup@mastodon.social device fragmentation is mostly a non-issue starting with Android 5
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 4d ago
Replying to
@dansup@mastodon.social I made an attempt at marketing it. It wasn't very successful. Yes, it's like VK, but it's also like Facebook, which is known worldwide.
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to
@dansup@mastodon.social imo ActivityPub and ATProto are both vers
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 1w ago
Replying to
@dansup@mastodon.social I can't believe 2020 was 6 years ago
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 3w ago
Replying to
@liaizon@social.wake.st @Edent@mastodon.social interesting! It's public domain (CC0) which is also attractive
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to
@silverpill@mitra.social @mariusor@metalhead.club at last, I did it
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 3w ago
Replying to
@liaizon@social.wake.st @Edent@mastodon.social countries and cities are also there with much more data than I could possibly ask for. Even subway lines and stations have their entries: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1784097 (will be useful for improving my events feature) Thank you for reminding me about this project.
wikidata.org
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to
@mariusor@metalhead.club do you have any examples of actors that have a ed25519 key?
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 4d ago
Replying to
@dansup@mastodon.social that's impressively poor for a project that started in 2019
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to
@silverpill@mitra.social @mariusor@metalhead.club so the prefix is always 2, which corresponds to "identity", which is quite useless, it could as well not be there
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 1w ago
I think I know why people on Instagram post more stories than every other type of content. Stories are the only type of content there that isn't subject to the algorithm. You only see stories from people you follow. They are sorted somewhat algorithmically, but I believe it's just based on how much you interact with that person. So, does this mean that almost everyone subconsciously wants non-algorithmic social media?
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 1mo ago
Replying to
@dansup@mastodon.social before I got hired to Mastodon I was considering Bluesky. The more I see these sorts of things, the happier I am that it all worked out the way it did
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to
@dansup@mastodon.social by the way, what's this with seemingly every gay from North America being obsessed with this whole drag thing? I.. just don't get it? Among Russian-speaking gays hardly anyone ever brings up this whole concept. For all intents and purposes, it seems entirely absent from our culture.
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to
@dansup@mastodon.social how do you deal with branching replies and someone adding and removing mentions in the middle of a thread?
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 3w ago
Replying to
@dansup@mastodon.social @liaizon@social.wake.st @Edent@mastodon.social yep, they offer it in multiple formats: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Database_download Lat/lng don't make a good key. They are ambiguous because e.g. there might be multiple organizations sharing a building. They are also too unique since given enough precision, or lack thereof, the chances of you getting bit-for-bit exact coordinates as someone else are close to none. There's a reason why check-in apps ask you to pick a place :)
wikidata.org
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 3w ago
Replying to on mastodon.social
@Edent@mastodon.social since Smithereen is a Facebook/VK clone, I'm contemplating adding profile fields for schools, universities and such. The problem is, there needs to be a database of these institutions (and cities) with globally stable IDs. I'm still not sure which one I'll be using. Foursquare published theirs a while ago under a permissive license, then there's also OSM data which needs attribution but I can live with that. I'm open to suggestions on this.
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to
@silverpill@mitra.social @mariusor@metalhead.club the example key from the FEP also uses 2 for that... The FEP itself says "Implementers can use cryptographic keys of any type for which a Multicodec prefix is registered.", I'm very confused. There's 0x1205 for RSA public keys and 0xed for ed25519 ones for example.
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to
@silverpill@mitra.social @mariusor@metalhead.club what is even going on here. It's definitely not base58 decoding since I tried several different decoders and they all give the same result. The first key is from the Multikey array, the second one is the regular publicKey after base64 decoding.
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 4d ago
Replying to
@dansup@mastodon.social and there are only like 3 Smithereen servers out there...
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to
@silverpill@mitra.social @mariusor@metalhead.club OpenSSL ain't having any of it either
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to
@silverpill@mitra.social @mariusor@metalhead.club what is even going on here. It's definitely not base58 decoding since I tried several different decoders and they all gave the same result.
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to
@dansup@mastodon.social so you do separate them into conversations? How does that work with federation?
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Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 1w ago
Replying to
@dansup@mastodon.social many people add them to highlights tho
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Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to
@dansup@mastodon.social Android has always been more powerful than iOS because of the intent system tbh. Any action that an app can perform in another app can be handled by *any* app. That's how you get replaceable launchers, dialers, SMS apps, web browsers, photo galleries, camera apps, email clients, etc.
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Open post
Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 1w ago
Replying to
@dansup@mastodon.social on more tokens to flood the internet with more slop
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Gregory @grishka@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to
@dansup@mastodon.social but that's Bluesky-like centralization
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