2026-24

API-First Appviews

The Tangled appview does too many things: it presently is a monolith that handles creation and ingestion of Tangled AT records, off-protocol data such as emails and settings, notifications and an HTMX-based frontend application.

Bobbin is a new project that aims to separate some of this logic out of the monolith, specifically: the ingestion of Tangled records. Bobbin is a read-only, API-only appview for Tangled. It exclusively ingests content from an AT firehose and provides a convinient API for clients to utilize. To top things off, bobbin is entirely stateless too. It backfills the entire network on boot, and destroys everything on shutdown. On-protocol state is instead handled by an upstream service, hydrant. This upstream service does take a couple hours to backfill, and data is stored on disk. Off-protocol state will continue to reside in a standard CRUD service.

Since bobbin is read-only, it does not deal with any kind of authentication either, clients are expected to deal with PDii, knots and spindles directly.

At present, bobbin is hosted and served at https://api.tangled.org, and the full list of XRPC APIs provided can be found here.

Notch Noodling

I've been tweaking my tmux statusline in my free time, to accomodate the notch on my Macbook Air. Something I am quite fond of is iOS's "Dynamic Island". To distract from the black bar at the top of the screen, applications that need to emit live statuses, can utliize portions of the statusbar to draw these statuses. I've got something similar working with just tmux primitives:

  1. The statusline program scans panes for interesting long running processes, like redis-server or ssh or git push commands
  2. It parses a bit of that pane's output and draws some text around the notch, it cycles through active statuses
  3. Using tmux's display-popup, you can "expand" the notification to expose a larger, more-detailed panel

At rest, the 2-line statusbar shows the existence of a live process:

When expanded (bound to a prefix+i):

Fern

I have purchased Fern, a "Venetian oldstyle for screens", for use on my website as well as my e-reader (an old Kindle, running KOReader).