The official Bluesky PDS software is very buggy lol
"TypeError: Cannot create property 'mailer' on string 'smpts://resend:<api key>@smtp.resend.com:465/' at new Mail (/nix/store/d4981gig41ff42a8q273ydvi5q0nsjzg-pds-0.4.204/lib/pds/node_modules/.pnpm/nodemailer@6.10.1/node_modules/nodemailer/lib/mailer/index.js:45:33)"
`pdsadmin`, the tool for creating/editing accounts, doesn't run at all on NixOS, for some reason. It just hangs.
Well, I fixed it, but you can't actually use pdsadmin to create accounts with did:web.
Okay, I figured it out. See, it's simple. You just
Generate a key in one format
Convert it to another
Create a JSON document with a very specific and kind of undocumented format
Create a new account by making raw API calls, because there is no client to do it for you
Call a barely documented endpoint that returns some almost-but-not-quite correctly formatted JSON to put in that JSON document
Strip some characters from one of the fields in that document
and boom, DID:WEB and true decentralization.
Should be easy for anyone to do, right? Way easier than just picking an instance and clicking sign up.
Oh and don't forget to
- already have your own hosting set up
- know how to set CORS headers
- know how to debug any of this when it inevitably fails
the only place the *working* process is documented is in a comment on a GitHub issue: https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/issues/2100
but there are many blog posts that tell you how to do it wrong!
Oh, no, I spoke too soon; now I get "cannot find profile" errors when I try to see my own profile or post.
Great.
This issue would tend to indicate that, because I didn't get it right on the first try, I can never use did:web:nora.codes again.
I'm actually quite frustrated about this.
@noracodes This is sounding worse than what setting up a Mastodon server in 2017 was like which is saying a lot because that was a pretty bad experience.
@packetcat @noracodes and here i thought setting glitch-soc up in 2021 was already annoying enough
