Tom Casavant (@tom.tomkahe.com) Bsky

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

@robinhouston

"The closest analogy I would give would be that the main openings in chess were well-studied, but AI discovers a new opening line that had been overlooked based on human aesthetics and convention.

In fact, the von Mangoldt function itself is celebrated for it's connection to […]

16 hours ago 0 1 0 0

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

I guess we’re all getting a little tired of talking about this sort of thing, but I think this is the most impressive example yet of an LLM-generated solution to a long-open mathematical problem:

https://www.erdosproblems.com/forum/thread/1196

Jared Lichtman, a mathematician who has spent (in […]

22 hours ago 0 4 4 0

@mattmaison he's giving me hope, which is a dangerous thing

13 hours ago 0 0 0 0

@tom

Sal is a beast.

14 hours ago 0 1 1 0

The Reds have a winning record. By my calculations they will never drop below 0.500 ever again this season

2 weeks ago 3 3 1 0

Got another mastoscold yelling at me for "using the platform to promote" my photos.

For the record, I don't generally sell my photos, here or anywhere else. But even if I did, I fail to see why that would be a problem.

Preventing artists from making a living is a strange hill to want to die on.

21 hours ago 5 81 33 1

RE: mastodon.social/@fediversereport/1164093...

A massive thanks to @laurenshof for actually attributing FediMod FIRES to me in his coverage. It means a lot to receive credit for my work!

18 hours ago 0 5 0 0

Original post on hollo.social

BOJ (Baekjoon Online Judge), a big competitive programming site in Korea, says it's shutting down on April 28. It has been around since 2010 and, as far as I know, has mostly been one person's work the whole time. The notice doesn't say why. The rumor is that the server bills finally got too […]

1 day ago 4 11 0 1

Original post on hachyderm.io

Oh, also, the labels structure that FediMod FIRES has will likely become the basis for doing labelling of content from the AP T&S taskforce: github.com/swicg/activitypub-trust-...

I'm still writing that FEP when I get time to, but it outlines why content labeling […]

2 days ago 0 1 0 0

Original post on mastodon.social

We’re happy to share that Mastodon has been awarded a service agreement from the Sovereign Tech Fund @sovtechfund 🎉

This covers five major initiatives through 2026 and 2027. We are very grateful for this support. Read about the details in our blog post […]

2 days ago 22 217 5 13

Some personal news... after an amazing 3 years working with the Mastodon team, first in developer relations and then as communications lead - it’s time for me to move on (after April 28). It’s been a privilege to work on something as meaningful and important as the Fediverse. 🧵👇🏻 (1/4)

2 days ago 9 26 12 1

Original post on hachyderm.io

Contrary to seemingly popular belief, FediMod FIRES and the protocol I created for it is so much more than just "blocklist synchronisation"

It's designed to give moderation teams choice in what they pull from providers and how that's applied to their server. It's designed to give finer-grained […]

2 days ago 1 12 2 0

Screenshot of github issues page showing a list of issues submitted by me: Select all issues: Search results https://www.catholicmuseum.org/feed/ moved to https://columbuscatholic.org/feed/ but no longer museum related? #142 TomCasavant opened 3 minutes ago https://www.prairietownship.org/rss.aspx#agendaCenter recategorize as website not RSS #141 TomCasavant opened 4 minutes ago https://www.marysvilleohio.org/rss.aspx#calendar recategorize this as website not RSS #140 TomCasavant opened 5 minutes ago https://heartofgrovecity.org/feed/ no longer exists (looks like they're in the process of redesigning site?) #139 TomCasavant opened 6 minutes ago https://www.fpconservatory.org/feed/ no longer exists #138 TomCasavant opened 7 minutes ago Recategorize https://fortressobetz.com/ as website not rss #137 TomCasavant opened 11 minutes ago https://www.columbusmuseum.org/rss no longer exists #136 TomCasavant opened 12 minutes ago https://centralohiotoday.com/stories.rss no longer exists #135 TomCasavant opened 14 minutes ago https://theactorstheatre.org/feed/ no longer exists #134 TomCasavant opened 16 minutes ago @columbushappenings.bsky.social no longer exists Status: Open. #133 TomCasavant opened 17 minutes ago https://www.upperarlingtonoh.gov/feed/ no longer exists #132 TomCasavant opened 22 minutes ago https://www.visitdelohio.com/feed/ no longer exists

Going through all my #columbus and Central Ohio feeds, it looks like everyone is redesigning their websites and forgetting to add RSS back in.

2 days ago 1 0 1 0

Stumbleupon but for an OPML of all your rss feeds

2 days ago 5 0 0 0

It's not just that Orbán losing inspires hope in other competitive-autocratic countries ruled by right-wing nationalist authoritarians. It's that his loss materially changes things in those other countries, because he's been operating as a headquarters and funding source...

3 days ago 14256 3101 135 133

Previous Action: 🅰

3 days ago 0 2 0 0

J.D. Vance as Death going down a series of doors marked Pope Francis, Iran negotiations, Viktor Orban’s re-election and Bengals Season.

@emarktaylor.bsky.social

3 days ago 1 3 0 1

#NFL @tom.tomkahe.com 👀

3 days ago 8 3 1 0

J.D. Vance as Death going down a series of doors marked Pope Francis, Iran negotiations, Viktor Orban’s re-election and Bengals Season.

@emarktaylor.bsky.social

3 days ago 1 3 0 1

Image of Artmeis with the text "there are two outlooks inside of you, neither of them is working"

1 week ago 26 93 1 0

Original post on activitypub.space

@tchambers@indieweb.social it goes beyond social networks and into communities in general.

Forums, for example, need to reach a critical mass of users before they become self sustaining. Sometimes that number is 5, sometimes it's 500.

Leveraging the built-up fediverse community is a game […]

4 days ago 0 2 1 0

Original post on indieweb.social

RE: https://mastodon.social/@dansup/116380620230177371

I can't imagine why any "emerging" or new early social media network isn't built on open social web protocols from the ground up.

Doing anything else seems destined for failure and misses out the millions of users that could immediately […]

5 days ago 0 2 1 0

A wide view of several mountains, from left: - Taboche (6,500 meters/21,325 feet) - Mount Everest (8,848 meters/29,032 feet) - Lhotse (8,516 meters/27,939 feet) - Ama Dablam (6,814 meters/22,355 feet)

Via www.windy.com/-Webcams-Khumjung-Hotel-...

#MountEverest #MtEverest #mountain #live #webcam

5 days ago 1 1 0 0

#NASA #ArtemisII Pretty!

5 days ago 6 1 0 0

@julian ah, nice, I was 50% right

@quillmatiq

5 days ago 0 0 0 0

Original post on tomkahe.com

It is a little funny, since Bluesky's status page incorrectly stated it was a 3rd party provider that caused the outage, that not only were all the bad takes about the outage wrong. But, also, most of the good takes were wrong as well […]

5 days ago 0 1 0 0

@quillmatiq Ah, that's on me. I thought they were both on-protocol.

5 days ago 0 0 1 0

Original post on stefanbohacek.online

Hmm, I went to check on Pebble, originally a Twitter clone that was reborn as a Mastodon server.

It looks like they're no longer around? Bummer.

techcrunch.com/2023/11/13/pebble-a-star...

Can't really find anything […]

6 days ago 3 4 3 0

Trunk & Tidbits, March 2026 Welcome to the _24th edition_ of Trunk & Tidbits 🎉 We’ve been publishing this monthly series, “behind the scenes of the code” from the Mastodon team, for a whole two years now! We’re getting close to the release of Mastodon 4.6. In the past few weeks we published two feature updates about things you’ll see in the next version: * firstly, there was a post about a redesign for profile pages, now available to try out on `mastodon.social` and coming to other servers with version 4.6; * we also posted a more detailed update on Collections (previously briefly known as “Packs”). Our goal in posting these updates is to offer a community-driven design process, and to provide visibility into _how_ and _why_ we reached implementation choices - similar to the transparency we’ve been offering via Trunk & Tidbits, but at a slightly less technical level. One more thing on a related topic - Imani spoke at FOSS Backstage Design, about the journey of being a designer at Mastodon, and some of the challenges and opportunities of working on federated software at scale. You can watch the talk on YouTube. ## Releases Last month, we released updates for the Mastodon server software across the three active branches. These point releases all include security updates, as well as fixes to compatibility with GoToSocial features. * 4.5.8 * 4.4.15 * 4.3.21 As usual, we strongly encourage server owners to update to the most recent version, in order to get the most stable and secure code and up-to-date user experience. > Note that this is the final month for the 4.3.x branch - the end of support date for this version is May 6th 2026. ## Backend and Web In March 2026 we reviewed and merged 347 Pull Requests (268 with translation and dependency updates removed), from 13 contributors. We’re continuing to focus on the new profile design work, and Collections, both of which will be major features of Mastodon 4.6 - so again this month, much of the work has been around these two areas. Thank you for the feedback shared about the updates to profiles, in particular - this is being used to shape the final full release version. We’ve also worked on improving the accessibility of the Mastodon Web UI. This has involved focusing on the sign-up and login flows, better colour contrast, and improved navigation with skip links, with more to come in the near future. — PR #38006 (by diondiondion) — PR #38188 (by diondiondion) — PR #38036 (by diondiondion) Hidden behind a feature flag for now, we’ve added the ability for account owners to allow anonymous visitors to subscribe to their posts via e-mail, without a Mastodon account. This feature is _not yet ready for testing_ - we are working on the missing pieces right now. The work has been funded by an NGI0 grant through NLNet, to improve Mastodon’s suitability for use by institutions. Mastodon now supports two additional Fediverse Enhancement Proposals, FEP-2c59 (_Discovery of a Webfinger address from an ActivityPub actor_ — PR #38239 (by ClearlyClaire) ) and FEP-3b86 (_Activity Intents_ — PR #38120 (by Gargron) — PR #38130 (by ClearlyClaire) ). This will improve interactions with other Fediverse servers. On the API side, as part of the profile redesign we are introducing a new dedicated `profile` endpoint, allowing client apps to access the current profile and update it. App developers are encouraged to add support for this new set of functions - they also allow brand new capabilities, such as setting a text description for profile pictures and header banners. Lastly, there have been a lot of technical improvements and refactoring in the codebase, including: support for Ruby 4.0; the removal of the `oj` gem for JSON handling in the backend; and, an upgrade of our web client toolchain to Vite 8, which should make the web assets build step both faster and more memory efficient. ## Android We continued working on the profile redesign, and made two releases with minor bug fixes. ## iOS We shipped version 2026.02 with a number of technical improvements that will help us keep moving forward, and some visible fixes as well: * You can now manage multiple logged-in accounts from the Settings screen (this has always been accessible by long-pressing the current account avatar, but was not easy to discover). * Fix for No audio while playing videos or audio before going full screen * Fix for Quoted posts that are _long_ are not truncated * Fix for Encoded HTML entities in display names are applied ## Community One of the benefits of building open platforms is that people can build interfaces that work well for different scenarios. We’ve got a number of client apps listed on our website (and you can add your own, if it is not listed there yet - send a pull request on our website repository). Not everyone uses the latest and greatest devices, and even if you do, maybe you also like small and simple interfaces as well? In these cases, check out smolfedi - a lightweight, cross-fedi-platform front end that works with Mastodon as well as with several other Fediverse services. If you run a Mastodon server, or any kind of Fediverse server - or even if you ran a server, and then closed it down - the Social Web Foundation has a new survey to gather data for a sustainability report. The Fediverse Sustainability Survey is anonymous, and the report will be published on the SWF site in the future. ## Thank you As the initiator and author of twenty four editions of Trunk & Tidbits, and on behalf of the Mastodon team, I’d like to say, directly to _you_ - Thank You, for all of your support over the past couple of years. Please do “chip in” with a recurring donation to the project - Open Source, not-for-profit software and movements like ours, need to be sustained. ### Thank you for supporting Mastodon We develop and maintain the free and open source software that powers the social web. There is no capital behind this — we rely entirely on your support. Donate to the project View our sponsors

Trunk & Tidbits for March is out - our monthly engineering news, featuring current releases, the profiles redesign, Collections, additional FEPs implemented - lots of work in motion.

#MastoDev #MastoAdmin #Mastodon

blog.joinmastodon.org/2026/04/trunk-tidbits-ma...

6 days ago 2 24 1 1

EFF is the latest organization to leave X techcrunch.com/2026/04/09/eff-is-the-la...

6 days ago 1 12 1 1

Posts by Tom Casavant