Samuel Lison

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Samuel Lison Interested in my art? You can purchase at https://samuellison.com/store I'm Samuel — a photographer based in Melbourne, Australia.

Most of what I shoot lives close to the ground: macro fungi, moss, insects, and the small details that turn up on a slow walk through the bush. The rest is landscapes, weather, and whatever the light is doing that morning. This page grew out of The Spore Trail, which was fungi-first. It's broader now — still photography at its centre, but with room for the other things I make: software, games, and the occasional long thought about how any of it fits together. Prints and full galleries: samuellison.com

🦋 A FediHome update today that closes something I left half-finished in May.Some background. FediHome can post to Bluesk...
21/08/2026

🦋 A FediHome update today that closes something I left half-finished in May.

Some background. FediHome can post to Bluesky, and Bluesky lets you run your own server rather than using theirs — which is the whole appeal of it, really. Back in v1.25.0 I added the ability to point FediHome at a server you run yourself.

It half worked, and half working is arguably worse than not working at all. Your timeline came from your server, and your likes went to it. But posting, replies, follows, direct messages and notifications all quietly went to Bluesky's server instead, where they failed — because twelve separate places in the code had Bluesky's address written into them rather than asking what you'd configured. Your password was being sent along on each of those attempts too, to sign in to a server that was never going to accept it.

They all go through one shared connection now, so the address you set is the address it uses. Everywhere.

And you can set it from the admin panel, which matters more than it sounds. Before, it was an environment variable — and on a lot of hosting, that means no way to set it at all.

Nothing changes if you use Bluesky's server, which is still what almost everyone should do.

Self-hosted. MIT. Yours.

https://github.com/TemujinCalidius/FediHome/releases/tag/v1.28.0

🚫 Small update to FediHome today, and the fix worth explaining is about blocking.Blocking someone already kept them out ...
19/08/2026

🚫 Small update to FediHome today, and the fix worth explaining is about blocking.

Blocking someone already kept them out of your timeline. It turned out four other places still let them through. Opening one of their posts directly showed it. A thread showed them if they appeared further up the conversation. Your own replies list showed their name, their picture and a snippet of what they wrote, any time you'd replied to them. And the Explore tab could still credit them as the reason a post had surfaced.

Worst of all — asking for the like and boost counts on one of their posts contacted their server. Which is the exact thing blocking is supposed to stop.

All four are fixed. So is the check that was meant to catch them: it only looked at one kind of database read, and it trusted a note at the top of a file that was true of one query and false of another sitting right beside it.

Also in this one: if you run your own AT Protocol server, FediHome now actually uses it everywhere rather than quietly falling back to Bluesky for half of what it does — and you can set the address in the admin panel instead of an environment variable.

Self-hosted. MIT. Yours.

https://github.com/TemujinCalidius/FediHome/releases/tag/v1.28.0

Spending this week rebuilding the website for SL Colonies — the medieval survival game I run inside Second Life.The part...
12/08/2026

Spending this week rebuilding the website for SL Colonies — the medieval survival game I run inside Second Life.

The part I've enjoyed most is small and probably invisible to anyone using it. The numbers on the front page aren't typed in by hand. They're read straight out of the game's own database, so when someone finishes building a crafting station somewhere in-world, the website's count goes up on its own.

91,731 things crafted. 1,711 stations standing. 119 colonies founded.

It's a strange feeling, building a page that changes without you. Most websites are a description of a thing. This one is more like a window onto it, and once you've done it that way the old approach feels a bit like a printed brochure of a place you could just go and look at.

The rest of what's being built — player profiles, achievements that follow you out of the game and into Discord — is still in development. But this bit works, and it's the bit I'd have found interesting if someone else had written about it.

🔐 Small update to today, and one of the fixes is the kind that makes you sit back in your chair.Here's the bug. The lo...
09/08/2026

🔐 Small update to today, and one of the fixes is the kind that makes you sit back in your chair.

Here's the bug. The login page lets you get a password wrong five times a minute before it starts refusing — sensible, stops anyone guessing their way in. To do that it has to keep count per person. Except a normal install can't actually tell one visitor from another, so it counted everybody as the same person.

Which means anyone at all could send five wrong passwords a minute, forever, and I'd be locked out of my own admin panel — holding the correct password. The refusal happened before the password was even looked at.

Nobody did this, as far as I can tell. It just sat there, quietly possible.

It's fixed. And if your site sits behind Cloudflare or a proxy there's a setting worth turning on, TRUSTED_PROXY_HEADER, which lets FediHome tell visitors apart properly. That's the second release running where that setting has mattered, so it's worth doing.

Also in this one: Bluesky posts arrive with their photos again. A quote post with a picture — one of the commonest kinds there is — had been importing completely blank.

No new features this time. Five fixes, three of them things that were quietly wrong for a while. I'm oddly pleased with that.

Self-hosted. MIT. Yours.

https://github.com/TemujinCalidius/FediHome/releases/tag/v1.27.1

🎬 A few of you asked how much work goes into one of these, so here's the honest answer: I filmed the entire edit of Spor...
07/08/2026

🎬 A few of you asked how much work goes into one of these, so here's the honest answer: I filmed the entire edit of Spore-Crossed Lovers, start to finish.

Twenty-five minutes, uncut. The RAW file straight off the camera, then everything I do to it in Photomator — including the parts where I take a wrong turn, sit and look at it, and undo the lot.

If you've ever wondered how much of a macro photograph is the moment in the field and how much is the hour afterwards at a desk, this is a fair look at it. The mushrooms did the hard part; I just tried not to ruin them.

Shot on the shore of Lake Daylesford, Victoria, on a family day out about a month ago.

Prints and the full-resolution file are in the store, if you'd like this one on a wall.

▶ https://makertube.net/w/9TvQgfhjjsnvkwv5ESV1NV

🧭 FediHome v1.27.0 is out — the software I build that runs your own website and lets people follow you from Mastodon o...
06/08/2026

🧭 FediHome v1.27.0 is out — the software I build that runs your own website and lets people follow you from Mastodon or Bluesky.

The new thing I'd point at is called Explore, and it's my answer to a question I've been chewing on for a while: how do you meet anyone new online without handing a company the job of deciding who?

Here's what it does. Beside your own timeline there's now a second tab, showing posts from people you *don't* follow. They appear for one reason only — somebody you already follow boosted them or replied to them. That's it. No algorithm, no trending, no engagement scoring. The people you chose are the filter.

It's off unless you switch it on. Public posts only, nothing from anyone you've blocked, and nothing it surfaces ever appears on your public pages.

Also in this release: the ability to take your followers with you if you ever leave (I posted about that this morning), a proper home page for the admin area with a search box, and a security fix for anyone running behind Cloudflare or a proxy.

Self-hosted. MIT. Yours.

https://github.com/TemujinCalidius/FediHome/releases/tag/v1.27.0

🖼️ After a fair bit of quiet work, my print store is open.The first photograph in it is this one — Spore-Crossed Lovers....
05/08/2026

🖼️ After a fair bit of quiet work, my print store is open.

The first photograph in it is this one — Spore-Crossed Lovers. Two wild mushrooms on the shore of Lake Daylesford, leaning toward each other until their caps almost touch, with a single heart-shaped petal fallen at their feet. Nothing staged, nothing moved. Some days the forest floor just hands you something.

Here's how it works, because I wanted it to be fair rather than clever:

🖼️ Choose framed or unframed, in three sizes.
📦 It's printed at whichever lab is closest to your address and shipped from there, so it isn't flown around the world to reach you. Australia, the UK, the US, Canada and the EU for now — a few countries are still off the list while I work out customs.
💛 You're quoted the cost price, and then you decide what to add on top for me. Nothing, or something. Both are fine.

There's also the full-resolution file if you'd rather print it yourself, on the same pay-what-you-want basis.

More photographs will follow over the coming days.

https://samuellison.com/store/cmqeqi2v8000ynpm045w12d0c

05/08/2026

I've set up to start cross-posting my updates here automatically.

If you're reading this on Facebook, that's why. Everything I write starts on my own site, samuellison.com, where I own it outright — and from there it travels to Mastodon and Bluesky by itself. The walled gardens don't work that way. Things go in; nothing comes out.

So rather than ask you to follow me somewhere new, I'm bringing it here instead. Photography, the software I build, the occasional echidna that stops traffic.

Same posts. Just meeting you where you already are.

Open web first. Everywhere else after. 🏠

Something I'm finishing this week on , and it's an odd thing to be proud of: I've built the way out.FediHome is the s...
04/08/2026

Something I'm finishing this week on , and it's an odd thing to be proud of: I've built the way out.

FediHome is the software I make that runs your own website and lets people follow you from Mastodon or Bluesky. It could already bring your followers in from another service, and keep up with people who moved away. The one thing it couldn't do was let you leave and take your followers with you.

🚪 Now it can. You enter the address of your new account, and FediHome tells every one of your followers' servers to move them across.

It's honest about the fiddly parts too — only followers move, not your posts; you need to leave the old site running for a while so other servers can verify the move; and cancelling stops the announcement but doesn't bring anyone back.

Most software is built to keep you. This is the opposite, and I think that's the point: it isn't really yours if you can't walk out with it.

https://github.com/TemujinCalidius/FediHome

New release of today — the software I built that lets you run your own website and be followed from Mastodon and Blu...
04/08/2026

New release of today — the software I built that lets you run your own website and be followed from Mastodon and Bluesky.

This one is about being able to leave with what's yours.

📦 You can now download everything you've written, from a button in the admin panel. Posts, photos, video, audio, your own Fediverse posts, approved comments — the original text and all the metadata, in one file. No shell access, no database tools, nothing technical.

That sounds small. It isn't. Plenty of platforms will happily host your words for years and make getting them back out somebody else's problem. If a thing is really yours, you should be able to pick it up and walk.

Also in this release: the About page is yours to write properly, you can decide how much disk other people's images are allowed to use on your machine, and access tokens can be given an expiry date instead of lasting forever.

Self-hosted. MIT. Yours.

https://github.com/TemujinCalidius/FediHome/releases/tag/v1.26.0

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Melbourne, VIC
3023

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