Wills thoughts

A collection of my thoughts, experiences and “how to” guides in software engineering

Journey to a distributed PDS: TOTP auth

Previously on Journey to a distributed PDS, I discovered that when one node generates the DPoP nonce that a client uses as part of a request and another node then receives that as part of a request to validate, it would fail because node one would have generated it differently than node 2. This was due to Cocoon using an incremental counter on a timer which would get used to generate and then validate a nonce. Each node would have a different counter and so they would both calculate different values.

Will
June 16, 2026

Journey to a distributed PDS: OAuth and deeper thoughts on why this experiment exists...

It's been a while since my last update, or even any progress, on the distributed PDS. I started looking into it again last week though and have hit quite the show stopper... OAuth 🫠

Will
May 19, 2026

Journey to a distributed PDS: A New Hope

In my last post I detailed the reasons for why I wanted to achieve a distributed PDS, or at least explore if it was possible. I also explained how I managed to achieve getting the database part of the PDS to be held on a server other than the PDS and then managed to run 2 PDS instances side by side, semi successfully.

Will
April 06, 2026

The journey to a distributed PDS

Hopefully this is part 1 of many posts, describing my progress into running a PDS across many nodes or devices.

Will
April 02, 2026

Running Tangled.sh locally for development...

... without having NixOS running on your machine (kinda)

Will
December 03, 2025

Setting a custom homepage on a PDS

A quick and dirty way to set a custom homepage on your PDS

Will
October 01, 2025

Migrating my Knot

In my previous pub I went over the process I went through to set up my own Tangled Knot and the problems I faced. One of those problems stemmed from the fact that I was using my PDS server to host my Knot, but since I didn't use a subdomain for my PDS I had some issues with Caddy redirecting properly.

Will
September 29, 2025

Hosting my own code with a Tangled Knot

My journey to hosting my code on a Tangled Knot and the problems I hit

Will
September 28, 2025