#TIL that one #Mastodon user innocently deciding to switch their existing account to do Automated Post Deletion (2 weeks) can trigger millions of notifications to push out into the Fediverse?

If you are curious the symptom for us was that our Sidekiq push queue was routinely filling up with 250k messages in many batches over about a 48 hour period. Spot checking the messages in the Sidekiq queue indicated that the majority involved a specific user, who helpfully clued us in to the change.

#TIL the query component of a URI is actually completely opaque. There is no such thing as a "query parameter" defined in any spec that I can find -- the use of ampersands to delimit such "parameters" is purely conventional!

At some point (HTML4), the recommendation was to use *semicolons* instead: https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/appendix/notes.html#h-B.2.2

There is even a line of argument that says that query parameters are a misfeature and antipattern. Any "parameter" should be passed along with the request itself, not the URI