22 ms·

Mastodon 2.4.0

294 points by valeg 8y ago

ben_utzer 8y ago
Updated privacy policy is commmit #666..6 :-)
fareesh 8y ago
Is anyone doing anything interesting on this platform that I can check out?
- hnarn 8y ago
  That's a pretty wide order.
  - tomcatfish 8y ago
    That, from my preliminary checks when trying to buy in, is going unfulfilled. It seems like no one wants to join yet another network just to wait for it to get users. As some other people havenoted jn other discussions, Mastadon seems to be either non-English or specialized in ways that don't apply to me at all.
    - CrystalLangUser 8y ago
      I've run into this myself, so I'm working on creating an instance that's a bit more geared towards engineering / tech discussion. It's nyquist.space [1] if you're interested. It's not hosted on Mastodon but on Pleroma [2] instead so it's more barebones at the moment. (But saves a LOT on cpu/memory resources) Disclaimer: I'm the only user currently. :-) [1]: https://nyquist.space https://nyquist.space [2]: https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma
- progval 8y ago
  What are you interested in?
- mgraybosch 8y ago
  > Is anyone doing anything interesting on this platform that I can check out? Define "interesting". I'm on [octodon.social](https://octodon.social/web/accounts/13051 https://octodon.social/web/accounts/13051) and I interact with BSD users, all sorts of developers, writers, artists, musicians, video producers, podcasters, and activists. Whether you have a good experience in the Fediverse depends primarily on you and your efforts. Make an account, fill out your profile, post an introduction with the "#introduction" hashtag, and follow/interact with interesting people who show up in the local and federated timelines. As long as you're not an asshole and don't expect others to bend over backwards to make you feel welcome, you'll probably be fine.
willvarfar 8y ago
Is mastodon getting mainstream? I first saw mastodon a few months ago on HN where it was suddenly 'hot'. But I had trouble finding any content to actually consume, and I didn't poke around very long. Hopefully that's changed and there's tons of interesting stuff to follow and its easy to find?
- Shank 8y ago
  In my experience, Mastodon is in use mostly not in America. Pawoo, Mastodon hosted by Pixiv in Japan, has 375k users with 15m statuses, connected to 4k other Mastodon instances. But it doesn't have any metrics about still being in use, and their instance is mostly in Japanese. [0] The biggest problem I ran into when trying to use Mastodon is the instance federation wars. Instances were banning other instances left and right from federating with each other due to content disputes (lolicon, "offensive speech," etc). This kinda made it problematic if you picked an instance that didn't want to behave nicely with the rest of the ecosystem, unbeknownst to you. [0]: https://pawoo.net/about/more https://pawoo.net/about/more
  - CrystalLangUser 8y ago
    Mastodon.social has over 150k users, and there are other large non-Japanese instances. [1] After the SESTA / FOSTA bills, switter.at also became a huge instance for sex workers. The instance banning thing is a huge problem and it’s not really being talked about much. The only thing you can do really is sign up on an instance like niu.moe that doesn’t filter besides illegal content. [1]: https://instances.social/list/advanced#lang=&allowed=&prohibited=&users= https://instances.social/list/advanced#lang=&allowed=&prohib...
    - wila 8y ago
      > Mastodon.social has over 150k users What would be more interesting as a number is active users. For example, I've got an account at mastodon.social, but last time I used it is over a month ago and before that there had been several months of inactivity. When I last looked at my friend list and follower list on mastodon it seemed like most people treated mastodon like that.
cdubzzz 8y ago
Some very interesting discussion[0] around the bot badge addition: > If you run bots on Mastodon, you can now opt-in to display a bot badge on your profile. This works with non-Mastodon software, too, if the ActivityPub actor is of the Service or Application type. In the future, more features might be implemented to filter bot accounts or opt-out of interactions with them. [0] https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/pull/7391 https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/pull/7391
- chickenfries 8y ago
  Is this really worth discussing? This comment spawned so many responses, but if you look at the actual thread it seems like the comment you quote was addressed rather sensibly and then things moved on. People who don't click through to your link get the impression that Mastadon is a gigantic SJW bikeshed where nothing gets done, but that's not actually what happens. I guess I'm just trying to say that we shouldn't give attention to or feed "trolls," even if they are being sincere.
  - deyan 8y ago
    Plus it is a grand total of 2 people making 4-5 comments. This issue seems like noise that distracts.
- jhoh 8y ago
  Yeah, very interesting... "some bots are people" "i want to use the bot badge and i dont want to be called not a person" "Okay, I'm gonna show my hand a little: as a transhumanist, I object to the implied conflation of "person" and "human". This is a situation where we can afford to be forward-thinking and open-minded without a cost to current functionality and, honestly, without a significant cost in terms of work." I hosted a Mastodon instance until a couple months ago. It was stuff like this that made me leave the platform.
  - madeofpalk 8y ago
    Or, you run an account that... posts the weather in your city and you want to mark it as a 'bot', like how slackbots are clearly defined in Slack.
parvenu74 8y ago
Is Mastodon the only high-profile implementation of OpenSocial? Given what Mastodon does it seems like an Erlang/Elixir implementation would be right in the sweet-spot of what those platforms do...
- xj9 8y ago
  https://pleroma.social https://pleroma.social is an ActivityPub server written in Elixir
  - vasilakisfil 8y ago
    Wow had been looking for something like that last week on github but maybe I should be using Google instead! Many thanks, you saved me a couple of months dev time!
    - xj9 8y ago
      there are a lot of interesting projects that choose to self-host their git server for various reasons. don't limit yourself to github esp if you're looking for decentralization-adjacent projects!
- djsumdog 8y ago
  Does GnuSocial implement OpenSocial?
  - RX14 8y ago
    no, it only implements ostatus, not activitypub
jaequery 8y ago
Is there a SPOF for Mastadon? How does Mastadon handle database (multiple masters, etc)? Genuinely curious if this is truly decentralized platform or just a poor man’s open source social networking app with some RSS type of functionality sprinkled on top of it, sort of like Wordpress in a sense in terms of hosting it.
- Crespyl 8y ago
  It is federated in a manner similar to traditional email. There are many different servers with many users on each one, it's straightforward to run your own server, and users on server A can easily communicate with users on server B. If your server goes down for some reason, much like email, you'll lose the ability to log in and post, but anyone on a different server will be unaffected. I don't believe there's any particularly special DB replication features in the reference server implementation, but there's nothing inherent in the system that would prevent someone writing a customized durable/distributed version of the server.
- codewiz 8y ago
  Mastodon is part of a federated network called the "fediverse": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse The fediverse works by propagating statuses a set of standard protocols: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub Typical Mastodon instances have one or more frontends (Ruby on Rails) backed by a PostgreSQL database (possibly replicated). Several cloud providers offer managed PostgreSQL instances which mitigate the SPOF of using an RDBMS backend. Accounts of users are bound to the instance where they were created, but recently Mastodon added a data export function that could be used to move an account to a different instance. I doubt you'd retain your followers in this case. Unboundling user identity from instances sounds like a difficult researh problem, given that users can upload considerable amounts of data.
  - billions 8y ago
    So profile can be censored by taking down the instance hosting it?
Vosporos 8y ago
https://fediverse.network https://fediverse.network is a good overview of the activity of the fediverse. There's even a secret endpoint, `/stats`, with global statistics for all the known fediverse!
- wut42 8y ago
  thanks :) I made that. It's not perfect yet but does the job :)
  - Vosporos 8y ago
    And the job is well-done. Nice graphs ;)
phaedryx 8y ago
The only thing I really use Twitter for is to get certain updates/notifications. Is there a way to pull my twitter feed into a Mastodon feed? I've done a little looking, but didn't find anything.
- sanlyx 8y ago
  I can imagine some sort of "proxy instance" which takes Twitter data and presents it in an ActivityPub-compatible format. However I'm not sure Twitter provides an API for reading that much data at scale (rate limits). But in principle it seems doable to me.
- Royalaid 8y ago
  The best I have found is apps on android https://github.com/TwidereProject/Twidere-Android https://github.com/TwidereProject/Twidere-Android is what I use currently. For cross posting I use https://moa.party/ https://moa.party/. For I unified feed on web I am still looking.
- boyce 8y ago
  The way I'd do it is set up a bot account that toots your twitter timeline, make it a locked account and only approve your mastodon account, make your replies to your mastodon bot then be tweeted from your twitter account. Build your own bridge, heh
djsumdog 8y ago
Has there been any discussion on how the GDPR affects EU citizens who want to setup Mastodon instances that they allow friends to register on?
- codefined 8y ago
  In a similar vein, if there is no feasible way to remove information from a service (E.G. placing data in a blockchain), does that break the rules of GDPR?
  - chatmasta 8y ago
    Probably, but who can get sued for it?
    - freeone3000 8y ago
      The person running the mastadon node.
    - djsumdog 8y ago
      Anyone holding a copy of the entire blockchain ledger? Potentially? I wonder if we'll see exchanges that will be unable to use EU servers/hosting.
      - chatmasta 8y ago
        Given that Citizens United set a precedent for “money as speech,” it would be interesting to try such a case on the basis of free speech.
        lokedhs 8y ago
        The GDPR is an EU law, and as such it is unlikely that anyone prosecuting under it will pay any attention at all to what the US definition of free speech is.
  - progval 8y ago
Moter8 8y ago
Why does not a single link on https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/ (scroll a bit for the example sites) work? I tried 10 of them but none of them work?
- xj9 8y ago
  https://instances.social/ https://instances.social/ needs to up their game apparently. the pleroma instance picker seems like its giving more reliable results: http://distsn.org/pleroma-instances.html http://distsn.org/pleroma-instances.html
- nightpool 8y ago
  Which ones didn't work? All of the ones I tried work.
jordigh 8y ago
This is really silly, but I'm looking forward to being able to label my Chocobot as a bot. Not that there ever was any doubt, but... https://botsin.space/@Chocobot https://botsin.space/@Chocobot He was really easy to write in D: http://inversethought.com/hg/chocobot/file/tip/chocobot.d http://inversethought.com/hg/chocobot/file/tip/chocobot.d
guiomie 8y ago
"Progressive Web App" ... I just learnt a new thing today.
rqs 8y ago
One question: How to move my account from one Mastodon Instance to another? I mean, if I was on 'Mastodon Instance One', now I want to move to 'Mastodon Instance Two', do I need to register an new account on the Instance Two and manually import all my data? Wouldn't that resulting a new Mastodon ID (@myname@InstanceOne -> @myname@InstanceTwo)?
- boyce 8y ago
  You can export and import your follows. Yes it would be a different account. There is an option to mark your old account as "account has moved" and specify where you've gone, which an app could treat as a redirect.
zaarn 8y ago
Some comments on here discuss the Mastodon community and I hope I can chime in a bit (as someone who runs an instance with fairly large reach although not many users). Mastodon should not be seen as a singular community, outside Mastodon there is pleroma and GNUSocial, all projects do attract different kinds of people (though GNUsocial and pleroma developers are often called out as nazis because some alt-right instances use their software, not sure why that matters). If you're looking for an instance, it's IMO important to discover the community and general feel of it. Some instances will be very strict with rules and generally boot federation with others fairly quickly, while other instances will basically federate with everyone until they break some serious rules or laws. (My instance is a mix, I have a lot of alt-right and deep-far-left instances silenced on account of excessive spam or being way to aggressive, though the instance I run is themed and politics in general are frowned upon) I think the second most important thing is to divorce the developers and software from their community. Mastodon hosts a very diverse community and a lot of niche, fringe or otherwise rather peculiar characters. A lot of them are nice, a lot aren't, most probably don't care. The federated network is what you make of it, follow people you want to follow and your timeline will likely fill with stuff that isn't too outside of your filterbubble (though there will be anti-filterbubble stuff) If you don't like mastodon itself, I severely recommend to try Pleroma instead, the developers for both projects are generally very enjoyable.

Mastodon 2.4.0

294 points by valeg 8y ago

ben_utzer 8y ago

Updated privacy policy is commmit #666..6 :-)

fareesh 8y ago

Is anyone doing anything interesting on this platform that I can check out?

hnarn 8y ago
That's a pretty wide order.
- tomcatfish 8y ago
  That, from my preliminary checks when trying to buy in, is going unfulfilled. It seems like no one wants to join yet another network just to wait for it to get users. As some other people havenoted jn other discussions, Mastadon seems to be either non-English or specialized in ways that don't apply to me at all.
  - CrystalLangUser 8y ago
    I've run into this myself, so I'm working on creating an instance that's a bit more geared towards engineering / tech discussion. It's nyquist.space [1] if you're interested. It's not hosted on Mastodon but on Pleroma [2] instead so it's more barebones at the moment. (But saves a LOT on cpu/memory resources) Disclaimer: I'm the only user currently. :-) [1]: https://nyquist.space https://nyquist.space [2]: https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma
progval 8y ago
What are you interested in?
mgraybosch 8y ago
> Is anyone doing anything interesting on this platform that I can check out? Define "interesting". I'm on [octodon.social](https://octodon.social/web/accounts/13051 https://octodon.social/web/accounts/13051) and I interact with BSD users, all sorts of developers, writers, artists, musicians, video producers, podcasters, and activists. Whether you have a good experience in the Fediverse depends primarily on you and your efforts. Make an account, fill out your profile, post an introduction with the "#introduction" hashtag, and follow/interact with interesting people who show up in the local and federated timelines. As long as you're not an asshole and don't expect others to bend over backwards to make you feel welcome, you'll probably be fine.

willvarfar 8y ago

Is mastodon getting mainstream? I first saw mastodon a few months ago on HN where it was suddenly 'hot'. But I had trouble finding any content to actually consume, and I didn't poke around very long. Hopefully that's changed and there's tons of interesting stuff to follow and its easy to find?

Shank 8y ago
In my experience, Mastodon is in use mostly not in America. Pawoo, Mastodon hosted by Pixiv in Japan, has 375k users with 15m statuses, connected to 4k other Mastodon instances. But it doesn't have any metrics about still being in use, and their instance is mostly in Japanese. [0] The biggest problem I ran into when trying to use Mastodon is the instance federation wars. Instances were banning other instances left and right from federating with each other due to content disputes (lolicon, "offensive speech," etc). This kinda made it problematic if you picked an instance that didn't want to behave nicely with the rest of the ecosystem, unbeknownst to you. [0]: https://pawoo.net/about/more https://pawoo.net/about/more
- CrystalLangUser 8y ago
  Mastodon.social has over 150k users, and there are other large non-Japanese instances. [1] After the SESTA / FOSTA bills, switter.at also became a huge instance for sex workers. The instance banning thing is a huge problem and it’s not really being talked about much. The only thing you can do really is sign up on an instance like niu.moe that doesn’t filter besides illegal content. [1]: https://instances.social/list/advanced#lang=&allowed=&prohibited=&users= https://instances.social/list/advanced#lang=&allowed=&prohib...
  - wila 8y ago
    > Mastodon.social has over 150k users What would be more interesting as a number is active users. For example, I've got an account at mastodon.social, but last time I used it is over a month ago and before that there had been several months of inactivity. When I last looked at my friend list and follower list on mastodon it seemed like most people treated mastodon like that.

cdubzzz 8y ago

Some very interesting discussion[0] around the bot badge addition: > If you run bots on Mastodon, you can now opt-in to display a bot badge on your profile. This works with non-Mastodon software, too, if the ActivityPub actor is of the Service or Application type. In the future, more features might be implemented to filter bot accounts or opt-out of interactions with them. [0] https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/pull/7391 https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/pull/7391

chickenfries 8y ago
Is this really worth discussing? This comment spawned so many responses, but if you look at the actual thread it seems like the comment you quote was addressed rather sensibly and then things moved on. People who don't click through to your link get the impression that Mastadon is a gigantic SJW bikeshed where nothing gets done, but that's not actually what happens. I guess I'm just trying to say that we shouldn't give attention to or feed "trolls," even if they are being sincere.
- deyan 8y ago
  Plus it is a grand total of 2 people making 4-5 comments. This issue seems like noise that distracts.
jhoh 8y ago
Yeah, very interesting... "some bots are people" "i want to use the bot badge and i dont want to be called not a person" "Okay, I'm gonna show my hand a little: as a transhumanist, I object to the implied conflation of "person" and "human". This is a situation where we can afford to be forward-thinking and open-minded without a cost to current functionality and, honestly, without a significant cost in terms of work." I hosted a Mastodon instance until a couple months ago. It was stuff like this that made me leave the platform.
- madeofpalk 8y ago
  Or, you run an account that... posts the weather in your city and you want to mark it as a 'bot', like how slackbots are clearly defined in Slack.

parvenu74 8y ago

Is Mastodon the only high-profile implementation of OpenSocial? Given what Mastodon does it seems like an Erlang/Elixir implementation would be right in the sweet-spot of what those platforms do...

xj9 8y ago
https://pleroma.social https://pleroma.social is an ActivityPub server written in Elixir
- vasilakisfil 8y ago
  Wow had been looking for something like that last week on github but maybe I should be using Google instead! Many thanks, you saved me a couple of months dev time!
  - xj9 8y ago
    there are a lot of interesting projects that choose to self-host their git server for various reasons. don't limit yourself to github esp if you're looking for decentralization-adjacent projects!
djsumdog 8y ago
Does GnuSocial implement OpenSocial?
- RX14 8y ago
  no, it only implements ostatus, not activitypub

jaequery 8y ago

Is there a SPOF for Mastadon? How does Mastadon handle database (multiple masters, etc)? Genuinely curious if this is truly decentralized platform or just a poor man’s open source social networking app with some RSS type of functionality sprinkled on top of it, sort of like Wordpress in a sense in terms of hosting it.

Crespyl 8y ago
It is federated in a manner similar to traditional email. There are many different servers with many users on each one, it's straightforward to run your own server, and users on server A can easily communicate with users on server B. If your server goes down for some reason, much like email, you'll lose the ability to log in and post, but anyone on a different server will be unaffected. I don't believe there's any particularly special DB replication features in the reference server implementation, but there's nothing inherent in the system that would prevent someone writing a customized durable/distributed version of the server.
codewiz 8y ago
Mastodon is part of a federated network called the "fediverse": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse The fediverse works by propagating statuses a set of standard protocols: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub Typical Mastodon instances have one or more frontends (Ruby on Rails) backed by a PostgreSQL database (possibly replicated). Several cloud providers offer managed PostgreSQL instances which mitigate the SPOF of using an RDBMS backend. Accounts of users are bound to the instance where they were created, but recently Mastodon added a data export function that could be used to move an account to a different instance. I doubt you'd retain your followers in this case. Unboundling user identity from instances sounds like a difficult researh problem, given that users can upload considerable amounts of data.
- billions 8y ago
  So profile can be censored by taking down the instance hosting it?

Vosporos 8y ago

https://fediverse.network https://fediverse.network is a good overview of the activity of the fediverse. There's even a secret endpoint, `/stats`, with global statistics for all the known fediverse!

wut42 8y ago
thanks :) I made that. It's not perfect yet but does the job :)
- Vosporos 8y ago
  And the job is well-done. Nice graphs ;)

phaedryx 8y ago

The only thing I really use Twitter for is to get certain updates/notifications. Is there a way to pull my twitter feed into a Mastodon feed? I've done a little looking, but didn't find anything.

sanlyx 8y ago
I can imagine some sort of "proxy instance" which takes Twitter data and presents it in an ActivityPub-compatible format. However I'm not sure Twitter provides an API for reading that much data at scale (rate limits). But in principle it seems doable to me.
Royalaid 8y ago
The best I have found is apps on android https://github.com/TwidereProject/Twidere-Android https://github.com/TwidereProject/Twidere-Android is what I use currently. For cross posting I use https://moa.party/ https://moa.party/. For I unified feed on web I am still looking.
boyce 8y ago
The way I'd do it is set up a bot account that toots your twitter timeline, make it a locked account and only approve your mastodon account, make your replies to your mastodon bot then be tweeted from your twitter account. Build your own bridge, heh

djsumdog 8y ago

Has there been any discussion on how the GDPR affects EU citizens who want to setup Mastodon instances that they allow friends to register on?

codefined 8y ago
In a similar vein, if there is no feasible way to remove information from a service (E.G. placing data in a blockchain), does that break the rules of GDPR?
- chatmasta 8y ago
  Probably, but who can get sued for it?
  - freeone3000 8y ago
    The person running the mastadon node.
  - djsumdog 8y ago
    Anyone holding a copy of the entire blockchain ledger? Potentially? I wonder if we'll see exchanges that will be unable to use EU servers/hosting.
    - chatmasta 8y ago
      Given that Citizens United set a precedent for “money as speech,” it would be interesting to try such a case on the basis of free speech.
      - lokedhs 8y ago
        The GDPR is an EU law, and as such it is unlikely that anyone prosecuting under it will pay any attention at all to what the US definition of free speech is.
- progval 8y ago

Moter8 8y ago

Why does not a single link on https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/ (scroll a bit for the example sites) work? I tried 10 of them but none of them work?

xj9 8y ago
https://instances.social/ https://instances.social/ needs to up their game apparently. the pleroma instance picker seems like its giving more reliable results: http://distsn.org/pleroma-instances.html http://distsn.org/pleroma-instances.html
nightpool 8y ago
Which ones didn't work? All of the ones I tried work.

jordigh 8y ago

This is really silly, but I'm looking forward to being able to label my Chocobot as a bot. Not that there ever was any doubt, but... https://botsin.space/@Chocobot https://botsin.space/@Chocobot He was really easy to write in D: http://inversethought.com/hg/chocobot/file/tip/chocobot.d http://inversethought.com/hg/chocobot/file/tip/chocobot.d

guiomie 8y ago

"Progressive Web App" ... I just learnt a new thing today.

rqs 8y ago

One question: How to move my account from one Mastodon Instance to another? I mean, if I was on 'Mastodon Instance One', now I want to move to 'Mastodon Instance Two', do I need to register an new account on the Instance Two and manually import all my data? Wouldn't that resulting a new Mastodon ID (@myname@InstanceOne -> @myname@InstanceTwo)?

boyce 8y ago
You can export and import your follows. Yes it would be a different account. There is an option to mark your old account as "account has moved" and specify where you've gone, which an app could treat as a redirect.

zaarn 8y ago

Some comments on here discuss the Mastodon community and I hope I can chime in a bit (as someone who runs an instance with fairly large reach although not many users). Mastodon should not be seen as a singular community, outside Mastodon there is pleroma and GNUSocial, all projects do attract different kinds of people (though GNUsocial and pleroma developers are often called out as nazis because some alt-right instances use their software, not sure why that matters). If you're looking for an instance, it's IMO important to discover the community and general feel of it. Some instances will be very strict with rules and generally boot federation with others fairly quickly, while other instances will basically federate with everyone until they break some serious rules or laws. (My instance is a mix, I have a lot of alt-right and deep-far-left instances silenced on account of excessive spam or being way to aggressive, though the instance I run is themed and politics in general are frowned upon) I think the second most important thing is to divorce the developers and software from their community. Mastodon hosts a very diverse community and a lot of niche, fringe or otherwise rather peculiar characters. A lot of them are nice, a lot aren't, most probably don't care. The federated network is what you make of it, follow people you want to follow and your timeline will likely fill with stuff that isn't too outside of your filterbubble (though there will be anti-filterbubble stuff) If you don't like mastodon itself, I severely recommend to try Pleroma instead, the developers for both projects are generally very enjoyable.