14 ms·

Mastodon 3.5

373 points by d4a 5y ago

cxr 5y ago
I'd like to see more attention put into carving out a subset of Mastodon's functionality that would allow you to host your fediverse node on a static site, à la blog feeds powered by RSS/Atom. The discovery problem can be handled pretty straightforwardly: if you want notifications of replies to your posts, then that's just another feed that you subscribe to—a separate service. You don't exactly need an always-on "instance" providing an inbox endpoint to relay notifications to you. You give up private channels (DMs), but you gain a lot more flexibility. It's a shame that there are so few server (and client) implementations for "the fediverse". We should have at least half as many options as we have in static site generators themselves. (In fact, with this approach, your preferred static site generator could become part of your "client"...) Imagine your corner of the fediverse being reachable at $YOURNAME.github.io. Prior art: Fritter <https://github.com/beakerbrowser/fritter https://github.com/beakerbrowser/fritter>
- ocdtrekkie 5y ago
  Have you seen twtxt or yarn.social? It's a text-format feed you can absolutely statically host.
  - cxr 5y ago
    I don't want another Twitter-but-reinvented. I want a Mastodon-interoperable "profile" to be enshrined in a standard that projects currently focused on compatible ActivityPub-based client/server implementations agree to support because it's a good compromise that allows people to participate with nothing more than the ability to publish a static site.
    - whacked_new 5y ago
      do you think what you're envisioning can be bootstrapped through github actions?
      - cxr 5y ago
        The mechanism used to actually service publication requests from the person controlling the node is orthogonal to doing the design work to specify the thing and the political/social aspect of getting people to agree to support/adopt it. So, in a word, no. (Side note: any design that necessarily depended on GitHub Actions or something with equivalent power would be a failure on the goals I've outlined.)
        whacked_new 5y ago
        I can see where you're coming from, but just as food for thought, I think this is an interesting angle: 1. many people are able to host their content on github now (or gitlab or otherwise) 2. github (et al) provides a simple way to add RSS to your content 3. github actions provides a simple way to poll and update Mastodon is very interesting, and it has gotten simpler over the years, but I don't think it is simple enough.
        hedora 5y ago
        I think the argument is that it should be trivial to host on github / github actions, or anywhere else, just like any other sane static site generator.
        cxr 5y ago
        Well, yeah. That's pretty much the thesis of what I wrote—hence, "Imagine your corner of the fediverse being reachable at $YOURNAME.github.io." (Are you trying to convince me here of something I was already convinced of? That's what it sounds like.)
    - nyx_land 5y ago
      ActivityPub is so poorly/vaguely specified that basically every real world implementation follows what Mastodon does, so good luck with trying to get what you're after without being at least indirectly dependent on the decisions of yet another Twitter clone.
      - cxr 5y ago
        > good luck with trying to get what you're after without being at least indirectly dependent on the decisions of yet another Twitter clone Not what I meant. The correct way to read what I wrote is with emphasis on "another Twitter-but-reinvented". We already have have a Twitter-but-reinvented (Mastodon, and Mastodon-interoperable ActivityPub clients/servers). And people actually use it—which is the hard part of working on any kind of "social" gewgaw. To think that we should throw that out and use twtxt or something like it would be to screw up bad. ActivityPub is better at being RSS-/Atom-like in its ability to convey structure than twtxt is, anyway. What's left is slicing it up, fusing the gaps and some now-necessary pieces with epoxy, and saying, "Here's the 'static' profile; you can look forward to support for this in Mastodon 4.0 [and everything else that tries to be interoperable]."
      - ratww 5y ago
        Yep. It was the same before Mastodon, with the predecessor of ActivityPub, et al. People had to "do whatever StatusNet/GNUSocial is doing". Even the code examples in the specs themselves were unable to interoperate with any instance whatsoever.
    - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
      ActivityPub is supposed to be a generic feed format but in practice it's used mostly for Twitter clones so none of its non-Twitter vocabulary or flows have ever been developed.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > I'd like to see more attention put into carving out a subset of Mastodon's functionality that would allow you to host your fediverse node on a static site, à la blog feeds powered by RSS/Atom. You could just serve standard ActivityStreams; this can happen statically and is not something that Mastodon itself needs to be concerned with, obviously. A different component (either Mastodon itself or some separate thing) would poll known ActivityStreams endpoints and either expose them directly in Mastodon or relay their content via ActivityPub in a way that a Mastodon instance can support.
- gargron 5y ago
  To allow people to review their followers before accepting them ("follow requests") all subscriptions in ActivityPub require the followed actor to send back an Accept activity. This, and the Webfinger requirement to confirm the username@domain address that predates ActivityPub, preclude plain static sites from being followable actors as seen from Mastodon. Although nothing prevents you from publishing a static feed in the ActivityStreams format, this would require a different, feed-like subscription mechanism where the publisher is not aware of subscribers and the subscriber has to poll the publisher periodically.
  - cxr 5y ago
    Yes. These are all assumptions of the sort that I'm saying would need to be (and should be) adjusted (i.e. fixed)—in Mastodon and ActivityPub, to better accommodate static nodes (not for the relevant desiderata to be adjusted to accommodate what's currently wrong with the design that Mastodon implements).
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    "Follow requests" are typically used for sharing private posts in existing social networks: that's why there is a "request and accept" flow. They seem like they should be irrelevant to users who only post content publicly. Does Mastodon require users with public posts to "approve" each of their subscribers?
    - shadowfacts 5y ago
      Not in the UI unless the user's enabled it, but ActivityPub server implementations send an Accept activity in response to a Follow activity.
      - zozbot234 5y ago
        Seems like GP is right then about some tweaks being advisable. There's no reason why ActivityPub servers should not be able to poll and republish ActivityStreams pages if the server admin arranges for this.
- pfraze 5y ago
  Ey, I made Fritter. The “fr” shamelessly came from my last name. Actually the cooler thing was Rotonde, which Devine of 100 rabbits fame made. Beaker has the ability to duplicate somebody else’s website, which we called forking. So Devine made a social website where the whole application was the website software itself. Bear in mind that beaker sites are like mutable torrents. They’re just collections of files. The fun is that you can read and write those files by an API. The js in Rotonde would detect if you owned the site, and then present a text input which would write a new text file in the posts folder. The site would then use js to read all its own post texts and the post texts of followed users to produce a feed. To create a new “account” you would fork an existing site, copying all the application software. This meant the software itself was literally viral. It was really cool. If you think a bit about it, you can probably guess the problems we ran into (both with rotonde and fritter). Most of it had to do with scaling - as all this occurred in the frontend of these p2p sites - and multi device coordination. There was, however, a pretty intense zen simplicity in the pattern of websites that wrote their own files with JS, and I wouldn’t write the idea off entirely.
  - cxr 5y ago
    > Most of it had to do with scaling - as all this occurred in the frontend of these p2p sites You didn't say it, exactly, but just in case anyone who's reading casually misses it: this need not be the case with the static fediverse. I didn't mention JS or any sort of fully in-browser aggregator; nothing here requires client logic running on the "frontend" (i.e. in a Web browser). You'd be free to make whatever client choices are appropriate for you, including managing the whole thing via shell scripts (as many people choose to with their static sites).
    - hedora 5y ago
      I think a static site hosted on git is the sweet spot for the fediverse. It's realistic to expect an HTTPS 1.1 static endpoint and openssh to have << 1 unauthenticated remotely exploitable bugs per year. This opens up a whole new world of hosting options. Think a raspberry pi that auto backs up to github/gitlab/git, with an ACME / let's encrypt client. Stick it behind the right CDN and it could even host podcasts / video. Enable automatic OS upgrades and give it a maintenance window and it's zero maintenance until the $35 hardware fails. Edit: Or be lazy and stick the static site in s3.
- tedunangst 5y ago
  Who does run the server where the feed of replies to my post lives?
  - cxr 5y ago
    Same as who operates hosted feed aggregators and podcast indexers for you to use: whoever wants to.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure there are tools that allow people to subscribe to an activitypub feed of your private blog similar to RSS, it's been a while since I dived into the world of activitypub community projects and tools but I am certain I saw something like that somewhere.
  - phs318u 5y ago
    It is indeed a thing. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rss+to+activitypub https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rss+to+activitypub There was even a HN article a few years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21470099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21470099
  - cxr 5y ago
    > there are tools that allow people to subscribe to an activitypub feed of your private blog Those aren't relevant here. You're saying, essentially, "static sites/blogs, squeezed through a Mastodon-/ActivityPub-shaped hole". I'm saying, "Mastodon profiles, squeezed through the static site/blog hole (in a typical staticgen pipeline)". They have some words in common, but the resemblance ends there, at the superficial level; they are otherwise completely opposite ideas. > I am certain I saw something like that Assuming that "that" means the thing that I'm describing: you wouldn't have seen that, because the relevant Mastodon-interoperable parts of ActivityPub as they currently exist are fundamentally at odds with the ability to do this, for reasons mentioned in part by Gargron upthread. The WebFinger thing is a big part of it. Mastodon's not alone here; there are other WebFinger-dependent protocols (like remoteStorage) that also suffer. This is covered in <https://github.com/konklone/jekyll-webfinger/tree/9bcb46bbabc08363b14fd8b41a944215539d7642 https://github.com/konklone/jekyll-webfinger/tree/9bcb46bbab...>. (Mastodon has taken off in a way that we could probably say it has reached critical mass, even if it's still not as mainstream as Twitter, but remoteStorage not so much.) This is a design flaw at the protocol level, and my contention is that it impacts further adoption more than people realize. There's no good reason, for example, why when I encounter a remoteStorage-compatible app where I only ever intend to grant it read-only access, I shouldn't be able to give it the URL for a dataset hosted on a static site. Presently, however, you cannot—unless the application author deliberately implements some workaround. But they shouldn't need to.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- mro_name 5y ago
  > your fediverse node on a static site, à la blog feeds powered by RSS/Atom. I'm aiming for such called #Seppo! There's a proof of concept https://demo.mro.name/shaarligo https://demo.mro.name/shaarligo and funding application paper in german for now https://mro.name/o/2022-03-08-201643-prototypefund12-037.pdf https://mro.name/o/2022-03-08-201643-prototypefund12-037.pdf Would you pay a doller per month for such?
  - unicornporn 5y ago
    Oh, I came across this long ago and forgot about it. Thanks for the reminder! Hope you will find funding via Prototype Fund too! > Would you pay a doller per month for such? For what? Hosting or development? I'd definitely pay $1 for development. :) BTW, you say #Seppo, but the repo says ShaarliGo. Are you considering a name change?
    - mro_name 5y ago
      > For what? Hosting or development? development. Hosting will be strictly decentral under your responsibility. > you say #Seppo, indeed, the other is a proof of concept and will remain as is.
      - unicornporn 5y ago
        > indeed, the other is a proof of concept and will remain as is. I've always said that a easy to deploy CMS is one of the missing pieces for the IndieWeb. Preferably it should work on any shared hosting. PHP/SQLite would be a good fit, but I understand if you have other preferences.
  - cxr 5y ago
    > 2. download https://mro.name/Linux-x86_64/shaarligo.cgi https://mro.name/Linux-x86_64/shaarligo.cgi[...] That doesn't sound like a static node to me, just another backend-heavy design. Can I deploy this to GitHub Pages? NeoCities? Netlify (sans Functions)? If the answer is "no", then it really doesn't have anything to do with what I'm talking about.
- zamalek 5y ago
  Writefreely[1] supports ActivityPub, and are already planning to look at some of the ideas you have. [1]: https://writefreely.org/ https://writefreely.org/
  - cxr 5y ago
    WriteFreely is no more relevant to static sites than Mastodon is. They're both "backend-heavy" servers—not tools for creating the sort of content that can be hosted on GitHub Pages or Neocities or Netlify (sans Functions) or a simple host that serves content from the file system using Caddy/Nginx/Apache/etc.
- khimaros 5y ago
  this is infeasible until https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/34 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/34 is addressed. Mastodon does not backfill posts or "poll" streams. they need to be pushed.
bovermyer 5y ago
Adding the editing of posts is a good feature addition, in my opinion. I wonder if posts that have been edited display that they've been edited, though.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  > "The original and previous versions of the posts are saved and remain accessible through a history view. And people who have previously shared the post get notified about any edits, so they can un-share if there’s foul play." It sounds like they've thought about these risks, and I would assume that the UI element for accessing the "history view" looks different if there is no history, i.e. the current version is the only version.
  - fomine3 5y ago
    What if poster is evil and also a server operator? Could be the post edited silently and seen from user in other server?
    - mariusor 5y ago
      A server operator will always be available to edit the content in the database.
    - zaarn 5y ago
      That would cause havoc; specifically because other instances can forward your message. So the original message will always float around in retweets and replies. It'll probably be very visible.
- gargron 5y ago
  Yes, there are visual indicators that the post has been edited, similar to how it is on GitHub.
imilk 5y ago
Funnily enough, the whole "Truth Social" is just a Mastodon clone
- hunterb123 5y ago
  Mastodon clone or instance? If either, explain why. What's the difference? The benefit of federation is to have multiple philosophies in charge of moderation of their own communities whilst also being connected.
  - imilk 5y ago
    Clone, as in a re-skinned version. But my main point is the irony of releasing a pitch deck like this [1], and just adding some custom CSS to popular open source product. [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1849635/000119312521348593/d242442dex992.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1849635/000119312521...
    - tnzk 5y ago
      Would their server federate with other servers?
      - imilk 5y ago
        Of course not. They probably just wanted to pay a laughably small amount to make a clone of Twitter. And whether the client asked for it to be done or not, the outsourced development group they hired copied the source code while removing the required attribution.
    - hunterb123 5y ago
      So is an instance not allowed to skin itself? Most instances have different designs. Are companies not allowed to compete with Twitter using Mastodon as the platform? Is this not the desired goal for social media companies, to operate within a federated network? You do admit to compete with Twitter you need a lot of resources, that's what the filing you linked to is for.
dane-pgp 5y ago
> As we value safety, these new features come with their own moderation tools–nothing will show up in trends unless reviewed by one of the server’s moderators first. That sounds like a lot of work (with the most enthusiastic volunteers likely being the most censorious) while doing little to stop someone who updates the content after it has been approved by the moderator.
- gargron 5y ago
  For news stories, moderators can approve publishers (e.g. techcrunch.com) and then they don't need to review individual links anymore (though the ability to override this for individual links remains). Same for posts and authors. If a post is edited to be something bad, there is still the fallback on reports and post-hoc moderation, making it not any more risky than having the local/federated timelines in the first place. There's a finite number of publishers/authors that regularly create popular content, so the workload decreases after an initial burst.
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    That's good to know, thank you!
olah_1 5y ago
i think selective following is the future of moderation, mainly because nobody wants to look at sick crap all day long. brings up the question of having to host the bad content though. this makes me think the client server model for decentralized networks is just dead in the water. selective following + each user just holding their own data on the client = so many problems solved
- black_puppydog 5y ago
  Have a look a the decentralised projects put there then. Ssb (secure scuttlebutt) seem to fit your description, but fair warning: this setup comes with its own set of problems around moderation and other things.
  - olah_1 5y ago
    I definitely do follow Manyverse development. But as you alluded to, I won’t use it until a few new features are developed like “strong” follows vs “soft” (doesn’t automatically seed all of their follower content) follows.
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  I disagree, client/server where there are multiple servers is the future - for legal reasons and for social reasons. It allows you to handle all sorts of governance issues... 1. If the EU passes some crazy law, you can just host the server in the EU and peer only with EU servers and EU customers so everyone complies with regulation. 2. If you don't like the mod rules, you can change servers and find new policies/rules. That is what we're seeing with many "conservatives" who feel that big tech is "biased". 3. Inevitably, people who create bad content ("sick crap" as you say) will be blocked and forced migrate to low-moderation fringe servers (or stop using the system if none exist). Very popular servers will increase their KYC type policies to cut down on moderation needs (and use moderation as a selling point). Sketchy servers won't be allowed as peers to common servers, or will come with warnings, just like how gmail flags many self hosted email servers as spam and corporate email servers flag everything from external domains. 4. Today, email is the only common protocol that isn't centrally owned besides phone systems for people to communicate. Zoom had a good boom during the pandemic but because its centralized it won't stay as a viable compatibility tool between organizations. As the costs rise on using centralized products (compliance, etc), then turning to self-hosted with inter-op will be more popular. Maybe those businesses don't care about a Twitter clone, but federation lets orgs own their communication (eg. monitor traffic, add retention policy, etc) but operate beyond their borders.
fallat 5y ago
Is Mastodon / the fediverse, the peak of composable asychronous communities (and IRC being the peak of synchronous communities)? Just a question I thought of while staring. I really gave Mastodon a try for 6 months and microblogging was just not for me. I like the underlying technology though and feel it really has potential to creating an alternative to all other social networks and maybe even personal websites.
- RainaRelanah 5y ago
  I'd say Matrix[0] is pretty important too. I wish both of these projects got more mainstream traction. 0. https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- parasti 5y ago
  Since you didn't say it, I'll mention that fediverse is not limited to microblogging. For long form blogging there is, e.g., https://writefreely.org/ https://writefreely.org/ To me it feels like RSS on steroids. Best of the modern web (technology) combined with the best of early 2000s web (decentralization).
eek2121 5y ago
An about page would be useful, for those unfamiliar with the project.
- gargron 5y ago
  Linked from the banner below the post: https://joinmastodon.org https://joinmastodon.org
axxl 5y ago
I'm surprised to see the iOS app ship without a local/federated stream. The local stream especially seems central to the communities that are built with mastodon.
- gargron 5y ago
  Mastodon's central feature is the home feed. You can successfully use Mastodon without ever looking at any of the firehose feeds.
  - axxl 5y ago
    I'm terrible at reading usernames so didn't even realize it was you responding! I read and reacted a bit to your thoughts on the previous GitHub issue around local feed in the app when someone posted it below. I can see the reasoning, even if I don't necessarily agree/it wasn't my use case. Good luck with the project! I'm impressed with it regardless.
- Kye 5y ago
  This was a minor hullabaloo back when the app launched. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-ios/issues/221 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-ios/issues/221
  - axxl 5y ago
    Interesting thoughts from gargron. I can understand the desire to reduce confusion for end users even if I don't agree with the decision. I think the issue is with communicating what the local feee is. In my personal opinion the federated timeline is close to useless near instantly, but local is not. Perhaps there really is no way to rebrand "local" to something users understand, but that feels a bit defeatist. I think I would be more... ok with his statement if it was not the official app? If it was gargron's mastodon app, not "the" mastodon app. One represents the community, one represents his specific vision. But then again he is the majority driver of this product. But to not support large features of the main product in the flagship mobile app feels like a setback. _shrug_ sadly I don't use the product much anymore regardless so this is all just mental spewing at this point.
ekianjo 5y ago
Still not recommendation system instead of just chronological posts which makes it really impractical to browse when you follow more than 10 people. This is really where Mastodon could shine with open algorithms an end user could choose from instead of proprietary ones like Twitter and al.
- waste_monk 5y ago
  I don't think I've ever seen a good recommendation system in practice (that is, having the properties of not accidentally hiding content I'd like to see AND maintaining the same level of reliability over time as my interests change), and I would imagine at least some segment of Mastodon's users would be escaping from platforms like Facebook that use them in part due to "curation exhaustion" - I would think that no recommendations is actually a very strong selling point.
  - tux3 5y ago
    People say Bytedance (Tiktok) has an excellent recommendation system, better at adjusting to interest changes than the other platforms. Personally I always go out of my way to get the chronological view on twitter, but I have to say I am curious what an open algorithm could mean in practice...
    - krainboltgreene 5y ago
      As far as I know the experts say this is because the medium. Twitter has no idea what tweet you're eyeballing because there are 3-20 tweets on your view screen. Tiktok is very aware of what you stopped caring about, because it's no longer being viewed.
    - ekianjo 5y ago
      > I am curious what an open algorithm could mean in practice... Could be a series of different algorithms to choose from, such as: - a feed about the people you follow, ordered by the popularity of their posts among their own followers - a feed about the people you follow, focusing on people who post least often and tend to be under-represented on a typical chronological timeline. - an algorithm to suggest topics or other people to follow, based on other similar profiles to yours. - a feed to focus on newer accounts instead of established accounts... etc. the sky is the limit. You can then imagine a UI that goes with it to switch from one algorithm to the next so that you don't waste your time scrolling down.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
aquova 5y ago
I self-host a number of products for use between myself and a small group of friends. I like the idea of Mastodon, but due to its requirement of needing an email server, it's honestly more trouble than it's worth to try and host it myself.
- gargron 5y ago
  If you are self-hosting for yourself, you can make-do without an e-mail server. You'd have to create an account from the command-line (`tootctl accounts create aquova --email=you-login-with@this --confirmed`) and turn on TOTP 2FA once you login for the first time to avoid e-mail based security challenges. For personal use, you won't need any other e-mails.
  - mariusor 5y ago
    You could always go the barebones route and generate a mailto: link which contains all the info in the email that you usually send (in text mode of course) but which the admin can send from their personal account with their personal email client. I am using a similar implementation in another fediverse project. Another example is/was AWS manual account creation.
    - gargron 5y ago
      I think you can just make Mastodon send e-mails through your GMail account if you're going that route.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  You can self host pleroma, no email server required, it federates with activitypub so it's on the same network as mastodon and federates with it. I used to host a server a while back, it was pretty straightforward.
aceflux 5y ago
Thought I was clicking into a new heavy metal album
alrs 5y ago
I still dig the fediverse. https://lsngl.us/@alrs https://lsngl.us/@alrs
ElijahLynn 5y ago
Broken Link 404 Not Found. There is not an easy way to send feedback on that article so will leave this here. The text "beta-testing our official Android app" links to https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2022/03/mastodon-3.5/android-beta https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2022/03/mastodon-3.5/android-b... which is a 404. There is a https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2022/02/official-mastodon-for-android-app-is-coming-soon/ https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2022/02/official-mastodon-for-... post. The full context is "just started beta-testing our official Android app with our Patreon supporters."
klabb3 5y ago
As a curious bystander, I am very excited about both the social/ideological and technical merits of Mastodon, but I would never use (what appears to be) a Twitter-like format myself. I prefer content-centric over people-centric and medium/long form text over short form. Even Facebook was a better fit for me, in certain situations (primarily private groups) than Twitter is. Does anyone know (1) if the current Twitter-like format is due to an explicit affinity towards it within the community - or due to some other reason and (2) will Mastodon allow for other formats in the future in some shape or form?
- jcbrand 5y ago
  Pleroma is a Mastodon-compatible (i.e. it federates with it) competitor that allows longer form posts. I don't use it myself, but I often notice users from Pleroma servers writing much longer messages than are allowed on Mastodon.
  - oynqr 5y ago
    I recall a saying: Pleroma does what Mastodon't.
  - 2Gkashmiri 5y ago
    i installed pleroma on my 1 gb vps just today. havent had time to play with it but it is hopefully going to be a sanctuary for the family
- Digory 5y ago
  The activitypub standard isn’t limited to tweets. There are Reddit-like and YouTube-like implementations.[0] The privacy would depend on the server rules. You could have a long/medium form blog that is federated using activitypub. But there’s a significant technology toll to pay to get these up and running in my experience. It’s still not like signing up for Twitter or facebook. Which probably makes for better communities once you’ve managed to make it inside. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub
  - 5y ago
assemblylang 5y ago
Great to see new updates! I run a mastodon instance [0] (themed to look like Windows XP). Overall I really enjoy mastodon (and the fediverse in general), it gives the user an opportunity to carve out their own niche through their own instance, while still being able to interact with the overall system. There are still some challenges with setting up your own instance (I couldn't get the docker image working, the documentation for setting up a dev environment could use some improvement, and email confirmation is difficult without using an external service), but think this will improve over time, and there are managed services you can use to run your own instance. [0] https://lunadon.org/ https://lunadon.org/
- codetrotter 5y ago
  Neat theme :) Is the theme available for download?
betwixthewires 5y ago
> Discoverability has always been a hot topic on Mastodon. Discoverability makes or breaks a platform, as there is nothing more important to retain a new user than to let them find something interesting to stay for, as soon as possible. In 3.5, we bring a new explore page which features currently popular posts, news stories that people share a lot, trending hashtags and follow recommendations. Furthermore, for the first time, we attempt to bring people content in their own language. An algorithm to rank posts and people? Did we learn nothing from twitter?
- zeruch 5y ago
  I think that depends what is baked in...using an algorithm to seek things one actually explicitly ask for/configs for, versus something that gets more oblique and "predictive" or makes decisions FOR you...let's give the code a look and decide after we actually scrutinize it, rather than just assume it's reimplementing the same problems again. This is after all, NOT twitter: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    Yeah you're right, I think the larger problem is an algorithm that "learns" from the user, it's a positive feedback loop that produces nasty results. A simple ranking algorithm, especially one we can look at, would be interesting. Something to consider though: even a simple ranking algorithm is going to influence social behavior on the network. I highly doubt most people will use the firehouse feeds with this option, and once you go down this road you begin talking about social impact. It's an interesting experiment, I'm not so averse to it now, but I'm wary of it still.
    - Vinnl 5y ago
      Another redeeming factor is that it's not personalised, allowing for it to be researched, and preventing people getting rabbitholed away from their peers.
    - tecleandor 5y ago
brainzap 5y ago
throwaway684936 5y ago
Back when I tried mastodon a couple years ago, the friction required to interact with users and content from other instances was incredibly annoying to the point of turning me off completely. Favoriting something should not take more than a single click regardless if it's from my instance or not. This doesn't appear to be addressed (was it already addressed in an earlier version?)
- Ndymium 5y ago
  I use fosstodon.org. I don't know what version it has, but I can just click on any post's favourite button (or reply to it or boost it) even if it's from another instance. So I reckon if there was an issue before, it has been fixed or it's not universal to all deployments.
  - SecurityLagoon 5y ago
    All that stuff works fine. I think what they are talking about is following a user on another instance which is still a little clunky sometimes just because of the inherent nature of the domain where you view their profile and click follow being a different domain to where your account resides. I generally just search for the user and click follow on my instance to avoid the redirection steps.
- gargron 5y ago
  The friction you are describing is when you leave Mastodon's web app and go on the public pages of different servers (that have no way to know who you are because they are separate websites with separate cookies). You do not have to leave Mastodon's web app to interact with users and content from other servers. When you naturally see content or users from other servers in your home feed, on the explore tab, in notifications, and so on, there is no difference in how you interact with them. And if you need to look up something that isn't in the interface, you can use the search bar (you can paste URLs into it, too)
bnh 5y ago
How is Mastodon different than Diaspora?
t0bia_s 5y ago
I do not recommend mastodon. It is censored. I was banned because of sharing my own satiric propaganda posters.
- rvieira 5y ago
  You can’t get banned from Mastodon (the software).
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
captainmuon 5y ago
Congratulations! I remember when Mastodon was first posted to HN. It has become a really polished and thriving project since then. I am a bit jaded about the whole Twitter model though. I haven't really found a nice twitter community, and I consider it mostly "write-only" TBH. I wonder if there is an ActivityPub application that is more like the early Facebook or MySpace. Not so much centered around the feed, but around the profile page. You curate a really nice profile page, add info about you and selected posts. And it can also serve as a landing page for people who are not on the network. You can add people to "collect" them as friends and get updates and chat with them, but it is not about getting a feed with all their tweets. I think I saw a federated VK clone the other day, which goes a little bit in that direction.
meerita 5y ago
The example image of the post is carefully done to make appear one side of the political spectrum worse than the other. I don't like this stuff. Specially if this people is aiming for an open place.
- ionicgiraffe 5y ago
  I did not notice that. Maybe because I wasn't looking for it.
  - meerita 5y ago
    I was checking the UI, and started to notice some political keywords, like "MAGA" and others, and then I followed the thread just realizing it. Coincidence? Maybe, but…
nirui 5y ago
I was wanting to host a Mastodon instance to use as a mail/chat/blog/publish/gallery service for myself, but based on an old (from 2017) official document(1) that I found, running a Mastodon instance doesn't come cheap. 1: https://github.com/mastodon/documentation/blob/9efa9b69d8dc44bf45b7becadfecf67869d67f7c/Running-Mastodon/Resources-needed.md https://github.com/mastodon/documentation/blob/9efa9b69d8dc4... Their new document stopped providing such information now. I wonder how things improved during the years, does it demands less RAM now? Long story: my plan was to put the instance on one of my Raspberry Pi which got 2GB of RAM. But based on the old information, 2GB of hardware RAM is dangerously close to the limit, so I waited to see if things improves somehow (say Ruby suddenly become more memory efficient, I can dream too).
- Lambdanaut 5y ago
  Try Pleroma. It will easily run on a raspberry Pi and is growing very fast. It's also a lot easier and simpler to install and deploy than Mastodon; it has far fewer dependencies. Also more features, like chat, have been around for years. Mastodon is falling behind even there. I really recommend it. It was a much nicer experience for me.

373 points by d4a 5y ago

cxr 5y ago

I'd like to see more attention put into carving out a subset of Mastodon's functionality that would allow you to host your fediverse node on a static site, à la blog feeds powered by RSS/Atom. The discovery problem can be handled pretty straightforwardly: if you want notifications of replies to your posts, then that's just another feed that you subscribe to—a separate service. You don't exactly need an always-on "instance" providing an inbox endpoint to relay notifications to you. You give up private channels (DMs), but you gain a lot more flexibility. It's a shame that there are so few server (and client) implementations for "the fediverse". We should have at least half as many options as we have in static site generators themselves. (In fact, with this approach, your preferred static site generator could become part of your "client"...) Imagine your corner of the fediverse being reachable at $YOURNAME.github.io. Prior art: Fritter <https://github.com/beakerbrowser/fritter https://github.com/beakerbrowser/fritter>

ocdtrekkie 5y ago
Have you seen twtxt or yarn.social? It's a text-format feed you can absolutely statically host.
- cxr 5y ago
  I don't want another Twitter-but-reinvented. I want a Mastodon-interoperable "profile" to be enshrined in a standard that projects currently focused on compatible ActivityPub-based client/server implementations agree to support because it's a good compromise that allows people to participate with nothing more than the ability to publish a static site.
  - whacked_new 5y ago
    do you think what you're envisioning can be bootstrapped through github actions?
    - cxr 5y ago
      The mechanism used to actually service publication requests from the person controlling the node is orthogonal to doing the design work to specify the thing and the political/social aspect of getting people to agree to support/adopt it. So, in a word, no. (Side note: any design that necessarily depended on GitHub Actions or something with equivalent power would be a failure on the goals I've outlined.)
      - whacked_new 5y ago
        I can see where you're coming from, but just as food for thought, I think this is an interesting angle: 1. many people are able to host their content on github now (or gitlab or otherwise) 2. github (et al) provides a simple way to add RSS to your content 3. github actions provides a simple way to poll and update Mastodon is very interesting, and it has gotten simpler over the years, but I don't think it is simple enough.
        hedora 5y ago
        I think the argument is that it should be trivial to host on github / github actions, or anywhere else, just like any other sane static site generator.
        cxr 5y ago
        Well, yeah. That's pretty much the thesis of what I wrote—hence, "Imagine your corner of the fediverse being reachable at $YOURNAME.github.io." (Are you trying to convince me here of something I was already convinced of? That's what it sounds like.)
  - nyx_land 5y ago
    ActivityPub is so poorly/vaguely specified that basically every real world implementation follows what Mastodon does, so good luck with trying to get what you're after without being at least indirectly dependent on the decisions of yet another Twitter clone.
    - cxr 5y ago
      > good luck with trying to get what you're after without being at least indirectly dependent on the decisions of yet another Twitter clone Not what I meant. The correct way to read what I wrote is with emphasis on "another Twitter-but-reinvented". We already have have a Twitter-but-reinvented (Mastodon, and Mastodon-interoperable ActivityPub clients/servers). And people actually use it—which is the hard part of working on any kind of "social" gewgaw. To think that we should throw that out and use twtxt or something like it would be to screw up bad. ActivityPub is better at being RSS-/Atom-like in its ability to convey structure than twtxt is, anyway. What's left is slicing it up, fusing the gaps and some now-necessary pieces with epoxy, and saying, "Here's the 'static' profile; you can look forward to support for this in Mastodon 4.0 [and everything else that tries to be interoperable]."
    - ratww 5y ago
      Yep. It was the same before Mastodon, with the predecessor of ActivityPub, et al. People had to "do whatever StatusNet/GNUSocial is doing". Even the code examples in the specs themselves were unable to interoperate with any instance whatsoever.
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    ActivityPub is supposed to be a generic feed format but in practice it's used mostly for Twitter clones so none of its non-Twitter vocabulary or flows have ever been developed.
zozbot234 5y ago
> I'd like to see more attention put into carving out a subset of Mastodon's functionality that would allow you to host your fediverse node on a static site, à la blog feeds powered by RSS/Atom. You could just serve standard ActivityStreams; this can happen statically and is not something that Mastodon itself needs to be concerned with, obviously. A different component (either Mastodon itself or some separate thing) would poll known ActivityStreams endpoints and either expose them directly in Mastodon or relay their content via ActivityPub in a way that a Mastodon instance can support.
gargron 5y ago
To allow people to review their followers before accepting them ("follow requests") all subscriptions in ActivityPub require the followed actor to send back an Accept activity. This, and the Webfinger requirement to confirm the username@domain address that predates ActivityPub, preclude plain static sites from being followable actors as seen from Mastodon. Although nothing prevents you from publishing a static feed in the ActivityStreams format, this would require a different, feed-like subscription mechanism where the publisher is not aware of subscribers and the subscriber has to poll the publisher periodically.
- cxr 5y ago
  Yes. These are all assumptions of the sort that I'm saying would need to be (and should be) adjusted (i.e. fixed)—in Mastodon and ActivityPub, to better accommodate static nodes (not for the relevant desiderata to be adjusted to accommodate what's currently wrong with the design that Mastodon implements).
- zozbot234 5y ago
  "Follow requests" are typically used for sharing private posts in existing social networks: that's why there is a "request and accept" flow. They seem like they should be irrelevant to users who only post content publicly. Does Mastodon require users with public posts to "approve" each of their subscribers?
  - shadowfacts 5y ago
    Not in the UI unless the user's enabled it, but ActivityPub server implementations send an Accept activity in response to a Follow activity.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      Seems like GP is right then about some tweaks being advisable. There's no reason why ActivityPub servers should not be able to poll and republish ActivityStreams pages if the server admin arranges for this.
pfraze 5y ago
Ey, I made Fritter. The “fr” shamelessly came from my last name. Actually the cooler thing was Rotonde, which Devine of 100 rabbits fame made. Beaker has the ability to duplicate somebody else’s website, which we called forking. So Devine made a social website where the whole application was the website software itself. Bear in mind that beaker sites are like mutable torrents. They’re just collections of files. The fun is that you can read and write those files by an API. The js in Rotonde would detect if you owned the site, and then present a text input which would write a new text file in the posts folder. The site would then use js to read all its own post texts and the post texts of followed users to produce a feed. To create a new “account” you would fork an existing site, copying all the application software. This meant the software itself was literally viral. It was really cool. If you think a bit about it, you can probably guess the problems we ran into (both with rotonde and fritter). Most of it had to do with scaling - as all this occurred in the frontend of these p2p sites - and multi device coordination. There was, however, a pretty intense zen simplicity in the pattern of websites that wrote their own files with JS, and I wouldn’t write the idea off entirely.
- cxr 5y ago
  > Most of it had to do with scaling - as all this occurred in the frontend of these p2p sites You didn't say it, exactly, but just in case anyone who's reading casually misses it: this need not be the case with the static fediverse. I didn't mention JS or any sort of fully in-browser aggregator; nothing here requires client logic running on the "frontend" (i.e. in a Web browser). You'd be free to make whatever client choices are appropriate for you, including managing the whole thing via shell scripts (as many people choose to with their static sites).
  - hedora 5y ago
    I think a static site hosted on git is the sweet spot for the fediverse. It's realistic to expect an HTTPS 1.1 static endpoint and openssh to have << 1 unauthenticated remotely exploitable bugs per year. This opens up a whole new world of hosting options. Think a raspberry pi that auto backs up to github/gitlab/git, with an ACME / let's encrypt client. Stick it behind the right CDN and it could even host podcasts / video. Enable automatic OS upgrades and give it a maintenance window and it's zero maintenance until the $35 hardware fails. Edit: Or be lazy and stick the static site in s3.
tedunangst 5y ago
Who does run the server where the feed of replies to my post lives?
- cxr 5y ago
  Same as who operates hosted feed aggregators and podcast indexers for you to use: whoever wants to.
betwixthewires 5y ago
I'm pretty sure there are tools that allow people to subscribe to an activitypub feed of your private blog similar to RSS, it's been a while since I dived into the world of activitypub community projects and tools but I am certain I saw something like that somewhere.
- phs318u 5y ago
  It is indeed a thing. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rss+to+activitypub https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rss+to+activitypub There was even a HN article a few years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21470099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21470099
- cxr 5y ago
  > there are tools that allow people to subscribe to an activitypub feed of your private blog Those aren't relevant here. You're saying, essentially, "static sites/blogs, squeezed through a Mastodon-/ActivityPub-shaped hole". I'm saying, "Mastodon profiles, squeezed through the static site/blog hole (in a typical staticgen pipeline)". They have some words in common, but the resemblance ends there, at the superficial level; they are otherwise completely opposite ideas. > I am certain I saw something like that Assuming that "that" means the thing that I'm describing: you wouldn't have seen that, because the relevant Mastodon-interoperable parts of ActivityPub as they currently exist are fundamentally at odds with the ability to do this, for reasons mentioned in part by Gargron upthread. The WebFinger thing is a big part of it. Mastodon's not alone here; there are other WebFinger-dependent protocols (like remoteStorage) that also suffer. This is covered in <https://github.com/konklone/jekyll-webfinger/tree/9bcb46bbabc08363b14fd8b41a944215539d7642 https://github.com/konklone/jekyll-webfinger/tree/9bcb46bbab...>. (Mastodon has taken off in a way that we could probably say it has reached critical mass, even if it's still not as mainstream as Twitter, but remoteStorage not so much.) This is a design flaw at the protocol level, and my contention is that it impacts further adoption more than people realize. There's no good reason, for example, why when I encounter a remoteStorage-compatible app where I only ever intend to grant it read-only access, I shouldn't be able to give it the URL for a dataset hosted on a static site. Presently, however, you cannot—unless the application author deliberately implements some workaround. But they shouldn't need to.
deleted 5y ago
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mro_name 5y ago
> your fediverse node on a static site, à la blog feeds powered by RSS/Atom. I'm aiming for such called #Seppo! There's a proof of concept https://demo.mro.name/shaarligo https://demo.mro.name/shaarligo and funding application paper in german for now https://mro.name/o/2022-03-08-201643-prototypefund12-037.pdf https://mro.name/o/2022-03-08-201643-prototypefund12-037.pdf Would you pay a doller per month for such?
- unicornporn 5y ago
  Oh, I came across this long ago and forgot about it. Thanks for the reminder! Hope you will find funding via Prototype Fund too! > Would you pay a doller per month for such? For what? Hosting or development? I'd definitely pay $1 for development. :) BTW, you say #Seppo, but the repo says ShaarliGo. Are you considering a name change?
  - mro_name 5y ago
    > For what? Hosting or development? development. Hosting will be strictly decentral under your responsibility. > you say #Seppo, indeed, the other is a proof of concept and will remain as is.
    - unicornporn 5y ago
      > indeed, the other is a proof of concept and will remain as is. I've always said that a easy to deploy CMS is one of the missing pieces for the IndieWeb. Preferably it should work on any shared hosting. PHP/SQLite would be a good fit, but I understand if you have other preferences.
- cxr 5y ago
  > 2. download https://mro.name/Linux-x86_64/shaarligo.cgi https://mro.name/Linux-x86_64/shaarligo.cgi[...] That doesn't sound like a static node to me, just another backend-heavy design. Can I deploy this to GitHub Pages? NeoCities? Netlify (sans Functions)? If the answer is "no", then it really doesn't have anything to do with what I'm talking about.
zamalek 5y ago
Writefreely[1] supports ActivityPub, and are already planning to look at some of the ideas you have. [1]: https://writefreely.org/ https://writefreely.org/
- cxr 5y ago
  WriteFreely is no more relevant to static sites than Mastodon is. They're both "backend-heavy" servers—not tools for creating the sort of content that can be hosted on GitHub Pages or Neocities or Netlify (sans Functions) or a simple host that serves content from the file system using Caddy/Nginx/Apache/etc.
khimaros 5y ago
this is infeasible until https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/34 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/34 is addressed. Mastodon does not backfill posts or "poll" streams. they need to be pushed.

bovermyer 5y ago

Adding the editing of posts is a good feature addition, in my opinion. I wonder if posts that have been edited display that they've been edited, though.

dane-pgp 5y ago
> "The original and previous versions of the posts are saved and remain accessible through a history view. And people who have previously shared the post get notified about any edits, so they can un-share if there’s foul play." It sounds like they've thought about these risks, and I would assume that the UI element for accessing the "history view" looks different if there is no history, i.e. the current version is the only version.
- fomine3 5y ago
  What if poster is evil and also a server operator? Could be the post edited silently and seen from user in other server?
  - mariusor 5y ago
    A server operator will always be available to edit the content in the database.
  - zaarn 5y ago
    That would cause havoc; specifically because other instances can forward your message. So the original message will always float around in retweets and replies. It'll probably be very visible.
gargron 5y ago
Yes, there are visual indicators that the post has been edited, similar to how it is on GitHub.

imilk 5y ago

Funnily enough, the whole "Truth Social" is just a Mastodon clone

hunterb123 5y ago
Mastodon clone or instance? If either, explain why. What's the difference? The benefit of federation is to have multiple philosophies in charge of moderation of their own communities whilst also being connected.
- imilk 5y ago
  Clone, as in a re-skinned version. But my main point is the irony of releasing a pitch deck like this [1], and just adding some custom CSS to popular open source product. [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1849635/000119312521348593/d242442dex992.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1849635/000119312521...
  - tnzk 5y ago
    Would their server federate with other servers?
    - imilk 5y ago
      Of course not. They probably just wanted to pay a laughably small amount to make a clone of Twitter. And whether the client asked for it to be done or not, the outsourced development group they hired copied the source code while removing the required attribution.
  - hunterb123 5y ago
    So is an instance not allowed to skin itself? Most instances have different designs. Are companies not allowed to compete with Twitter using Mastodon as the platform? Is this not the desired goal for social media companies, to operate within a federated network? You do admit to compete with Twitter you need a lot of resources, that's what the filing you linked to is for.

dane-pgp 5y ago

> As we value safety, these new features come with their own moderation tools–nothing will show up in trends unless reviewed by one of the server’s moderators first. That sounds like a lot of work (with the most enthusiastic volunteers likely being the most censorious) while doing little to stop someone who updates the content after it has been approved by the moderator.

gargron 5y ago
For news stories, moderators can approve publishers (e.g. techcrunch.com) and then they don't need to review individual links anymore (though the ability to override this for individual links remains). Same for posts and authors. If a post is edited to be something bad, there is still the fallback on reports and post-hoc moderation, making it not any more risky than having the local/federated timelines in the first place. There's a finite number of publishers/authors that regularly create popular content, so the workload decreases after an initial burst.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  That's good to know, thank you!

olah_1 5y ago

i think selective following is the future of moderation, mainly because nobody wants to look at sick crap all day long. brings up the question of having to host the bad content though. this makes me think the client server model for decentralized networks is just dead in the water. selective following + each user just holding their own data on the client = so many problems solved

black_puppydog 5y ago
Have a look a the decentralised projects put there then. Ssb (secure scuttlebutt) seem to fit your description, but fair warning: this setup comes with its own set of problems around moderation and other things.
- olah_1 5y ago
  I definitely do follow Manyverse development. But as you alluded to, I won’t use it until a few new features are developed like “strong” follows vs “soft” (doesn’t automatically seed all of their follower content) follows.
vineyardmike 5y ago
I disagree, client/server where there are multiple servers is the future - for legal reasons and for social reasons. It allows you to handle all sorts of governance issues... 1. If the EU passes some crazy law, you can just host the server in the EU and peer only with EU servers and EU customers so everyone complies with regulation. 2. If you don't like the mod rules, you can change servers and find new policies/rules. That is what we're seeing with many "conservatives" who feel that big tech is "biased". 3. Inevitably, people who create bad content ("sick crap" as you say) will be blocked and forced migrate to low-moderation fringe servers (or stop using the system if none exist). Very popular servers will increase their KYC type policies to cut down on moderation needs (and use moderation as a selling point). Sketchy servers won't be allowed as peers to common servers, or will come with warnings, just like how gmail flags many self hosted email servers as spam and corporate email servers flag everything from external domains. 4. Today, email is the only common protocol that isn't centrally owned besides phone systems for people to communicate. Zoom had a good boom during the pandemic but because its centralized it won't stay as a viable compatibility tool between organizations. As the costs rise on using centralized products (compliance, etc), then turning to self-hosted with inter-op will be more popular. Maybe those businesses don't care about a Twitter clone, but federation lets orgs own their communication (eg. monitor traffic, add retention policy, etc) but operate beyond their borders.

fallat 5y ago

Is Mastodon / the fediverse, the peak of composable asychronous communities (and IRC being the peak of synchronous communities)? Just a question I thought of while staring. I really gave Mastodon a try for 6 months and microblogging was just not for me. I like the underlying technology though and feel it really has potential to creating an alternative to all other social networks and maybe even personal websites.

RainaRelanah 5y ago
I'd say Matrix[0] is pretty important too. I wish both of these projects got more mainstream traction. 0. https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/
deleted 5y ago
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parasti 5y ago
Since you didn't say it, I'll mention that fediverse is not limited to microblogging. For long form blogging there is, e.g., https://writefreely.org/ https://writefreely.org/ To me it feels like RSS on steroids. Best of the modern web (technology) combined with the best of early 2000s web (decentralization).

eek2121 5y ago

An about page would be useful, for those unfamiliar with the project.

gargron 5y ago
Linked from the banner below the post: https://joinmastodon.org https://joinmastodon.org

axxl 5y ago

I'm surprised to see the iOS app ship without a local/federated stream. The local stream especially seems central to the communities that are built with mastodon.

gargron 5y ago
Mastodon's central feature is the home feed. You can successfully use Mastodon without ever looking at any of the firehose feeds.
- axxl 5y ago
  I'm terrible at reading usernames so didn't even realize it was you responding! I read and reacted a bit to your thoughts on the previous GitHub issue around local feed in the app when someone posted it below. I can see the reasoning, even if I don't necessarily agree/it wasn't my use case. Good luck with the project! I'm impressed with it regardless.
Kye 5y ago
This was a minor hullabaloo back when the app launched. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-ios/issues/221 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-ios/issues/221
- axxl 5y ago
  Interesting thoughts from gargron. I can understand the desire to reduce confusion for end users even if I don't agree with the decision. I think the issue is with communicating what the local feee is. In my personal opinion the federated timeline is close to useless near instantly, but local is not. Perhaps there really is no way to rebrand "local" to something users understand, but that feels a bit defeatist. I think I would be more... ok with his statement if it was not the official app? If it was gargron's mastodon app, not "the" mastodon app. One represents the community, one represents his specific vision. But then again he is the majority driver of this product. But to not support large features of the main product in the flagship mobile app feels like a setback. _shrug_ sadly I don't use the product much anymore regardless so this is all just mental spewing at this point.

ekianjo 5y ago

Still not recommendation system instead of just chronological posts which makes it really impractical to browse when you follow more than 10 people. This is really where Mastodon could shine with open algorithms an end user could choose from instead of proprietary ones like Twitter and al.

waste_monk 5y ago
I don't think I've ever seen a good recommendation system in practice (that is, having the properties of not accidentally hiding content I'd like to see AND maintaining the same level of reliability over time as my interests change), and I would imagine at least some segment of Mastodon's users would be escaping from platforms like Facebook that use them in part due to "curation exhaustion" - I would think that no recommendations is actually a very strong selling point.
- tux3 5y ago
  People say Bytedance (Tiktok) has an excellent recommendation system, better at adjusting to interest changes than the other platforms. Personally I always go out of my way to get the chronological view on twitter, but I have to say I am curious what an open algorithm could mean in practice...
  - krainboltgreene 5y ago
    As far as I know the experts say this is because the medium. Twitter has no idea what tweet you're eyeballing because there are 3-20 tweets on your view screen. Tiktok is very aware of what you stopped caring about, because it's no longer being viewed.
  - ekianjo 5y ago
    > I am curious what an open algorithm could mean in practice... Could be a series of different algorithms to choose from, such as: - a feed about the people you follow, ordered by the popularity of their posts among their own followers - a feed about the people you follow, focusing on people who post least often and tend to be under-represented on a typical chronological timeline. - an algorithm to suggest topics or other people to follow, based on other similar profiles to yours. - a feed to focus on newer accounts instead of established accounts... etc. the sky is the limit. You can then imagine a UI that goes with it to switch from one algorithm to the next so that you don't waste your time scrolling down.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

aquova 5y ago

I self-host a number of products for use between myself and a small group of friends. I like the idea of Mastodon, but due to its requirement of needing an email server, it's honestly more trouble than it's worth to try and host it myself.

gargron 5y ago
If you are self-hosting for yourself, you can make-do without an e-mail server. You'd have to create an account from the command-line (`tootctl accounts create aquova --email=you-login-with@this --confirmed`) and turn on TOTP 2FA once you login for the first time to avoid e-mail based security challenges. For personal use, you won't need any other e-mails.
- mariusor 5y ago
  You could always go the barebones route and generate a mailto: link which contains all the info in the email that you usually send (in text mode of course) but which the admin can send from their personal account with their personal email client. I am using a similar implementation in another fediverse project. Another example is/was AWS manual account creation.
  - gargron 5y ago
    I think you can just make Mastodon send e-mails through your GMail account if you're going that route.
betwixthewires 5y ago
You can self host pleroma, no email server required, it federates with activitypub so it's on the same network as mastodon and federates with it. I used to host a server a while back, it was pretty straightforward.

aceflux 5y ago

Thought I was clicking into a new heavy metal album

alrs 5y ago

I still dig the fediverse. https://lsngl.us/@alrs https://lsngl.us/@alrs

ElijahLynn 5y ago

Broken Link 404 Not Found. There is not an easy way to send feedback on that article so will leave this here. The text "beta-testing our official Android app" links to https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2022/03/mastodon-3.5/android-beta https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2022/03/mastodon-3.5/android-b... which is a 404. There is a https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2022/02/official-mastodon-for-android-app-is-coming-soon/ https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2022/02/official-mastodon-for-... post. The full context is "just started beta-testing our official Android app with our Patreon supporters."

klabb3 5y ago

As a curious bystander, I am very excited about both the social/ideological and technical merits of Mastodon, but I would never use (what appears to be) a Twitter-like format myself. I prefer content-centric over people-centric and medium/long form text over short form. Even Facebook was a better fit for me, in certain situations (primarily private groups) than Twitter is. Does anyone know (1) if the current Twitter-like format is due to an explicit affinity towards it within the community - or due to some other reason and (2) will Mastodon allow for other formats in the future in some shape or form?

jcbrand 5y ago
Pleroma is a Mastodon-compatible (i.e. it federates with it) competitor that allows longer form posts. I don't use it myself, but I often notice users from Pleroma servers writing much longer messages than are allowed on Mastodon.
- oynqr 5y ago
  I recall a saying: Pleroma does what Mastodon't.
- 2Gkashmiri 5y ago
  i installed pleroma on my 1 gb vps just today. havent had time to play with it but it is hopefully going to be a sanctuary for the family
Digory 5y ago
The activitypub standard isn’t limited to tweets. There are Reddit-like and YouTube-like implementations.[0] The privacy would depend on the server rules. You could have a long/medium form blog that is federated using activitypub. But there’s a significant technology toll to pay to get these up and running in my experience. It’s still not like signing up for Twitter or facebook. Which probably makes for better communities once you’ve managed to make it inside. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub
- 5y ago

assemblylang 5y ago

Great to see new updates! I run a mastodon instance [0] (themed to look like Windows XP). Overall I really enjoy mastodon (and the fediverse in general), it gives the user an opportunity to carve out their own niche through their own instance, while still being able to interact with the overall system. There are still some challenges with setting up your own instance (I couldn't get the docker image working, the documentation for setting up a dev environment could use some improvement, and email confirmation is difficult without using an external service), but think this will improve over time, and there are managed services you can use to run your own instance. [0] https://lunadon.org/ https://lunadon.org/

codetrotter 5y ago
Neat theme :) Is the theme available for download?

betwixthewires 5y ago

> Discoverability has always been a hot topic on Mastodon. Discoverability makes or breaks a platform, as there is nothing more important to retain a new user than to let them find something interesting to stay for, as soon as possible. In 3.5, we bring a new explore page which features currently popular posts, news stories that people share a lot, trending hashtags and follow recommendations. Furthermore, for the first time, we attempt to bring people content in their own language. An algorithm to rank posts and people? Did we learn nothing from twitter?

zeruch 5y ago
I think that depends what is baked in...using an algorithm to seek things one actually explicitly ask for/configs for, versus something that gets more oblique and "predictive" or makes decisions FOR you...let's give the code a look and decide after we actually scrutinize it, rather than just assume it's reimplementing the same problems again. This is after all, NOT twitter: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  Yeah you're right, I think the larger problem is an algorithm that "learns" from the user, it's a positive feedback loop that produces nasty results. A simple ranking algorithm, especially one we can look at, would be interesting. Something to consider though: even a simple ranking algorithm is going to influence social behavior on the network. I highly doubt most people will use the firehouse feeds with this option, and once you go down this road you begin talking about social impact. It's an interesting experiment, I'm not so averse to it now, but I'm wary of it still.
  - Vinnl 5y ago
    Another redeeming factor is that it's not personalised, allowing for it to be researched, and preventing people getting rabbitholed away from their peers.
  - tecleandor 5y ago

brainzap 5y ago

throwaway684936 5y ago

Back when I tried mastodon a couple years ago, the friction required to interact with users and content from other instances was incredibly annoying to the point of turning me off completely. Favoriting something should not take more than a single click regardless if it's from my instance or not. This doesn't appear to be addressed (was it already addressed in an earlier version?)

Ndymium 5y ago
I use fosstodon.org. I don't know what version it has, but I can just click on any post's favourite button (or reply to it or boost it) even if it's from another instance. So I reckon if there was an issue before, it has been fixed or it's not universal to all deployments.
- SecurityLagoon 5y ago
  All that stuff works fine. I think what they are talking about is following a user on another instance which is still a little clunky sometimes just because of the inherent nature of the domain where you view their profile and click follow being a different domain to where your account resides. I generally just search for the user and click follow on my instance to avoid the redirection steps.
gargron 5y ago
The friction you are describing is when you leave Mastodon's web app and go on the public pages of different servers (that have no way to know who you are because they are separate websites with separate cookies). You do not have to leave Mastodon's web app to interact with users and content from other servers. When you naturally see content or users from other servers in your home feed, on the explore tab, in notifications, and so on, there is no difference in how you interact with them. And if you need to look up something that isn't in the interface, you can use the search bar (you can paste URLs into it, too)

bnh 5y ago

How is Mastodon different than Diaspora?

t0bia_s 5y ago

I do not recommend mastodon. It is censored. I was banned because of sharing my own satiric propaganda posters.

rvieira 5y ago
You can’t get banned from Mastodon (the software).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

captainmuon 5y ago

Congratulations! I remember when Mastodon was first posted to HN. It has become a really polished and thriving project since then. I am a bit jaded about the whole Twitter model though. I haven't really found a nice twitter community, and I consider it mostly "write-only" TBH. I wonder if there is an ActivityPub application that is more like the early Facebook or MySpace. Not so much centered around the feed, but around the profile page. You curate a really nice profile page, add info about you and selected posts. And it can also serve as a landing page for people who are not on the network. You can add people to "collect" them as friends and get updates and chat with them, but it is not about getting a feed with all their tweets. I think I saw a federated VK clone the other day, which goes a little bit in that direction.

meerita 5y ago

The example image of the post is carefully done to make appear one side of the political spectrum worse than the other. I don't like this stuff. Specially if this people is aiming for an open place.

ionicgiraffe 5y ago
I did not notice that. Maybe because I wasn't looking for it.
- meerita 5y ago
  I was checking the UI, and started to notice some political keywords, like "MAGA" and others, and then I followed the thread just realizing it. Coincidence? Maybe, but…

nirui 5y ago

I was wanting to host a Mastodon instance to use as a mail/chat/blog/publish/gallery service for myself, but based on an old (from 2017) official document(1) that I found, running a Mastodon instance doesn't come cheap. 1: https://github.com/mastodon/documentation/blob/9efa9b69d8dc44bf45b7becadfecf67869d67f7c/Running-Mastodon/Resources-needed.md https://github.com/mastodon/documentation/blob/9efa9b69d8dc4... Their new document stopped providing such information now. I wonder how things improved during the years, does it demands less RAM now? Long story: my plan was to put the instance on one of my Raspberry Pi which got 2GB of RAM. But based on the old information, 2GB of hardware RAM is dangerously close to the limit, so I waited to see if things improves somehow (say Ruby suddenly become more memory efficient, I can dream too).

Lambdanaut 5y ago
Try Pleroma. It will easily run on a raspberry Pi and is growing very fast. It's also a lot easier and simpler to install and deploy than Mastodon; it has far fewer dependencies. Also more features, like chat, have been around for years. Mastodon is falling behind even there. I really recommend it. It was a much nicer experience for me.