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Mastodon v4.0.0 Release Candidate

AndyMcConachie 4y ago
Great to see NLnet funding Mastodon development.
- rektide 4y ago
  there should absolutely be some less biased forks that get funding too, but, yes, agreed. there's been a long series of mimd of insensitive counter-community decisions gargaron has forced upon Mastadon, such as greatly concealing the local timeline. Instead of being a local community with outward ties, this has made mastadon & being a member of a particular server a far less local, community-based, explorable phenomenon.
  - yborg 4y ago
    If you are referring to the official mobile client not having the local timeline, I disagree with the approach, but there are a round dozen alternative clients and this didn't affect the web interface. As usual, everyone has their own vision for what the absolutely correct decision is in every instance, but it's Eugen's project.
EGreg 4y ago
Here is another open source alternative to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. that is supposed to allow any community to assemble its own software... for dating, events, making reservations, videoconferencing, livestreaming, taking trips together, common interests, etc. The goal is to allow for example a rural village to organize itself, make dinner plans, dating, doctor's appointments, and so on, using a local wifi mesh network and one computer. There is no need for all the signals to go to Zuck's FB or Elon's TW server farms in California. People need to have their own software. If you’re interested, here is more on why it’s needed: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ If you want to try it yourself: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform https://github.com/Qbix/Platform If you want to play around with it, it’s free to use. The platform is ready for use but needs a lot more tutorials and needs to be packaged for hosting companies… https://qbix.com/platform/guide https://qbix.com/platform/guide
- bebopcowboy 4y ago
solatic 4y ago
I really wish more libre-social apps would support serverless deployment options. If I were to deploy a personal Mastodon instance on Heroku, it would be, what, close to $30/month? Shared hosting from a provider like masto.host is $6/month and quickly rises with use? What if there was a CloudFormation stack that quickly brought up Mastodon on API Gateway + Lambda + SQS + S3 + DynamoDB? Costs nothing if you don't post or follow anybody, with slowly rising costs as you use Mastodon more, and basically no ops concerns? Wouldn't that eliminate most of the technical barriers (cost, ops hassle, albeit still some setup hassle) for promoting federated social?
- nathants 4y ago
  independent scale to zero services per end user is definitely the play. people can sell their data on marketplaces if they want to cover the few dollars a month of usage fees.
- Vecr 4y ago
  Yeah if you don't federate with anyone. Otherwise people will send you stuff to rack up your bill. I say just run it from your house, and use wireguard and haproxy with a VPS to get the traffic to and from the wider Internet if you don't have IPs and/or don't want your home network getting DOSed.
  - solatic 4y ago
    > People will send you stuff to rack up your bill Sure, but on a personal level, that's still very, very cheap, almost without concern for how much you follow. CloudFront and API Gateway are pennies per million requests. SQS usage would probably fit in the free tier. DynamoDB, if implemented with a single-table design, would probably cost no more than a couple of bucks, and storage would probably fit in the free tier. You can use IAM policy on pre-signed URLs to restrict the maximum object size of an object that someone is sending you, as well as implement effective rate limiting and automatic expiration with lifecycle policies that keep costs under control. Of course, costs could expand if the user wants to keep an infinite history, but that's their choice, by design.
  - 4y ago
raydiatian 4y ago
This fediverse stuff seems incredibly overhyped. Why don’t we all just disconnect from social media (esp Twitter) for a few years, touch grass (while the stuff still exists) and then come back for the metaverse refreshed and grounded in reality like it’s 1990 and we just invented the internet. Those were good times.
- eeixlk 4y ago
  Or we could embrace something that is new and uncomfortable and see if it brings us joy because we can own it and tweak it or if it ends up being bad because it requires maintenance and oversight and energy. It's not like there are tons of opportunities for networked sites to crumble. Myspace, Linked In, Facebook and Reddit launched around 19-20 years ago. Twitter was 16 years ago.
  - raydiatian 4y ago
    I mean what are the economics of fediverse? Who pays to keep the lights on, and where do they get their money from? How will the cost and logistics of policing one metric planet’s worth of sociopaths be any different from when Twitter had to do it? I hate and am truly tired of America’s three premier Twitter narcissists (I bet I don’t even have to name them and you’ll know), but this “cry about Twitter and leave it” meme all feels like a groupthink knee jerk at its root, and then the “let’s move to fediverse” meme feels utterly thoughtless. Trolls are the internet, people turn to sociopaths the second they touch the net. It’s hyperbolic, but it’s not unfair. Trolls are on fediverse too, they cannot be escaped without several orders of magnitude additional energy injected into the system. If management alone and a desire to silence trolls is what this is all about, I’ve found that just being disconnected is an immense sea of peace, the one place they truly cannot get you. Social media is genuinely just a gigantic psy-op at this point anyway. Why even bother to participate and take it seriously?
    - EnKopVand 4y ago
      > I mean what are the economics of fediverse? Who pays to keep the lights on, and where do they get their money from? Is this a genuine question? Because it depends. Some people/groups run their own server. Others run free servers, kind of like people ran IRC servers. Some pool money together to run a server. Some are run by NGOs. One I saw was charging around $2 a month, but would use any profits to plant trees. I know it's not really polite to call out people for a lack of effort on HN, but all that information that I just gave to you, I got from browsing the server section of join mastodon or whatever it was called for like 5 seconds. It took you longer to wonder about this stuff, than it would've taken you to actually find out. I don't want to come off as advertising mastodon or the fediverse. I just think the payment model is actually quite good and that there are more serious concern. Like what happens with your "twitter" handle if you've joined a server that goes rogue or shuts down. You can solve this by hosting your own mastodon server on your own domain or by joining a server run by some sort of established organisation, of which there seem to be very few. I like the concept personally, but I can also setup a self-hosted serve, or alternatively spin up a vps fairly easily, as can a lot of people here on HN. That's probably quite a barrier for most twitter users though.
Timja 4y ago
Does Mastodon have themes? I tried a few instances and none of the UIs clicked with me very much. With themes, I not only mean custom colors and fonts. I mean custom templates, so I can rearrange the position of elements and leave out some elements altogether.
- freewizard 4y ago
  UI is replacable, there are quite a few frontend compatible with Mastodon API, some of them very closedly resemble Twitter.
  - Timja 4y ago
    I'm not sure how to read your comment. "there are quite a few frontend compatible with Mastodon API"? Isn't the Mastodon API the ActivityPub API? Of course one could write a new ActivityPub application from scratch. But my question is: Can the Mastodon templates be easily changed?
    - bremensaki 4y ago
      No, it's incredibly difficult to style Mastodon beyond minor CSS additions via the admin panel. If you really want to change anything substantial you need to fork the entire project.
      - Timja 4y ago
        I was not so much talking about the admin panel. My question is rather if the codebase has a template directory, where one could change the templates. And if the template format will stay stable, so that custom templates won't break in the future.
    - Kudos 4y ago
      There are web frontends available where you can sign into your instance, just like you so with a mobile app. For example https://pinafore.social/ https://pinafore.social/

Great to see NLnet funding Mastodon development.

rektide 4y ago
there should absolutely be some less biased forks that get funding too, but, yes, agreed. there's been a long series of mimd of insensitive counter-community decisions gargaron has forced upon Mastadon, such as greatly concealing the local timeline. Instead of being a local community with outward ties, this has made mastadon & being a member of a particular server a far less local, community-based, explorable phenomenon.
- yborg 4y ago
  If you are referring to the official mobile client not having the local timeline, I disagree with the approach, but there are a round dozen alternative clients and this didn't affect the web interface. As usual, everyone has their own vision for what the absolutely correct decision is in every instance, but it's Eugen's project.

Here is another open source alternative to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. that is supposed to allow any community to assemble its own software... for dating, events, making reservations, videoconferencing, livestreaming, taking trips together, common interests, etc. The goal is to allow for example a rural village to organize itself, make dinner plans, dating, doctor's appointments, and so on, using a local wifi mesh network and one computer. There is no need for all the signals to go to Zuck's FB or Elon's TW server farms in California. People need to have their own software. If you’re interested, here is more on why it’s needed: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ If you want to try it yourself: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform https://github.com/Qbix/Platform If you want to play around with it, it’s free to use. The platform is ready for use but needs a lot more tutorials and needs to be packaged for hosting companies… https://qbix.com/platform/guide https://qbix.com/platform/guide

bebopcowboy 4y ago

solatic 4y ago

I really wish more libre-social apps would support serverless deployment options. If I were to deploy a personal Mastodon instance on Heroku, it would be, what, close to $30/month? Shared hosting from a provider like masto.host is $6/month and quickly rises with use? What if there was a CloudFormation stack that quickly brought up Mastodon on API Gateway + Lambda + SQS + S3 + DynamoDB? Costs nothing if you don't post or follow anybody, with slowly rising costs as you use Mastodon more, and basically no ops concerns? Wouldn't that eliminate most of the technical barriers (cost, ops hassle, albeit still some setup hassle) for promoting federated social?

nathants 4y ago
independent scale to zero services per end user is definitely the play. people can sell their data on marketplaces if they want to cover the few dollars a month of usage fees.
Vecr 4y ago
Yeah if you don't federate with anyone. Otherwise people will send you stuff to rack up your bill. I say just run it from your house, and use wireguard and haproxy with a VPS to get the traffic to and from the wider Internet if you don't have IPs and/or don't want your home network getting DOSed.
- solatic 4y ago
  > People will send you stuff to rack up your bill Sure, but on a personal level, that's still very, very cheap, almost without concern for how much you follow. CloudFront and API Gateway are pennies per million requests. SQS usage would probably fit in the free tier. DynamoDB, if implemented with a single-table design, would probably cost no more than a couple of bucks, and storage would probably fit in the free tier. You can use IAM policy on pre-signed URLs to restrict the maximum object size of an object that someone is sending you, as well as implement effective rate limiting and automatic expiration with lifecycle policies that keep costs under control. Of course, costs could expand if the user wants to keep an infinite history, but that's their choice, by design.
- 4y ago

raydiatian 4y ago

This fediverse stuff seems incredibly overhyped. Why don’t we all just disconnect from social media (esp Twitter) for a few years, touch grass (while the stuff still exists) and then come back for the metaverse refreshed and grounded in reality like it’s 1990 and we just invented the internet. Those were good times.

eeixlk 4y ago
Or we could embrace something that is new and uncomfortable and see if it brings us joy because we can own it and tweak it or if it ends up being bad because it requires maintenance and oversight and energy. It's not like there are tons of opportunities for networked sites to crumble. Myspace, Linked In, Facebook and Reddit launched around 19-20 years ago. Twitter was 16 years ago.
- raydiatian 4y ago
  I mean what are the economics of fediverse? Who pays to keep the lights on, and where do they get their money from? How will the cost and logistics of policing one metric planet’s worth of sociopaths be any different from when Twitter had to do it? I hate and am truly tired of America’s three premier Twitter narcissists (I bet I don’t even have to name them and you’ll know), but this “cry about Twitter and leave it” meme all feels like a groupthink knee jerk at its root, and then the “let’s move to fediverse” meme feels utterly thoughtless. Trolls are the internet, people turn to sociopaths the second they touch the net. It’s hyperbolic, but it’s not unfair. Trolls are on fediverse too, they cannot be escaped without several orders of magnitude additional energy injected into the system. If management alone and a desire to silence trolls is what this is all about, I’ve found that just being disconnected is an immense sea of peace, the one place they truly cannot get you. Social media is genuinely just a gigantic psy-op at this point anyway. Why even bother to participate and take it seriously?
  - EnKopVand 4y ago
    > I mean what are the economics of fediverse? Who pays to keep the lights on, and where do they get their money from? Is this a genuine question? Because it depends. Some people/groups run their own server. Others run free servers, kind of like people ran IRC servers. Some pool money together to run a server. Some are run by NGOs. One I saw was charging around $2 a month, but would use any profits to plant trees. I know it's not really polite to call out people for a lack of effort on HN, but all that information that I just gave to you, I got from browsing the server section of join mastodon or whatever it was called for like 5 seconds. It took you longer to wonder about this stuff, than it would've taken you to actually find out. I don't want to come off as advertising mastodon or the fediverse. I just think the payment model is actually quite good and that there are more serious concern. Like what happens with your "twitter" handle if you've joined a server that goes rogue or shuts down. You can solve this by hosting your own mastodon server on your own domain or by joining a server run by some sort of established organisation, of which there seem to be very few. I like the concept personally, but I can also setup a self-hosted serve, or alternatively spin up a vps fairly easily, as can a lot of people here on HN. That's probably quite a barrier for most twitter users though.

Timja 4y ago

Does Mastodon have themes? I tried a few instances and none of the UIs clicked with me very much. With themes, I not only mean custom colors and fonts. I mean custom templates, so I can rearrange the position of elements and leave out some elements altogether.

freewizard 4y ago
UI is replacable, there are quite a few frontend compatible with Mastodon API, some of them very closedly resemble Twitter.
- Timja 4y ago
  I'm not sure how to read your comment. "there are quite a few frontend compatible with Mastodon API"? Isn't the Mastodon API the ActivityPub API? Of course one could write a new ActivityPub application from scratch. But my question is: Can the Mastodon templates be easily changed?
  - bremensaki 4y ago
    No, it's incredibly difficult to style Mastodon beyond minor CSS additions via the admin panel. If you really want to change anything substantial you need to fork the entire project.
    - Timja 4y ago
      I was not so much talking about the admin panel. My question is rather if the codebase has a template directory, where one could change the templates. And if the template format will stay stable, so that custom templates won't break in the future.
  - Kudos 4y ago
    There are web frontends available where you can sign into your instance, just like you so with a mobile app. For example https://pinafore.social/ https://pinafore.social/