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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
Honestly, an AGPL'ed, fully transparent, shareable, forkable and self hostable algorithm to do this is a whole new ball game. Where it will land us remains to be seen but compared to the current state of affairs I want to find out.
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.
What we learnt from Twitter, and Facebook, and (I've never worked in those two, but I've worked in other companies) is that ranking posts in general increases user satisfaction, and how often they return.
I realise there are a number of tech people who hate it, and it should definately be configurable, but companies aren't doing it to be mean, they are doing it because it works.
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.
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?
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.
@klabb3 The underlying protocol - ActivityPub - does not have the same limits imposed by proprietary platforms (e.g. Twitter, etc.). Most constraints that exist on platforms like Mastodon, etc., are usually decisions made for a partiocular purpose (e.g. any character limit on posts in Mastodon is becausse the intended function of Mastodon is for microblogging, etc.). Different platforms in the fediverse - that leverage ActivityPub protocol - implement different constraints for similar reasons; namely, choice.
That being said, for your interest on content and less on interactions - if i accurately understood what you're asking about - may i suggest looking into the write.as platform. See https://write.as/about One can self-host this if inclined, but there's also a paid plan thrhough this company...but the gist is that its designed for much longer-form blogging (and other related functions too)...but still leveraging ActivityPub undernath which could be used for interactions if desired...but its core premise is much longer form blogs. I'm sure there may be other long-form platforms, but this is the one that comes to mind for me (at least for leveraging protocols similar to mastodon). Cheers!
> 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.
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.
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.
Chronological home feed is our selling point. You can also opt-in to notifications when specific accounts post if you don't want to miss them (bell button on profiles). Finally, you can also split your home feed into lists. However, nothing precludes someone from developing a client that reorganizes your home feed somehow.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Yeah, this seems like trying to drive your users into a paradigm that is contrary to how people are actually using it. The central problem with any social network is discoverability, which is hard on a decentralized platform. For me, the process is/was finding an instance that was congruent to my interests, and the only way to determine that is by watching the instance timeline.
I'm admin for a small Mastodon server, and I'm kind of depressed that the official app is simply not going to support my local feed, that any feedback about this is ignored. The local feed is the main motivation to run a small Mastodon instance. I understand that it's useless to a huge server like the flagship instance, but I thought the point of the fediverse is to not simply run everything on a handful of huge websites.
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?)
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.
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.
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
Isn't that kind of the point of open source software? I doubt they would use it going forward because of the BS the mastodon developers already tried to pull on a closed alpha site because they disagreed with the users. I get it, there's some people you let the little things slide because you like them and others you act strict as hell because you don't like them. It's odd to use an open source software when you feel the developers are actively trying to catch you slip up to bring you down permanently.
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.
[+] [-] cxr|4 years ago|reply
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>
[+] [-] pfraze|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mro_name|4 years ago|reply
I'm aiming for such called #Seppo! There's a proof of concept https://demo.mro.name/shaarligo and funding application paper in german for now https://mro.name/o/2022-03-08-201643-prototypefund12-037.pdf
Would you pay a doller per month for such?
[+] [-] gargron|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zozbot234|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] khimaros|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] betwixthewires|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ocdtrekkie|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zamalek|4 years ago|reply
[1]: https://writefreely.org/
[+] [-] tedunangst|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] betwixthewires|4 years ago|reply
An algorithm to rank posts and people? Did we learn nothing from twitter?
[+] [-] apatters|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zeruch|4 years ago|reply
This is after all, NOT twitter: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon
[+] [-] CJefferson|4 years ago|reply
I realise there are a number of tech people who hate it, and it should definately be configurable, but companies aren't doing it to be mean, they are doing it because it works.
[+] [-] rsolva|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] assemblylang|4 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] codetrotter|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] klabb3|4 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] Digory|4 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] mxuribe|4 years ago|reply
That being said, for your interest on content and less on interactions - if i accurately understood what you're asking about - may i suggest looking into the write.as platform. See https://write.as/about One can self-host this if inclined, but there's also a paid plan thrhough this company...but the gist is that its designed for much longer-form blogging (and other related functions too)...but still leveraging ActivityPub undernath which could be used for interactions if desired...but its core premise is much longer form blogs. I'm sure there may be other long-form platforms, but this is the one that comes to mind for me (at least for leveraging protocols similar to mastodon). Cheers!
[+] [-] jcbrand|4 years ago|reply
I don't use it myself, but I often notice users from Pleroma servers writing much longer messages than are allowed on Mastodon.
[+] [-] dane-pgp|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ekianjo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gargron|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fallat|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] parasti|4 years ago|reply
To me it feels like RSS on steroids. Best of the modern web (technology) combined with the best of early 2000s web (decentralization).
[+] [-] RainaRelanah|4 years ago|reply
0. https://matrix.org/
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] captainmuon|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nirui|4 years ago|reply
1: 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).
[+] [-] axxl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yborg|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skyfaller|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kye|4 years ago|reply
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-ios/issues/221
[+] [-] gargron|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway684936|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meerita|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ElijahLynn|4 years ago|reply
There is a 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."
[+] [-] aquova|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olah_1|4 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] imilk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sparyjerry|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hunterb123|4 years ago|reply
The benefit of federation is to have multiple philosophies in charge of moderation of their own communities whilst also being connected.
[+] [-] rvz|4 years ago|reply
They are using free and open source software. What is wrong with that? Anyone can use it, just like anyone can use Tor, including undesirables.
I'm still waiting for the 'gotcha' though.
[+] [-] bovermyer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alrs|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eek2121|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aceflux|4 years ago|reply