Mastodon 3.0
github.com
github.com
The programmer/artist Darius Kazemi has done a great job articulating a way to use decentralized social networks like Mastodon in a "human-centric" way: "How to run a small social network site for your friends." [1]
I really hope the Fediverse can succeed and thrive, and Mastodon is a big part of that.
Use a dynamic dns provider, it'll give you a domain name that changes your IP record as it changes.
My thoughts were that if Mastodon nodes connect each other so that anyone on any node can communicate with anyone on a different node, can't nodes with dynamic IPs set up persistent connections to reachable nodes so that those will work as a sort of DNS?
This is one of the reasons that the article I linked to above recommends a community-based approach. friend.camp (Darius' instance) uses a Patreon to cover the (fairly small) costs of hosting, registration, etc. I think a lot of users donate something like $1-$5/ year.
Running an entire server just for personal use may be overkill in terms of time-investment, monetary costs, etc. But for a small group of users these costs are negligible, and the small community still gets the benefits of having a lot of control over how the instance operates (who to federate with, custom features, etc).
We are used to thinking in terms of solutions that are either totally individualistic (everyone for themselves) or rely on giant monolithic institutions. A system made up of small, autonomous communities which can still communicate is a nice middle-ground.
Wouldn't this problem be mitigated by allowing users to migrate everything to other instances?
Shameless self-plug. I'm currently working on a peertube android client which you can find here: https://github.com/sschueller/peertube-android
Put Blender's PeerTube account in Mastodon's search for an example: https://video.blender.org/accounts/blender
Even on my own projects, on a much smaller scale, I've never been able to go that fast.
But you can use IRC: https://wiki.bitlbee.org/HowtoMastodon
Now, to see a few more services jump on the fediverse wagon and work together so we can have some choice... ;)
Already found Drew here: https://cmpwn.com/@sir
https://communitywiki.org/trunk/grab/Linux
https://communitywiki.org/trunk/grab/FLOSS
The list with all the categories: https://communitywiki.org/trunk/
It would even be more useful if you could have a dynamically rendered timeline of multiple people with a single URL (sort of like a multireddit).
click one: click "follow" initially
click two: submit id to home server, "proceed"
click three: yes, really "follow" and click again
Also, those lists intersect quite a bit.
https://alexschroeder.ch/software/Trunk
As far as custom issue trackers go, this one isn't too bad. You could suggest an improvement. If you know perl, you could even write your own extension to provide this functionality.
Probably about the same number of clicks, admittedly, but it may feel faster.
The Twitter bridge takes this approach. https://bridge.joinmastodon.org/
It's open source and could be used as example code for the community list tool. (https://source.joinmastodon.org/mastodon/bridge)
Freenode #pleroma-dev
Maybe that will help. They'd also respond on their activitypub profiles most likely.
Neat
Mastodon. Don't worry, seeminglyneveryone makes that mistake. Hell, the first version of the Gab fork called it that all over.
> It's like mastadon
Sort of. It started out with a "we want to be just indie enough to not attract mainstream attention" (but as I've heard they switched to wanting to be for everyone now). This is why it might seem less polished to end users.
> It even includes a mastadon front end, called Glitch.
Glitch is an entirely different thing. It's somewhere between a fork and a patchset. They keep up with upstream code and it hasn't been rare to see glitch features merged into the core version.
What you're speaking of is Mastofe, the frontend code. Pleroma uses the one modified by Glitch.
I host my own that I've split into three layers, web front, app and db.
The web front only runs nginx and terminates tls. I tried building assets on it to serve static assets but gave up after a few upgrades and issues.
Web front only has 1G total RAM and right now has 595M available for IO buffering.
The app layer can sometimes run out of RAM when upgrading because of asset compiling. Perhaps this has gotten better with time. It has a total of 6G RAM and at present has 3.4G available for IO buffering. The only reason it has 6G total is likely because of upgrades causing OOM when compiling assets.
I put all media on S3 and that is up to around 35G in size after 1 year of operation and 50 some users. Probably much less active users. The database uses 4.3G.
the storage requirements can get pretty beefy over time though, so make sure to set up cheap block storage.
ActivityPub was led by someone working on another GNU project, MediaGoblin.
I personally recommend people to Pleroma at this point.
And I'm no newbie to this. I've been comfortably RTM'ing and CLI'ing and admin'ing in various Linux flavours (and the occasional *BSD) for over two decades, after I cut my teeth on Slackware 2.something. I've often built LFS just for fun. I've been replacing a gaggle of Excel/Access crap at work with my own homemade golang web apps, despite us not being a tech company at all and me not being a pro developer, just because I know I can do a better job. The point I'm trying to make is that I'm not afraid of putting in effort to learn how to do something complex on a computer. But the Mediagoblin install process broke me each time.
But I wholeheartedly agree about Pleroma. It's a fantastic choice for someone looking to host a reasonably-sized microblogging community on truly minimal hardware. It's fast and stable.
I’ve given up hope on both projects at this point, but MediaGoblin in particular a long while ago.
The removal of the Atom feed broke my feed embed service [1] until I patched in ActivityPub support.
Effectively this is the "G Suite" model: preserve auth and identity within an organization's existing set of namespaces.
This site keeps track of some of the various AP projects: https://fediverse.party/
Thanks
You say "Assholes aren't allowed to use this code" and Major-General Asshole will use it anyway -- because he's an Asshole.
Some battles simply aren't worth the resource cost of fighting them.
Mastodon does not come with features that enable the idea of "groups"?
I just found issue 139 [0], but "mastodon groups" is an extraordinary bad combination of search terms.
The author seems to dismiss the idea that "groups" are an obvious requirement (IMHO) for any "social" software. Instead he seems to be assuming that one instance of the software might serve one "group" - with no easy way to scale "instance" to many servers.
Pleroma seems to plan for a groups feature [2][3], also using a framework that might be much easier for scaling, but seems to be struggling with implementation.
I see GNU social seems to have groups [1], but in the linked issues people write about bugs with that.
I am not sure this is really how it is, so please correct me if I am wrong.
Would anybody with more knowledge please like to explain why such a basic feature is missing from "social" software alternatives?
I want to understand what the problem is here, I feel like this is the first feature that should be considered from day one. It seems to me trying to handle such a basic feature as an afterthought has a high potential for disaster score (PFD>80): will require a deep re-design and rewrite, trigger several different implementations, standards and endless discussions, in the end will destroy everything.
I understand that groups and p2p / federation is complicated - but is this not a solved problem?
If not, is it a good idea to put this on top of the agenda for "offer alternative for big social brother"?
[0] https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/139 [1] https://gnusocial.net/doc/groups [2] https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma/issues/656 [3] https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma-fe/issues/625
No, tags can not replace groups.
So maybe it isn't really that big of a deal?
No, I did not do that.
I do not want to discuss if "groups" is a "big deal" or not.
I am interested in the question if "groups" in distributed, federated systems is a solved problem or not.
One of the creators had a conversation with kaniini, one of the pleroma devs, about this: https://social.coop/@datatitian/102893246730611249
And that is the one reason I haven't already started a Mastodon instance and tried to talk all my family and friends into using it instead of Facebook.
Some people like everything to be public; fine. But some people, like me, want to be able to control who sees stuff; as far as I can tell, the only platform which allows that at the moment is Facebook.
Why not make "groups" an option, so that it can serve both kinds of people?
Last I checked, Twitter doesn't have groups.
Usually, focusing on doing one thing only is how you make good products.
Most email programs use a built-in rendering engine anyway, and sometimes browsers can actually use the email code (e.g. MHTML is basically MIME+HTML, HTML sanitization[0], Opera used M2 for RSS support). So a browser having a built-in email client might be undesirable, but it is not "insane".
[0]https://frederik-braun.com/firefox-ui-xss-leading-to-rce.htm...
Mastodon not implementing a "limited visibility" option would be more like a web browser refusing to implement Private Browsing mode.
It's funny how something that seemed so insane at the time is now the de facto standard way of taking pictures.
I still have an account on mastodon thought and I'm far more active there than on twitter, mostly because new is interesting and to support a good cause.
I also sometimes follow development and hope that it might get more features from both Google+ or Facebook. Groups would be an obvious improvement in my book.
That way maybe it could become more than a twitter clone, which matters to me because in my opinion Twitter is close to useless except as a better way to receive spam and propaganda (it is even easier to ignore than the spam folder in my mail.)
But at the end of the day it's still a Twitter clone, so offers absolutely no value to me.
Agree in the long run.
In the short run playing with interesting tech has its own value at least as long as it only replaces more useless stuff (I guess tv is the thing I "sacrifice" to have time for tech.)
In Mastodon (or most ActivityPub software), a DM thread can even be splitted and recipients added/removed at any point.