Mastodon: AGPLv3 FOSS social network server | Hacker News Reader

Mastodon: AGPLv3 FOSS social network server

github.com

324 pointsjeroenheijmans148 comments

People interested in this stuff should check out alternate software as well. Hometown is a fork of mastodon that has a few extra features but one very interesting one in particular: you can post to the local server only, which is an excellent community building feature.

There's also pleroma, which I've run and is pretty great and low on resource requirements. And there are tons of other social UX paradigms like link aggregators and even Peertube which is a tube site server on the same network as mastodon using the same ActivityPub protocol.

I'd love to see people implement novel types of social sites besides functional clones of existing social media, there are some significant architectural and UX differences in a distributed, federated social architecture that can be leveraged to great effect.

Watchlist for ActivityPub applications:

https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-fo...

This is the wide assortment of applications that speak the same common protocol that Mastodon does, as part of an interoperable social cloud. There's a Cambrian explosion of diversity in this space. Let's see more content management systems adopting this system for self-sufficient publication.

For developers there is another watchlist at https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/Watchlist-fo...

> ...you can post to the local server only, which is an excellent community building feature.

The idea of building a local community that you have to have an account and associated identity on a specific server to access is the kind of mal-aligned incentive that tends to cause federated systems to become de-facto centralized silos and, eventually, return to the status quo of a controlling oligopoly :(.

... but its an essential feature if you're using the software to run, say, an internal company microblogging service.

Isn't this like saying you need your own slack instance for your team? It should be IMO possible to limit conversation on mastodon to a group of people as an alternative to limiting it to an instance.

That's one take on it, and I've heard the maintainer of mastodon share similar sentiments. I disagree because as long as the servers are all interoperable and people can communicate across them they can never actually become silos.

An architectural feature of a federated system is that people congregate on servers together for whatever reasons they have. Communities are an emergent part of this architecture whether we like it or not, and this can be used to create a positive user experience that you cannot truly get on centralized services. What we wind up with is a network of communities that interact with one another, not as some people envision a network of superfluous servers that humans use simply to interact with one another, and this is unavoidable in a federated system like this. If we do want a network where the servers are meaningless to the social interaction it has to be fully peer to peer.

I admin and use a Mastodon instance. It takes a while to get used to the differences from Twitter, but it's far more polished than people seem to expect. The reading I tend to recommend if people have questions is Darius Kazemi's https://runyourown.social/

Another admin here, and yes I agree.

But one major aspect of fediverse, that people rarely talk about when promoting it, is the spam.

To summarize my impressions over the last 5 years I'd say there is no way to run a big open instance without funding. The best way for small single actor instances to survive is to be invite only or approve each member account.

And even then I'd suggest using Geo blocking to fence off your instance from certain parts of the world.

My personal wish is to see the fediverse made up of smaller, localized instances that federate across borders. So for example a Finnish instance that only accepts finnish users, but it federates with every other instance.

And ontop of that more ActivityPub relays to facilitate federation.

> My personal wish is to see the fediverse made up of smaller, localized instances that federate across borders. So for example a Finnish instance that only accepts finnish users, but it federates with every other instance.

This would be great to stop the American-influence dominating every conversation like happens on Reddit, etc.

While English is the majority by server stats, there are plenty in other languages. You can filter out English toots. The filter isn't perfect, but it works well enough.

> To summarize my impressions over the last 5 years I'd say there is no way to run a big open instance without funding. The best way for small single actor instances to survive is to be invite only or approve each member account.

I really like the way social.coop, a cooperatively run instance, handles this. Because we're all just pooling a little bit of money (1GBP/yr for most people) we can run a service cheaper than we could run it ourselves if we're renting a VPS and there are enough people interested to create a rotating moderation team, so we rarely get too much spam from other instances. So far a cooperative model has worked very well for us; no donations required, just splitting up costs in the cheapest possible way so that no one gets burned out or feels like their money is carrying the instance!

That's great to hear, heart warming.

But I have had many experiences with various voluntary organisations over the years. Hacker spaces, maker spaces, activist groups and online groups.

Maintaining a group is hard work and it requires someone to care about the end goal. And if that one fire brand gives up someone has to take their place.

So in the long run most of my experiences with such organisations have ended on a sad note. And especially when it comes to the Fediverse I'd say 99.99% of my users just want to try it out and see if it ever goes anywhere.

At the moment it's all coming from my pocket because I love the work and I love the idea. And at the moment it's not that much, just maybe 80 euros a month.

I feel like local governments running some sort of federated network like that would be really cool, and could reduce some of the political influence twitter has. How local "local" is could be anything from a city to state/province to country-wide. Unfortunately, I think it would require centralized or federated identity management which is pretty complex, especially at a government level.

> The best way for small single actor instances to survive is to be invite only or approve each member account.

Yup! That's exactly the approach Kazemi is advocating, too. It makes sense if you think about the trust that there needs to be both ways in a admin/account-holder relationship.

Mastodon was hard to "sell" to my peers when I tried to explain how it works. Recently I changed my approach by not explaining all the great technical features related to federation, and instead focused on the fact that it is ad-free, do not use an algorithm (feed is chronological) and is community run. Mastodon is what Twitter once was, before it got ruined by ads and algorithms.

A friend who is an artist was frustrated with the experience on Instagram, and finally signed up on an art-related community in the fediverse, and found it to be a breath of fresh air, with more meaningfull interactions, not just likes.

Mastodon recently hit 1 million active users. It has about 2.89 million total users among 3,400+ servers.

https://fediverse.party/en/mastodon

I followed this link and using the Server Wizard found that my biggest local instance is run by an experienced FOSS and business guru in my hometown. Thanks. I have to meet this guy now.

Are they including Gab users in the MAU count?

No, since Gab does not federate with mainline Mastodon instances anymore.* I'm not sure if Gab discloses its stats the same way other instances do.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25715513

Gab is separate, and significantly larger than the entire fediverse combined.

Do you have a source for that? My impression is that Gab is significantly smaller than the Fediverse (Wikipedia says ~100,000 active users).

Well I'm the CTO there so I am a source... but you don't have to trust me really, you can check https://www.similarweb.com/website/gab.com/ and https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/gab.com#section_traffic and draw your own conclusions.

For some things, Wikipedia is a really bad source. Especially about things they hate.

Well, the source is The Interecpt, based on leaked internal data, which I trust a lot more than stat aggregators like Alexa. If you're the CTO then you could just answer the question: how many accounts (or unique IPs, if multiple accounts is common) have posted something in the past month?

How do things stand on account portability? If I sign up at a mastodon server, build an audience and network there, but later if the server admin changes its policies in unfavorable directions, can I migrate to a new server with all my contacts and reputation intact - even without the old admin's cooperation?

Mastodon has a "profile move" feature that moves all of your followers (on instances that support the protocol) to your new account. However, it will not move your toots (posts).

All of your account data can be exported, and everything except for toots (and media) can be imported.

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/

Post is called a toot? Tf

The bird app (Twitter) calls them tweets, so the Mastodon service decided to call them toots. But, they did rename them to "posts" earlier this year:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26882318

I guess this isn't reflected in joinmastodon.org yet. Each instance can also choose to call posts whatever they want:

https://www.reddit.com/r/mastodon_social/comments/9mhzu8/how...

Long story short: Eugen didn't know toot had another meaning in some places. Toot is the sound a mastodon makes.

I only discovered the other meaning on the post they made about the renaming. For me it always was mastodon and trumpet sound

They recently stopped calling them toots (I liked the absurdity of it personally). Don't think that decision has made it through to the UI yet though.

Boo

"Truth in advertising"

Yup -- either the devs don't know what that means in English slang, or they have a very juvenile sense of humor.

Either way, that alone seems like it would present a pretty serious obstacle to anyone taking Mastodon remotely seriously.

I'd argue that is a benefit. Imagine if people took Twitter and the Twitverse less seriously

Imagine a "Tweet to Fart" extension in the same vein as "Cloud to Butt". Lets see: "How could you refart that fart?! :angry_face: That's a terrible fart." Maybe I'm just juvenile but that might be funny enough to make twitter usable again.

In other words, I don't really mind "toot". It casts the medium with a healthy perspective on itself.

It's a benefit for society, but it's a big negative for the project. Twitter wouldn't be half as popular if it didn't stroke the egos of its users.

> However, it will not move your toots (posts).

I would say that moving the posts is what worries me more about moving the account. I can refollow everyone, but I can't post hundreds (or thousands) of posts in their original datetime

Post migration is tracked in https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423.

Hi, yes, you can move your followers to another account, and export/import other contacts. Perhaps not entirely without the old admin's cooperation though.

You can without the old admin's cooperation, but not if the old admin actively tries to stop you.

Honest question: is this something that is stopping you from joining/getting more active/build an audience?

If it is, have you considered running your own instance?

I run my own instance in a convoluted way - I added ActivityPub source and sink support to my own webapp. But every user deserves account portability, not just those who know how to deploy and maintain a Mastodon instance.

I'm one of the moderators of the /r/Mastodon subreddit, and folks are more than welcome to stop by and share their experiences using and operating this software.

Background: I've been building a growing commercial social network. There are things about what I want to do that made that the better option for what my target market is.

With that said, I really like what Mastodon has done and as far as federated and open social networks go (ActivityPub!). It's in a class of its own IMO.

As much as I'd love to use Mastodon, both times I tried, I got bored and gave up because I couldn't find interesting people to follow. All of the people I do find interesting are only on Twitter.

Yeah that's how it is now. The federation sort of blends into the background so disregarding that part I feel like I'm using a big message board in the early 2000s.

But actually worse, because at least those message boards had better defined topics. I can follow some hashtags that I enjoy but in the web gui it's very limited. I've been thinking about writing my own software to help me follow tags alone. Just to participate in relevant discussion.

Otherwise you're just watching people rant in the public feed and if you're lucky you might catch the occasional interesting post.

But I persist because I truly believe in the fediverse concept.

> But I persist because I truly believe in the fediverse concept.

It helps to see Fediverse as the early web, where things aren't that smooth yet, and everyone is just experimenting. From that perspective as a techie it is a joy to explore the possibilities.

That's the most difficult part is finding who to follow (likely strangers) when you first start. You could watch the global timeline or search some #hashtags for things you are interested in or try to pick the right server with a like-minded userbase from the get-go. However, these issues aren't too different than any other social media tbf. And eventually you find interesting people exclusive to the Fediverse or post different content on it that is more interesting. Mastodon and others never force being social and following others though.

Should we follow people, or topics?

I guess both work. On Instagram and Tumblr I can follow people and hashtags, on Twitter I can follow people and topics. On forums, you basically navigated by topic, without following any specific person.

I've had the opposite experience for the most part (way easier to find good people to follow than on Twitter), but maybe that's just because circles I'm interested in have largely migrated to the fediverse which may not be true of most. It also might be because I found an instance dedicated to at least one thing I'm interested in and used that one. Maybe that approach could work for you too?

I really enjoy the scholar.social instance for my particular usecase, but yeah the network effects are real :(

I've been trying to set this up for years and it continues to defeat me. Even the Docker method is still fraught. I hope they can dumb it down at some point, or clean up the docker setup. There's a LOT of different frameworks & tooling at play in this ecosystem to debug when things go wrong. But I guess it is close to rocket science.

The go-to managed hosting option is masto.host if you have $7/month and no great urge to run your own.

Thanks, I didn't know this existed.

I used that for a client project. Excellent service.

I had similar trouble when I was trying to make it work on a Fedora VM. When I gave up, admitted to myself I was a pleb, and switched to Ubuntu, it was entirely smooth. Dunno how/why.

There are lots of files at the root level, which means I have to do 5/6 complete scrolls to get at the beginning of the readme. I see this pattern a lof with Go project. I've always wondered if it has an impact on the popularity of the project. If anybody from Github is reading this, that could be a blog post idea. Something like an invisible pixel at the top of the readme, and the number of top level files + directories, and see if there's any correlation.

There's a way too hard to notice Readme link on the sidebar of repositories with the file. It's right between the tags and license.

Thank you! I never saw that link before.

I really wanted to like it, but it's just so difficult to actually find people and content, considering you can only search for hashtags and all...

We definitely want to improve content/people discovery. One recent addition was the follow suggestions you get when you first sign up. It pulls up the most popular/proactive accounts in your language. Trending tags should also help, but we want to explore more options for discovery and are open to ideas.

I think a lot depends on having an onboarding experience that sets the expectations right. Good guidance text may come a long way already.

For those who don't know: Mastodon works differently in how you build your social graph than Twitter, where much is automated by the recommendation algorithms kicking in. I think that once one properly grasps how to go from 'empty timelines' to having some first fine people in 'following' the process of building further can very intuitive and be a refreshing and liberating experience where one feels in control.

As for ideas and feedback..

"follow suggestions [based on] most popular/proactive accounts in your language". I would be careful here, to not get to a point where Fediverse / Mastodon becomes dominated by influencers that are focal points of activity and sees this feature becoming part of their SEO marketing toolkit. While it may help uptake and network effects, it may hurt and degrade fedi culture over time.

You might consider integrating something similar to Trunk [0] so people can directly follow others that have explicitly expressed an interest in a particular topic and are open for discovery. They can peruse the timeline of these accounts and then checkmark the ones to follow based on that. This keeps social graph building natural and organic, not algorithm-driven.

As for "trending hashtags", another algorithm driven engagement feature. There may be a Hashtag Directory to browse, sort and filter and an indicator of post counts to each of them. Long inactive hashtags need not be shown, but the directory shows way more entries than just what's trending and doesn't directly push you to that.

Another idea might be to have account profiles be able to have a list of the top 3 or top 5 other accounts most valued by a person, in a friend-of-a-friend kind of way. Maybe it only becomes available once a mutual follow relationship is established, and allows further discovery of the FOAF graph.

[0] https://communitywiki.org/trunk

> so people can directly follow others that have explicitly expressed an interest in a particular topic

Rapnie: yes, that's what's missing for me. If I'm looking for people interested in fiction books, anime or sitcoms, it could be useful to just explore those topics. That's how I end up discovering people on Twitter right? See there's a discussion on the latest episode of XYZ show, and them see their profiles and follow

Gargron: Thanks so much for the response, and all your work so far :)

On a good note, I absolutely LOVE that we can tag one specific post as NSFW, and that we can add the spoiler/TW to hide the rest of the post, So damn useful

Same, most of my friends aren't on Mastodon, many of the content creators I'm interested in aren't either. And trying to explain Mastodon to random non-technical people is frustrating, they don't want to think about the social service, they just want to use it. Having to think about providers and federation and compatibility is too much effort for posting cat photos. So they stay on Facebook.

Most instances have an open directory which lets you browse through the most active/recent profiles, but yeah, bootstrapping any new network is difficult. Even more so due to the fragmentation of the fediverse.

In any case, I have running and managing a instance of Mastodon (and Matrix, and XMPP) as a side-project for some time. Some of my users asked about having a twitter bridge, where they could at least follow who they are used to from one single client. Would that help you?

> Most instances have an open directory which lets you browse through the most active/recent profiles

which is useless, unless it's a niche instance. mastodon.social is generalist, so most people there are not posting anything I want to see.

But finding a good niche instance is really hard - in terms of the niche, rules, and actually being fast and working well.

You don't need to join the instance to see its directory.

When I started my own instance, I went to a handful of different instances and looked at the directory. Then I started following the ones that seemed interesting. That was enough for me to bootstrap my feed to the point of something useful.

Check out https://communitywiki.org/trunk/ and https://sizeof.cat/post/mastodon-accounts/.

The second link is useless: 'interesting accounts' with no information on what they post, or what makes them interesting.

But the first is very nice, and that's kinda what I was looking for, thanks!!!

Title needs a correction. It is AGPLv3, not GPLv3.

I suspect this was posted today because Trump's new social network was outed as using Mastodon, likely illegally.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dgm5k/truth-social-is-masto...

Discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28945733

TIL about the AGPL license, thx for the tip.

Interesting. Is it protocol-compatible with other mastodon instances? (I'm not very familiar with how these fediverse sites work.)

It is compatible since it's using the exact same codebase, but practically everyone on the mainstream fediverse has blocked them, and I suspect they probably will turn off federation.

I'd think it'll just disable the federation API.

Mastodon already has blacklists to prevent abuse from certain servers, and given Trump's target audience, the block would probably be mutual.

beware mastodon downloads and mirrors all federated media to instance users, which is whatever, but the admin tools do not correctly keep track of removing old media. hell, if an instance goes offline without nuking itself proper, mastodon will leave all of the media on your drive. it requires a ton of babysitting to run on bound storage, and the issues around this are still open.

i highly highly recommend pleroma over it, it uses 1/10th the system resources and doesn't download federated accounts data locally

It is not that the admin tools do not correctly keep track of old media, it is that the judgement over what to keep is left to the admin since it is not so simple to programmatically decide whether a resource being currently unavailable through the network means it's gone forever, and whether it's gone intentionally or unintentionally. A server that went down might come back after a month of downtime, all sorts of things happen. If you don't care about such minutea you may simply setup a cronjob to run the `tootctl media remove` utility every week and then your primary concern for unbounded storage growth are files uploaded by your own users, which is something you have to deal with regardless of whether you choose Mastodon or Pleroma.

Pleroma may save storage by not downloading federated media locally, but hotlinking to 3rd party servers leaves your users vulnerable to tracking by malicious operators, leeches off the bandwidth of remote servers, and, far more practically, does not guarantee that the media that needs to be displayed is in a file format that is playable on the users' devices. For example, as Pleroma makes no effort to convert user-uploaded files to browser-compatible formats, if Mastodon didn't go through the trouble of converting formats, Mastodon users on iOS would not be able to see many "GIFs" and videos uploaded by Pleroma users in the popular WebM format that is not available on iOS (yet).

You may prefer one or the other but there are definitely reasons for why Mastodon does it that way.

> but hotlinking to 3rd party servers leaves your users vulnerable to tracking by malicious operators, leeches off the bandwidth of remote servers,

And goatse attacks. Nothing ensures that the media that was there when the post was shared to the local instance will be the same at the moment it is shown to an user. An instance can turn evil and replace nice user-generated images with ads once they are shared all across the fediverse.

At the risk of shilling my own project:

https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

It does a few things differently ;-)

Feedback welcome!

Anyone have a tutorial on how to use mastodon as an end user? Are there servers worth joining? Does the fediverse make the server you join irrelevant? Has SDF got an instance? Are there clients people prefer? I'd love an alternative social media platform but when I join them they often end up dead (wt.social, etc)

> Are there servers worth joining?

Fosstodon's alright.

> Does the fediverse make the server you join irrelevant?

In theory, yes. But in practice, joining a server means the UI gives you a global feed for that server that you don't otherwise get. And for the niche communities that have a global feed you can keep up with, you want to be able to access that.

>> Does the fediverse make the server you join irrelevant? In theory, but in the beginning, an instance aligned with your interests will make it easier to find like-minded people to follow. The instances may also have different rules how you should behave. And you can run into problems when your instance admin bans another instance with which you would like to communicate, or you instance gets banned by them. Just the perils of online drama in small communities I guess. Running your own instance could help here, though.

>> Has SDF got an instance? https://mastodon.sdf.org/

What's the best way to find interesting people if you've already got an account and don't want to switch instances but your local instance is a little slow these days and you'd like to liven up your feed?

The way I do it is to follow the hashtags I'm interested in, see the people that post under it regularly and decide if they're interesting enough to follow. This has a chicken and egg downside, as these people won't appear at all if nobody on your instance follows them, which is unfortunate. :(

To circumvent that you can use mastodon social's tag page, but it's less user friendly. See here an example: https://mastodon.social/tags/activitypub

Does anyone know if there is a client to automate and (timely) measure operations (i.e., add user, add comment, add like, etc) in a local Mastodon server?

I love the concept of Mastodon, but I feel it inherits many of the problems of Twitter. I only used it for about a month, but I encountered far too much mob mentality and pearl clutching for my health and left. I like free discussion, and I feel the current Mastodon userbase means I'd have to host my own echo chamber to avoid theirs.

I want to like mastodon, but it needs a single sign on feature and usually every server I look at it is totally dead.

Putting a centralised auth that depends on Big Tech for a software which was supposed to be decentralised and against BigTech principles?

Define "totally dead"? A lot of big servers I've looked at (Fosstodon, social.coop, mastodon.social, etc.) seem very active. Also, "dead" may have to be defined differently in a federated world where it will in fact be quite common (probably even the majority of servers) to have 2 users on an instance that are active, but of course most activity is through federation so the service itself may look like it just has a few posts a day.

From slate.com

Everything That Went Wrong With Donald Trump’s New Social Network in the First 24 Hours

> Truth Social will be a lot like Twitter, with the primary interface consisting of a feed of short posts from users you follow. However, these posts will be called “truths” instead of “tweets,” and reshares will be known a “retruths.” While the platform wasn’t supposed to have its soft launch until next month, users found a way to access the site and were setting up accounts within hours of the announcement. (One vandal claimed the @donaldjtrump handle and posted a picture of a pig with extremely large testicles.) Truth Social eventually cut off access, though screenshots of the interface taken before then suggest that the platform is basically just a fork of Mastodon, the open-access software that allows users to make spinoff social media networks. Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko has said that he will be seeking legal counsel since Truth Social appears to be breaking his product’s terms of use by not sharing the code or license with the public. Truth Social’s terms further claim that the source code is proprietary, which could also violate Mastodon’s license.

https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/donald-trump-true-socia...

Trump’s upcoming social network app is using Mastadon.

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-accused-ripping-code-s...

Not trying to get political, but this site is obviously going to be the biggest Mastadon showcase.

Anil Dash made a great point earlier today in this tweet thread:

https://twitter.com/anildash/status/1451209739141066756

"My wish is that media gives proportionate attention to the many thriving, interesting, well-moderated, non-fascist Mastodon servers that are enabling healthy communities across the web before focusing on one doddering fascist's vaporware social network.

Given that this is unlikely to be a request that media honors, at the very least make sure your story gives equal emphasis to the violent fascist agenda, and countless deaths, that the person behind the new social network enabled, before delving into its photo sharing features.

And by contrast, the wonderful @tinysubversions has, for years, been leading a movement to create healthy, supportive, pro-human, independent social networks with efforts like https://runyourown.social that are home to thousands of thriving communities. Each deserves coverage."

Gab already forked Mastodon, and it's not clear whether Truth Social would surpass Gab in popularity.

Unlike Truth Social, Gab actually complies with Mastodon's AGPLv3 license by publishing its source code, though in an obnoxious way (password-protected archive file):

https://code.gab.com/gab/gab-open-source

Last update was 7 months ago, either gab didn't do any chance if this timeframe or they are also violating the license.

If they did update their production code since their last source code release, then you're right, it would be a license violation. I don't know if this is the case. Either way, it is much better to make occasional source code releases than to not release any code at all, when the code is under a copyleft license.

Honest question:

There is a lot of talk about Truth Social violating the AGPL license.

If it it a work in progress and not yet public, do they need to share their source code, or do they need to share it once they launch?

If Truth Social is running Mastodon-based code on a server, even if it is a private beta, the source code needs to be made available under AGPLv3 to anyone who can access the service.

> d) Convey the object code by offering access from a designated place (gratis or for a charge), and offer equivalent access to the Corresponding Source in the same way through the same place at no further charge. You need not require recipients to copy the Corresponding Source along with the object code. If the place to copy the object code is a network server, the Corresponding Source may be on a different server (operated by you or a third party) that supports equivalent copying facilities, provided you maintain clear directions next to the object code saying where to find the Corresponding Source. Regardless of what server hosts the Corresponding Source, you remain obligated to ensure that it is available for as long as needed to satisfy these requirements.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html

Is there any evidence that supposed beta testers are not receiving the source code?

The FSF has a somewhat relevant answer about this: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#StolenCopy

It depends on if the accidentally public instance could be considered a trade secret.

I guess they heard you because now it's "last updated 50m ago".

So basically Truth Social can do the same thing and be compliant?

Yes. The other major requirement is that Truth Social must also be licensed under AGPLv3.

> c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged. This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not invalidate such permission if you have separately received it.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html

It's a fork that violates the GPL and is already being filled with troll posts despite not officially being launched. It's not going to last, just like the other 2? 3? attempts.

It's not really clear that it will be a showcase if it hides its Mastadon roots and doesn't connect to the Fediverse.

A large segment of the Fediverse has already blocked Trump's domain due to incompliance with the license.

Yours right that it's been a mostly blocked, but the license issues is not the reason.

Gab got blocked very quickly as well, and they complied with the license.

Nothing obvious about it. It's only "obvious" if you get political.

Trump has started a couple of other alt megaphones for himself since he got booted off Twitter and they failed. He's tried email and he's tried blogs and he doesn't get enough attention on them, so he quits. This one has already started ridiculed and with poor security and moderation practices before it's even gotten off the ground. I am not sure how Parler, which caters to the same audience, is faring nowadays, but I don't get the impression it's really the alt social media juggernaut its proponents have hoped for. Gab also is for the maga crowd and it hasn't been a large crowd. The fediverse at large isn't that large either, for that matter.

So, let's see how Trump does this time.

> this site is obviously going to be the biggest Mastadon showcase

why?

The media will cover it.

Hm I can see that but I don't think that aspect will receive all that much attention and it looks like the site as a whole has already sunk beyond repair and is sizzling out pretty fast even before the launch.

Are there any actively maintained Activitypub/Mastodon clients that don't integrate their own blacklists? Someone recommended Husky to me, but it's been dead for a minute.

Federation really seems to combine the downsides of centralization with the downsides of decentralization.

now mix it with pion and we're cooking

Right after read an article on WAPO about Truth Social likely violating Mastodon's license, I hop on HN and find this as the first post.

To learn more about this: https://twitter.com/VValkyriePub/status/1451035108266233863?...

I e-mailed them requesting a copy of the source. We'll see, I suppose.

There's no evidence provided anywhere at all that any of these screenshots are of Trump's new platform.

I don't know why you're so unwilling to believe those screenshots are from Trump's social network. Dozens of different people independently posted screenshots of the network, including some trusted reporters. It would be quite a conspiracy to suppose all of them coordinated and lied about those images. Such little to gain. Such massive consequences.

If you need more evidence, here [0] is the archived login page from the mobile version of the site before it was taken down (because it was flooded and trolled). By comparing it visually to other mastodon instances and inspecting the source itself, you can confirm there was a mobile mastodon instance up at the given archival time. Additionally, the press release [1] links to the social media website [2] which links to the app store page [3] which has preview images that are very similar to the images posted on Twitter.

[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20211021014524/https://mobile.tme...

[1] https://thedeskofdonaldtrump.com/announcing-trump-media-tech...

[2] https://www.truthsocial.com/

[3] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/truth-social/id1586018825

There were dozens of people who created accounts and were generally trolling the new platform. They didn't lockdown the mobile site (https://mobile.tmediatech.io/) which let people register accounts and post to the platform. The links / screenshots are definitely to his site.

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/trump-truth-media-platform-sh...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com