Mastodon 3.5
blog.joinmastodon.org
blog.joinmastodon.org
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>
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.
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).
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.
The static fediverse requires an always-on, network-available machine that is your data storage, your interaction with other people, and your data manipulation center, all in the same place
The nice thing about client-driven p2p is that the local-first model mirrors the intuition of using a desktop app, kind of like editing files in vim. Rakoo is overselling it a bit though, because the p2p network we used doesn't guarantee uptime unless you keep your device on. You might still want a caching supernode in the system. P2P also introduces coordination challenges with multiple devices, though the hypercore protocol folks are developing some answers to that now.
The idea you're discussing of dumb files on an HTTP server can work. There's a shocking amount you can accomplish if you just add the ability to enumerate files with range-queries (aka "list files in folder") though solving that with generated index files as in RSS is also fine, and a bit more flexible to boot. If your goal is to keep the server "dumb" then you're probably looking at a pull-based architecture -- again like RSS -- which reduces the amount of coordination between servers. This tends to mean you sacrifice discovery because you don't receive information you're not pulling, so a @mention or reply or subscribe by a random won't reach you. That might be a feature more than a bug for some. The solution is either to add push or to do some network-crawling. Secure Scuttlebutt does the latter along N expansions of the FoaF graph, which has a nice web-of-trust concept embedded in it. You could also go "full google" and run a service that crawls the entire network, then serve the crawled output to users, at which point you're pretty much at Twitter-levels of connectivity with a pull-based network.
The one other observation I'd make is that dumb file servers are most limited by the kinds of queries they can satisfy over the network. You can solve that either by crawling a site into your local index before attempting queries, or by trying to produce index-files on each server (which, again, is basically what RSS is). If you do the latter, I'd look into a file format in which range queries could be used so that a query can fetch a subset; perhaps using a fixed-length header and/or fixed-length records.
> As you said, in a server-side model you're using a server and you have a lot of freedom in how you manage the system.
This is an aside, but: I didn't say that, and it's not how I'd characterize a backend-heavy ("server-side") design, like the current way the fediverse operates, but that's really an eye-of-the-beholder thing. I think of the dumb server approach as being the more flexible and convenient one if I'm putting myself in the shoes of the person wanting to publish—for several of the reasons you mention—which is the basis for my recommendation to define a static profile, after all.
PS: The discovery problem was pre-emptively raised in the original comment. The crawler approach is more or less sufficient (and something worth encouraging), but wouldn't actually be necessary. We're augmenting an existing network here that already supports push among accounts that don't deliberately choose to operate as static nodes. If Alice wants to respond to Bob, and Alice's client sees that Bob chooses to publish through a static node but is advertising in his profile the fact that he subscribes to the "Facebook Fediverse Feedsource" account, she can push a parallel notification to it. (Bob's choice to run his account as a static node doesn't have any implication for whether FFF is static or not—or whether Alice's is, either, for that matter.)
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?
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
How do you tell 'backend-heavy'?
> How do you tell 'backend-heavy'?
Is there something confusing about the litmus test I gave in the comment you're responding to? What are the steps for deploying this thing to NeoCities? How would I use this to operate a node at $WHATEVER.github.io (where $WHATEVER is the name of my account or organization)?
A host capable of executing CGI applications—making it an active participant (rather than a passive one)—is exactly what I mean by "backend-heavy".
so be it then – while a rapberry pi can run a primitive webserver plus CGI but the services you mention require datencenters, heavy stacks and lots of smallprint in the T&Cs. Backends with millions of LOC as trusted computing base.
Seems I target something different than you. The world is big enough for both, I guess. And paid shared hosting (with a legal claim then) is common in Europe (except among Cloud-Hipsters maybe).
You're talking nonsense. I mentioned static sites.
It is not _more_ difficult or expensive to serve a static site with a Raspberry Pi than it is to get it to host a PHP application.
The project you linked to does not resemble in any way the thing that I described. It is worse than irrelevant. What sucks, though, is that it took three comments before you even partially acknowledged that you're talking about something completely different, despite what your original response to me indicates.
This has been a monumental waste of time.
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.
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/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.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rss+to+activitypub
There was even a HN article a few years ago.
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]."
(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.)
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.
An algorithm to rank posts and people? Did we learn nothing from twitter?
This is after all, NOT twitter: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon
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.
- Friends of friends - Keywords - Popular toots...
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.
A line needs to be drawn somewhere, and it is not clear to me that Mastodon did, as a project; because it keeps pushing what I (and other early adopters) consider anti-features in the name of new user retention.
For example, trending toots would have been unthinkable four years ago while trending tags were being designed, but trending tags eventually led to that.
Just a week later, here is a pull request adding an option to allow trends without reviews: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/17977
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.
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 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.
https://join-lemmy.org/ and https://joinpeertube.org/ that is. More on https://fediverse.party/.
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!
I don't use it myself, but I often notice users from Pleroma servers writing much longer messages than are allowed on Mastodon.
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.
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.
It does not have to be "this and nothing else". The main complaint people have with Twitter is censorship and algorithmic curation without transparency. Mastodon solves the first problem with decentralization, and it could just as well fix the second problem with a market for algorithms to apply to your own feeds. And you could still keep the default chronological timeline for those who wish to keep using it this way. Adding more features does not kill your product, it just makes it more flexible for more use cases.
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...
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.
Chronological timeline is one of the biggest advantages compared to Twitter.
And yes I do follow a number of people on there. Algorithmic timelines are the worst.
It's not because you were never exposed to a good one that good ones don't exist. And the point I was making is that you could have several algorithms to choose from every time you are logged in - to focus on specific strengths of each sorting algorithm. Instead, following the chronology favors over-representation of the ones that post the most, which sucks completely.
I'm not a big fan of the common "it could work nicely if its just done well" in a world where nobody really does it well.
What are talking about? The algorithm(s) would be on user side, not the server side, and there's nothing to game if you switch algorithms as you wish.
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.
To me it feels like RSS on steroids. Best of the modern web (technology) combined with the best of early 2000s web (decentralization).
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.
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).
I really recommend it. It was a much nicer experience for me.
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.
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.
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."
I am using a similar implementation in another fediverse project. Another example is/was AWS manual account creation.
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
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.
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.
Most of these people running servers don’t charge anything, so I can only assume that it is a (1) a hobby or (2) they have bad intentions.
If 1, they have failed to understand the dangerous legal position they are putting themselves in.
If 2, they are wonderfully set up to entrap or just monitor people and send info to the authorities. Maybe that in itself is a fun hobby for them, who knows?
Every single point you bring up here is completely unnecessary work. It’s just a lot of work.
Why would I find a server with exactly the policies i prefer when I can just self-moderate and follow the people i want to follow?
Not to mention that these “policies” are basically written on a napkin and at the whims of a random person who may have gotten bad indigestion that morning. My question is simply why bother with all this needless bureaucracy when you can be left alone?
If it’s a hobby, then that’s fine. Those servers will be like hobby email servers today.
Why can’t they have good intentions? Eg a real business. Like Gmail, Outlook, etc before them. Only for modern day services. Why does anyone host anything on the internet? What is this, 1985? People will host and share things online for others.
Why would someone who hosts something have to be a nefarious covert LEO?
You’d find a server because self moderation is a lot of work. People already seek out specific people to follow and that’s more than enough moderation for them. The rise of algorithmic feeds being popular is because self moderation is already not something people want. Who wants to host the data of their feeds locally and have to query other individuals? People want always available servers not p2p. We see the behavior already.
“Why… When you can be left alone” is probably the attitude of someone not meant for social media.
Nobody relies on these for real communication. Maybe as a toy. But everyone would have a gmail as backup.
> Eg a real business. Like Gmail, Outlook
If it’s a for-profit business, that does change things. But please let me know of any business you know of like this that isn’t spying on you, isn’t selling your data, and is still reliable. I can’t think of any.
Actually to lower the bar, let me know of any mastodon server that is run like a legitimate business that a user could potentially sue for breaking contract.
> self moderation is a lot of work
Not in my experience. Simply don’t follow people that you don’t want to follow.
> People want always available servers not p2p
Always-available is not mutually exclusive with p2p. see: relay servers. I don’t need to rent my account from a relay server, they can just seed my data for me. Heck they don’t even need to be able to read my data to seed it for me.
> “Why… When you can be left alone” is probably the attitude of someone not meant for social media.
And not being able to see possibilities beyond the fediverse (a completely failed project from adoption and UX standpoints) is not an attitude meant for hacker news. Innovwtion should not stop just because some techy hacker people have made a solution. We shouldn’t be precious about these things just because we see the builders as one of our own or something.
Look at the laughable "Infrastructure" slides on their investment deck:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1849635/000119312521...
And all this bluster just to pay someone in Eastern Europe to re-skin an existing open source project. It should take about a week to recreate what they've done. It's like saying you're going to make the #1 Slack competitor then just re-skinning Mattermost. It's pathetic.
I love open source and all the ways it benefits the world. But I hate exaggerated bravado when the actual service is the very definition of average.
With free software, yes. It also includes undesirables as well.
> 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.
Well it seems that the Mastodon developers have forgotten that there aren't any restrictions in free software except for the terms of the license and in the end Truth Social complied. So that is that.
Putting special source code restrictions on other users beyond the AGPL intends to basically defeats the purpose of free software.
The benefit of federation is to have multiple philosophies in charge of moderation of their own communities whilst also being connected.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1849635/000119312521...
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.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/29/mastodon-issues-30-day-ult...
Given the short timeline, couldn't it just be an honest mistake?
My point in the reply was to followup on events, the fact they "capitulated" was left out.
That's not how this works. Mastodon has an AGPL license on their repo. The burden is on you to read and follow the license. If your devs don't tell you they were illegally ripping code then you need better devs. The burden still falls on you.
You enforce your license, people comply. Ideally they know to comply in the first place, but a letter isn't too much trouble to inform them.
Only if they defy that should anyone hold ill will.
This is very basic stuff and makes me wonder if you've ever worked in a vendor/client relationship before.
UPDATE: As expected, they proved my point in their response "I'd just worry about the content of my post and not about my name or laptops."
There's only one side of bias in this current conversation, anger towards anyone including dev firms that help Trump.
Most likely they're new to this scene, didn't know or weren't informed, then they corrected it without dispute. Non story really.
UPDATE: Who are you yelling at? Everyone can read my joke, as well as the explanation of my point of view, which you haven't addressed...
You're proving my point attacking me and not what I'm saying.
"When the debate is lost slander becomes the tool of the loser"
As you said this happens all time by companies even you worked for, why get bent out of shape if they corrected it?
Do you blow up this much for other companies or is it bias?
I'm not an investor in the company nor do I have any interest to invest. I just think you guys were being biased in assuming malice as well as blowing it out of proportion.
Your bias is due to your hatred of Trump and everything he touches. That's why you were so aggressive in your critiques against even the developers Trump's company employed.
Me not picking up a pitchfork in your witch hunt is not me being biased, it's you being a lunatic...
It'd be like announcing that you're creating what will be the world's most popular website builder and blogging platform, then spending 10k to just rip off WordPress and thinking job done. It's hilariously inept.
Way to keep jobs in the USA, I guess? But perhaps this was a 4d-chess move to stay outside of the influence of US/western 'big tech' which 'silences' right wing Truth? Who can tell?
Just look at the "Infrastructure" slide (22) in their deck I posted above. It's like a middle schooler did a book report on web development.
slide 27 mentions mastodon as the backend for v1... as if they'll have the ability to just swap in something else later with 10M active users...
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.
On top of that, so basing on 'free and open source software' and even giving attribution now means 'you haven't built anything novel or interesting'. Oh dear.
> the just copy/pasted another project and expect people to take them seriously as a major social network.
Yeah, surely Mastodon by itself has hundreds of millions of users worldwide since launch day right? /s
I never knew that a controlled launch, only in the US with a waitlist already means 'it is over' or 'it is failing' /s I guess it depends on the 'sources' one reads.
If this company did not have their current political affiliations, I seriously doubt you'd be defending them for a second. Because all the evidence of how well they are performing points to them being laughably inept.
Mastodon, despite being an 'alternative' hardly anyone cared about it.
Not even the general public cared either for 6 years until Team Orange came along and used it. They'll probably surpass the amount of users on Mastodon regardless away.
> If this company did not have their current political affiliations, I seriously doubt you'd be defending them for a second. Because all the evidence of how well they are performing points to them being laughably inept.
So now you are a fortune teller and somehow 'launch day disasters' are indicative of future performance isn't it?
Who cares?
You haven't answered any of my questions have you? Only still obsessed around the orange man.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_Social
https://mashable.com/article/truth-social-downloads-drop-don...
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1849635/000119312521...
And all this bluster just to outsource the re-skinning of an existing open source project. Vlad N listed as their CIO on slide 21 is Vladimir Novachki, CTO of Cosmic Development, a North Macedonian outsourcing firm. It would take about a week to recreate what they've done, costing about $5k max.
It's like saying you're going to make the #1 website builder then paying someone $5k to just re-skin WordPress. Given the promotional materials they've put out, it's beyond pathetic.
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.