daveid

You can press back in your browser to leave the public timeline, as well as opening anything else (account, hashtag, status) will replace it.

I make an effort to moderate the worst, i.e. hate speech, spam and vandalism should not stay on the public timeline for long (who disagrees with my policies is welcome to start their own instance). If I've missed something please let me know @Gargron@mastodon.social or per e-mail eugen@zeonfederated.com. A "report" feature is in the works in the next few days.

Actually, "let's see what's trending on mastodon." doesn't sound wrong to my ears at all, but maybe that's because I've been around people who say that for a couple of months.

For reference, the community-decided verb/noun for posting on Mastodon is "toot" (as in, the elephant sound), so that would be "can you toot me". I mean. It's ridiculous, but I like it. It's endearing.

Images actually work fine! But yes, mentions don't quite "work", i.e. when you mention someone on twitter and it gets cross-posted to Mastodon, it appears as a string "@username@twitter.com" which is informative enough but not really "correct" if you get what I mean.

What disappears? Let me know @Gargron@mastodon.social or per e-mail eugen@zeonfederated.com

Edit: Also as a side note, mastodon.social has been federating with GNU social just fine for more than 6 months, so I'm inclined to believe this is some sort of confusion

For some definition of "easy": https://github.com/halcy/MastodonToTwitter

If you try GNU social and Mastodon I believe with a high confidence that you'll find that Mastodon is a much better execution of the idea. So yeah my goal is for this to be the most popular thing. But they're not mutually exclusive, GNU social is still the same network.

Indeed! And I'm talking to some orgs about setting up their own instance for them :)

Sorry, you can't. I kinda forgot that would be a nice addition.

Discovery:

If someone from your instance follows someone remotely, that account is in the instance's database, and can be searched (we have account search). Furthermore you'll see their posts in a real-time public timeline if you wish to view that.

If you're just kickstarting a fresh instance and are alone, yeah, you kinda have to browse other sites to find people to follow. But then you follow them (there's also a "remote follow" button across mastodon and GNU social sites that facilitates this) and you get that benefit again. And you find people who the people you're following retweet/reblog/boost (whatever you wanna call it).

I mean honestly, it's not like you can immediately find every good account on Twitter either. It's not much harder or at all imo.

I don't do any real tracking except for login times, so here is the best data i can offer (for mastodon.social exclusively, other Mastodon and GNU social instances are obviously excluded but should count towards your question because of federation):

1687 users active in the last 14 days. 16,744 registered accounts on mastodon.social. 18,347 accounts in total known to this instance. 460,563 statuses in the database, 306,905 created by locally registered users. 173 different Mastodon/GNU social instances known to this instance (i.e. at least one account from such an instance in the database).

Hopefully that answers your question!

There's also a way to run an S3-compatible file storage server on your own VPS or hardware, thus avoiding S3 costs altogether. The project's name is Minio [1]. Finding that out has saved me a lot of money. I've written up a story about that if anyone's curious [2]

[1]: https://minio.io/ [2]: https://www.patreon.com/posts/long-changelog-7498817 (skip the changelog)

Thanks for the shout out!

Mastodon is a FOSS alternative to Twitter, with a focus on UX. Github: https://github.com/Gargron/mastodon/ Screenshot and demo video linked from the README

Mastodon [1][2]

[1]: https://mastodon.social [2]: https://github.com/Gargron/mastodon

Disclaimer: I'm the developer

If you are concerned about the direction Twitter is going, I recommend checking out alternatives. There is a community-owned "Twitter", it is called the fediverse and it consists of projects like GNU social and Mastodon [1] (My own project).

[1]: https://github.com/Gargron/mastodon https://mastodon.social

You might enjoy my https://github.com/Gargron/mastodon

Yes, you could do that. It would be like crawling the web and the task would probably require equivalent resources depending on how big the whole known network is.

Mastodon uses redis sorted sets and publish/subscribe for timelines and real-time message delivery respectively. And for background processing. It's not easily replaceable, plus it's a super lightweight dependency and a lot of projects nowadays use redis as well.

Thank you! The Mastodon team is just me though!

Right, I'll get on fixing the styles for that.

The error messages are a bit close to programmatic at the moment, 404 means user hasn't been found, 422 (unprocessable entity) means validation error (like if you submit empty status or over the character limit). So it's all intended, just the error messages could be humanized a lot.

I'd love to write an app client for it eventually.

Here is my profile: https://mastodon.social/users/Gargron

I also made a demo video (linked in the README): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YO1jQ8_rAMU

I realize that a public timeline would be a good addition.

As the other poster pointed out, I was heavily inspired by TweetDeck which I've been using for 6+ years.

And yes, I agree that's a nice suggestion, user/content discovery is definitely a big area in which this can be improved.

Edit: I realized I forgot to answer the last two questions.

Plans for the project: I'm a realist so I don't think that it will be able to compete with Twitter. However I would like this project to become the go-to option for people who are already inclined to prefer decentralized/self-hosted solutions, and simply be better than the other software in that space.

No, I don't plan to monetize. Mastodon is open-source, licensed under AGLPv3. However I do have a Patreon through which interested people could support me while I work on it.

It's early in development so I haven't gotten to an admin UI to moderate content yet, but blocks are already implemented.

Edit: If you look at the github issues, I have a couple of features queued up for dealing with abuse.

I can't speak for Diaspora but Pump.io, GNU social and Mastodon don't need bridges, the users are actually equal.

ActivityPub is a successor to ActivityStreams/Salmon which Mastodon and GNU social are currently using. At least with these it's not really a xkcd/927 situation.

To be honest I perceive decentralized and federated as synonyms.

That's fine as long as they're compatible with each other, isn't it? Different software, same social network.

Mostly correct but it does not use Jabber/XMPP, it uses a set of procotols like Webfinger (account resource discovery), Atom/ActivityStreams, Salmon (remote account notifications) and PubSubHubbub (follower update notifications)

1. You can either run it yourself or find an instance run by someone else (e.g. my flagship instance mastodon.social). This is similar in principle to GNU social, Diaspora and XMPP.

2. Users belong to a certain instance and can be addressed like username@domain. You can follow any user from any instance and you will receive their posts, you can interact with them just like if they'd be on your own instance (replies, mentions, reblogs, favourites, etc). On the technical side, this is accomplished with OStatus, Atom feeds/ActivityStreams, Salmon, PubSubHubbub and Webfinger. Anything that supports those technologies is part of the network (e.g. GNU social instances)

User discovery in the sense of UX is something I want to work on in the future, like implementing "who to follow" suggestions etc.

If you don't know anyone you can follow on it yet, you can start with me: Gargron@mastodon.social

Also if you have any questions feel free to ask!