I'm sorry, but by what metric are musical bands "dead"? I'm asking because I follow a lot of bands that are actively releasing new music and touring across the US and Europe. Not to mention the musical festivals.
Arguably, Bluesky being spun off from Twitter and having Jack Dorsey as one of the founding members is a somewhat Meta-like advantage, in a sense of immediate legitimacy in the press and networking opportunities/connections in Silicon Valley. Mastodon had to start absolutely from scratch. I had zero connections to anyone important when I launched it. Bluesky also raised over $8M in venture capital funding, while Mastodon was being developed on a $0/mo budget for the first year of its existence, and something like $5000/mo for the next 5. Our current annual budget of around $500K still pales in comparison to the money Bluesky has at their disposal right now to spend on e.g. marketing. They also have the advantage of not really trying to do decentralization. That being said, venture capital money isn't free, while Mastodon's funding comes from the community with no strings attached, so in the long term, I believe in our approach.
Mastodon has changed quite significantly since a few years back. We take product design seriously and spend a sizeable amount of our resources on improving usability and reducing friction. If you could, please try again, and let me know how it goes this time. If you are an Android user, I strongly recommend our official app, as in my (obviously biased) opinion it is the best social media app right now and the user experience I am most proud of.
mastodon.social runs nightly releases off of our GitHub. Anyone can run nightlies to get these features. Or wait for the stable. What's hacky about this feature?
> But the thing is, I just hate the Mastodon UI. It's so clunky.
I hope this situation improves once we finish hiring a product designer. Personally I don't think the web client is as bad as some people make it sound, but I know it can be improved. In the interim you can try the 3rd party web client Elk [1], some people seem to really like it.
This PR is just one part of item MAS-86 on our public roadmap [1] "Markdown formatting for posts" which is meant to enable users to use code spans/blocks and bold and italic text as championed by the Elk third-party app [2]. I believe "rich text" in the PR title is a little not nuanced enough because like before I'm of the position that Mastodon is the wrong medium for long-form articles and the various block-level formatting structures that come with it, but allowing users to use bold text without resorting to mathematical Unicode characters is a win for accessibility.
The choices aren't "just break compatibility with all de facto standards" and "come up with your own base standard". You can work on an extension to the protocol that everyone can adopt and move to if it's really an improvement.
Rewriting the user's entire database on each delete sounds like it might become a problem. Especially as some users like to automatically delete old posts on a regular basis.
"Fuzzy blinky UI features" is what people actually care about though. You can have all the theoretical bells and whistles in the protocol but if you don't have a flagship application that people can use for their everyday needs, nobody is going to care. The fact of the matter is that "porting your account" is just a much less frequent need than literally anything else that people will come across in their day to day use, and the fact that you can move to another account in the fediverse without losing your followers is good enough for most. Of course it would be nice if the old and new accounts were verbatim, not even identifiably different copies, but we're talking about synchronizing (potentially, and likely on average) multiple gigabytes of data across small hobbyist servers that also still have to serve requests from other users. Not to mention the abuseability of being able to import gigabytes of pre-recorded content like that, a spammer's boon. Worth mentioning that the account portability approach described in ATP is just "upload your backup to the other server" which in practice is going to suffer from the exact problems I am describing.
This is not right. First of all, what do you mean by "PublicInbox"? Are you referring to the optional sharedInbox attribute, which allows delivering a payload to a whole server at once instead of iterating over the personal inbox of every actor on the server? Or are you referring to the inbox in general? The inbox is just a mechanism to deliver a payload from point A to point B. It is in fact used to receive messages from folks you don't know, but there is no obligation to share all or even most of your messages with anyone in particular. You can deliver posts to your followers, but you don't have to, protocol-wise, and you can choose, person by person, who to deliver to. The concept of indexers doesn't seem foreign to ActivityPub either. PeerTube runs sepia.search, which is exactly that kind of indexer that powers search for their video platform.
ActivityPub, the protocol, doesn't actually tie your identity to your homeserver. Webfinger (which is the protocol responsible for the username@domain addresses) is not part of it. In fact, even Webfinger doesn't actually "tie" your identity to your homeserver -- the fact that your identity is "tied" is an implementation detail in Mastodon and other currently popular fediverse software.
I cannot relate to this way of thinking. That's about the entire city of Manchester. Do dozens of people live in Manchester? 500K is vastly more than any average person can ever hope to have as followers on Twitter; it's not a ceiling anyone debating joining Mastodon can reasonably run into unless they are a celebrity -- and those have the power to pull in anyone from anywhere.
ActivityPub is a common language that allows describing "actors", "activities" and "objects" -- and as such, can describe any kind of social platform, from blog, to forum, to social media site, be it for photo sharing, video sharing, or something -- in your words -- Twitter-like. Not everything that uses ActivityPub will be 100% identical in user-facing functionality and UX, but most platforms have a concept of subscribing to other users, receiving new posts, and replying or re-sharing posts, which is where the interoperability comes to shine.
If your blog uses ActivityPub, it is still a blog. People could just subscribe to it to receive your posts in their home feed, reply to them, or re-share them in a way your blog could process (or choose not to).
I hope this project goes somewhere, but I feel like it may be too early for a public launch. I also think it may hurt the project to position itself so clearly as specifically a TikTok alternative given how difficult it is to replicate TikTok's defining characteristics - a powerful video editing app, ability to duo with other people's videos, and a famously good recommendation algorithm.
While Mastodon can be used for small server purposes (e.g. server-of-one) it is really geared towards professional use - providing a service to thousands of users and scaling up horizontally. Looking beyond technical requirements, so many of Mastodon's features echo this -- account management, reporting, moderation. In that context, I really do not think that "uses a reverse proxy in the front" and "has a database and a cache store" is a factor.
Saying it as the person in charge of developing Mastodon, probably the most likely reason more servers don't charge for access is that it's not built into the software, so it would require either customizing the code or manually sending out invites based on external payments (e.g. Patreon, some servers actually do that). I would imagine the other likely reason is that complexity of signing up as a business with your local tax office, charging the right taxes based on where the customers are located, and accounting. I do absolutely agree that paying for your account would make running the servers so much more sustainable.