BirdsiteLive VS Mastodon

That's exactly what https://github.com/NicolasConstant/BirdsiteLive is, their purposes are distinct

Partially true. There are tools that mirror Twitter accounts into the Fediverse. In fact, you can set up such tools for yourself. I personally did that for only a few news sites. Everyone else that I care about migrated or at least crossposted to Mastodon already. You may find more people on there than you think. A lot has changed in the last months and weeks. There’s also a tool that helps you with finding your Twitter followings.

There are a bunch of people out there running theBirdsite Live software which will automatically monitor twitter accounts and post them to Mastodon. However the person that wrote the software does not think it should be used anymore.

I've come across BirdsiteLIVE, but that requires you to import one twitter account at a time. Is there a way to bulk-bridge all the accounts I follow?

I think the proxy_cache_bypass header not being present may be causing the issues as the behavior I'm seeing is described in this issue https://github.com/NicolasConstant/BirdsiteLive/issues/125 and the solution was apparently to implement proxy_cache_bypass

I did the same and am pretty happy with the end result, but be warned: the official guide requires you to install a full Ruby dev kit to run an instance, with Docker being available but poorly documented (as configuration requires running separate commands rather than just writing a file).

It's not hard, but if you're like me and you don't like polluting your server system with all kinds of dev tools in the global space, you may need somewhat of an understanding of Docker to get everything running smoothly.

One thing to note is that if you're going to be the only one using your server, you may want to enable single user mode. It's a mode for the Mastodon frontend that's optimized for deployments with a single user account.

For those considering the switch, I also recommend checking out https://github.com/NicolasConstant/BirdsiteLive and setting up an instance. With your Twitter account you can register for an API key and then mirror all the Twitter users that aren't on the Fediverse yet! It's unidirectional but as most Twitter users seem rather passive anyway, this can make the transition rather easy.

To prevent others from using your keys and quota, you can safely limit ingress to BirdSiteLive to only your Mastodon server. You end up with proxied tweets only visible to users of your server.

Some folk are setting up Birdsite Live to get access to those tweets without needing to actually use Twitter. https://github.com/NicolasConstant/BirdsiteLive

Oh, TIL about https://mastodon.social/ (https://joinmastodon.org/)

Looks like what you describe, doesn't it?

> Social networking that's not for sale.

Interestingly there is some discussion for Mastodon with people asking the limit to be smaller, which raises the question as to the purpose of alt text, and how to properly handle larger text lengths in screen reader programs.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12268

Through the Fast Forward program, we give free services and support to open source projects and the nonprofits that support them. We support many of the world’s top programming languages (like Python, Rust, Ruby, and the wonderful Scratch), foundational technologies (cURL, the Linux kernel, Kubernetes, OpenStreetMap), and projects that make the internet better and more fun for everyone (Inkscape, Mastodon, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Terms of Service; Didn’t Read).

Mastodon DMs have absolutely no privacy: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18079

For a decentralized protocol doing things right is much more important than doing things fast, it is very difficult (and in a lot of cases impossible) to break backwards compatibility.

Postmortem on what happened here: https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=39305884

The v1 API of Mastodon limits the size of the tree that it will expand for users who are not logged into the server: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/main/app/controllers/api/v1/statuses_controller.rb . I am guessing that this or some similar limit applies to threads being returned to unauthenticated users of the web UI. It just arbitrarily stops expanding the replies at some point, including the main thread from the OP.

If a thread is truncated, users expect it to expand automatically and autoscroll when you hit the bottom. In my desktop browser, that does not occur, and there is no indication that there is more to see. This is the situation of the web interface as of Mastodon version 4.2.5.

The issue is very sensitive to observer conditions. If you are logged into the server, the behavior is different. If you use a Mastodon app instead of the web, the behavior might be different. As the tree expands, the cutoffs become different. If you look at the thread on a different Mastodon server, the tree is different because every server has its own view of the Fediverse.

HN needs a best practice for linking to Mastodon threads in a way that provides a consistent experience to HN readers. The average Mastodon server would be crushed by hundreds of HN readers grabbing the entirety of a huge thread all at once, so this might involve some thread-unroll-and-cache service. I tried https://mastoreader.io/ but it did not solve the problem.

Alternately, we push changes into the Mastodon web UI to warn users when they need to click to see more and assume that people will get used to the navigation.

Suggestions?

Fixed in Mastodon v4.2.5 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/releases/tag/v4.2.5

>You can defeat the Affero clause by putting the software behind a proxy, for example

Could someone elaborate on this? This is NOT my understanding of the license, and it seems absurd considering e.g. Mastodon is AGPL but the standard install requires a reverse proxy[1]. If using a proxy defeats Affero, why would the Mastodon team do this? Are they stupid?

[1] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/main/dist/nginx.co...

Mastodon is free and open-source. Go ahead and add the flag:

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING....