activity-kit VS Mastodon

Ahh this is so exciting to see so much happening in this space all of a sudden! My quest to get a personal instance running has been a long slog for me personally.

I had been working on an ActivityPub server in Node.js/TypeScript for a while before the Twitter migration. It's got most of the features I'd want in a small server but it's basically bring-your-own-client at the moment.

https://github.com/michaelcpuckett/activitypub-core

Finding all the resources to build a complete server that can interact with other instances isn't easy, so maybe this can help someone. The spec is well worded, but the checklist is confusing, the test server is down, Mastodon has its own rules, etc. Plus you have to have at least a cursory knowledge of JSON-LD/RDF.

Hi all, I've had trouble adapting to Mastodon because your server is equated with your identity, but lots of servers are topic-oriented. To solve for that, I created this as a way to implement groups.

You create an account and then whoever follows that account can @message them and then the account automatically boosts the original post.

https://github.com/michaelcpuckett/ap-groups

For context, first I built a mostly-working ActivityPub server in TypeScript/Node.js. I haven't quite figured out what to do as far as the client, but this seemed like a quick and easy solve for the groups issue.

https://github.com/michaelcpuckett/activitypub-core

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....