Coral VS Mastodon

The Coral Project [0] (commenting platform used on Washington Post, New York Times, The Verge) uses an Apache 2.0 license [1]. Which doesn't seem to have prevented it from raking in big SaaS customers.

A lot of people worry about copy-cat services, but it's kind of rare that someone will be able to compete with you as the original in hosting your own service as well as you can. Especially when you consider support and maintenance requirements of a new product you aren't personally developing.

I could see copy-cat services being more of an issue in the late stage of a product though? When everyone knows lots about how to stand it up and use it?

[0] https://coralproject.net/

The Coral Project was created inline with this initiative. They have lots of guides that provide some of the research that was conducted: https://coralproject.net/

For comment system, I choose Coral Project Talk because it could use Akismet and Google Perspective API for reducing spam and harassment. I also need to think about the remove comments when user delete their account (GDPR stuff). Coral Talk has the above functions in the UI.

Another great API that could be self-hosted is Coral. It’s a commenting platform where users can leave online comments. It’s received contributions from over 40 people on Github. It has a good-first-issue tag and also offers a contribution guide.

Yup! We do a Typescript/Node.js/GraphQL back-end with React/Relay/Typescript on the front end.

https://github.com/coralproject/talk

It's pretty nice having the whole code base share types, syntax, structure, etc.

Coral is poorly advertised outside it's ecosystem, but should be considered. https://github.com/coralproject/talk

See https://docs.coralproject.net/coral/v5/integrating/cms/ to get an idea of it's use.

Our highest tier comment system is quite powerful, and is based off Coral Talk by Vox. For beginners like yourself, if we allowed users to integrate Disqus on all tiers, would that alleviate your concerns with using Storipress?

If you need some inspiration, we added support for server caching of responses on Coral: https://github.com/coralproject/talk/blob/develop/src/core/server/app/middleware/graphql/apolloServer.ts#L85-L88

I've seen some examples in which people embed Discourse discussions.

There's also Coral (https://github.com/coralproject/talk) which used to be Mozilla + Vox project before Mozilla handed it over to Vox completely, but I have no experience with it.

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....