foundation.rust-lang.org VS Mastodon

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).

This is why some of the bigger programming languages have a consortium behind them, dedicated to maintaining the language and making decisions for its continued improvement. When you look at the logos at the bottom of the Rust Foundation page, you can see some pretty big names.

The Rust foundation, which is a nonprofit general (delaware) corporation with bylaws, employees, a normal legal existence. It owns the trademarks and domain names, acts as a legal and administrative point of contact when one is needed, and has I think operational and funding responsibility for infrastructure (crates.io, CI, etc.) The foundation has members which are almost all corporate sponsors who donate money (and sometimes people) to further its mandate. There's a fairly broad set of companies involved here: Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, Huawei, etc. etc.

When you say enterprise, who do you mean? Rust is absolutely being pushed by faang et al for example. Just look at the bottom of the Rust foundation page[0]. You do not see this support for things like Nim or Julia[1].

[0] https://foundation.rust-lang.org/

The Rust language is supported by the Rust Foundation, more details on that website. Financial donors to the Rust Foundation are about 30-40 companies currently, the bigger ones include Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, AWS, and Meta

> https://foundation.rust-lang.org/ 15,000

With all due respect, they don't need this money. Rust is a great project, and deserving, but they already have plenty of sponsors.

I would have rather seen 150 x $100 go to smaller projects. So much great software is being written, by people who are barely scraping by, and even $100 could be the motivation for someone to finish something widely useful.

So, let's clarify a couple things first about how the Rust and Cargo crates work. First off, there is no single company or entity who's the sole contributor to the core Rust tooling. Rust is an open source project to which anyone can view the codebase and contribute (though there's a select set of people who are responsible for approving changes to it and managing releases). It's worth noting this doesn't mean there isn't an organization responsible for the project however. The Rust Foundation are a non-profit who manages the core repositories and tooling, and is also responsible for setting high level goals for the language.

I don't think it is the same as Java. There is no single company owning Rust. Several big companies are investing in rust foundation (https://foundation.rust-lang.org/) including Google in particular which had quite a story regarding Java.

Recently, several big techs like Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Amazon jointly launched a non-profit organization to help the language maintain itself by giving full support to the maintainers who lead and develop the project. Here at Vaultree we use Rust in our product and services, as we need to deliver data with reliability and agility to our customers, as we are in a business line where any error or inaccuracy can be costly, the adoption of Rust was a great fit for us.

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....