F# VS Mastodon

F# F*

This year I've been attempting Advent of Code in my favourite programming language, F#. This is a beginner(ish) centered post about making incremental changes from the smallest possible solution to something more robust.

I can recommend polyglot notebooks in vs code, so you can mix different languages.Take a look athttps://fsharp.org/ for some project ideas and frameworks.

I have many less followers on Mastodon than in the Birdsite (40 vs 341), yet my activity has generated many more interactions than there. Not only that, among the users who decided to interact with me I counted: a co-discoverer of the Laniakea supercluster, one of the lead developers behind F#, the author of many important books on Java & JVM, plus many others. I'm literally a nobody, but this time there was no algorithm relying on relevance and engament metrics to decide what to present to each one of us.

FP devs differ based on language here. Elm, like F#, tends to encourage "a bunch of functions and types in a file". While Elm supports modules, we don't really care where it came from; they're all pure, all deterministic, the compiler tells us if it works.

The builtin fsharp collections actually are just "immutable", not persistent as you mention. (Ref: https://github.com/fsharp/fsharp/blob/master/src/fsharp/FSharp.Core/map.fs. This is just an AVL tree that returns a copy on mutations: https://github.com/fsharp/fsharp/blob/577d06b9ec7192a6adafefd09ade0ed10b13897d/src/fsharp/FSharp.Core/map.fs#L118)

You can dive into .NET ecosystem by trying F#. It's functional-first language so this should be familiar.

ReScript code is just like F# or OCAML; it doesn’t have a function parse phase like JavaScript, so we have to define our functions and types first before we can use them. That’s fine, but makes explaining the code backwards (meaning you start at the bottom of the file and work your way up), so we’ll start at our lambda handler and explain each part, regardless of where it’s defined.

F# is a JavaScript and .NET language for web, cloud, data-science, apps and more.

Also a programming joke

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....