kbin VS Mastodon

One will notice the regrettable duplication in that list, and it's (AFAIK) a massive unsolved problem in the Fediverse. My mental model is that Lemmy is exactly like signing up to mailing lists but where one can also upvote and downvote posts (err, some instances don't allow downvotes, so there's that). That means that folks who want the most coverage for their submission will post it to every one of the duplicated mailing lists, which results in their own message-id along with their own threaded replies and upvote/downvote scores. Some folks have proposed using the link-url and subject for deduplicating them, but I believe it's just a proposal from the client side and the servers will do no such thing (although running your own instance hypothetically would allow for such customization)

There's also https://kbin.pub which is its own ActivityPub implementation and behaves a little different from Lemmy, I'm sure with good and bad parts. IIRC there's some federation drama between Kbin and some Lemmy instances, and (AFAIK) Kbin does not have any mobile apps whereas there are currently several which speak the Lemmy API. I'd credit it with "first mover effect" more than one being objectively better than the other

I do hope Lemmy catches on and siphons users off of Reddit because the rug-pull from Reddit was a trust-breaking middle finger, IMHO. I wished the same thing for Mastodon, too, but I think the inertia is just too strong with X

The Fediverse - which kbin is a part of - is a network of interconnected servers used for publishing content, much like Reddit. The benefit is that the Fediverse is decentralised and not controlled by any company or authority, cannot be monetised in the same sense as Reddit, and the code is free. Different servers - also called instances - are independent but communicate with each other.

There is pretty big one on kbin and iirc there is one on lemmy as well

There is pretty big one at kbin, specifically on the kbin.social instance

Lemmy https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy has definite technical advantages vs https://github.com/ernestwisniewski/kbin -- use of PHP is a bit of a red flag. I'm going to try a small ARM64 instance so explicitly supporting that is nice.

Lemmy (https://join-lemmy.org) and Kbin (https://kbin.pub) - those are like reddit, but federated (means there are multiple websites and are connected to each other so you can access "subreddits" of each of them, it's similar idea how e-mail works, you don't need to be on gmail to send e-mail to friend on gmail). The Kbin is distinct from lemmy, but it looks like you can access lemmy communities from kbin and vice versa. Also this might be useful https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances

Sinon kbin (qu'il faut que je test).

You can use kbin instead, if the political views of Lemmy's developers makes you feel uneasy.

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....