localias VS Mastodon

I empathize with the author and found the post to be a interesting and concrete example of what it's _actually like_ to try to publish a blog to Mastodon, which is something that I have thought about and read about in abstract. So, thank you sir for writing this up.

One thing to consider would be to try to use Caddy [0], or a tool like localias [1], as a local https proxy. You might be able to run both the mastodon server and your blog software on the same computer and refer to local-only urls like "https://blog.test" and "https://mastodon.test" and have everything work.

I'd be curious to know why the author didn't try this, they seem to be quite knowledgeable of other web technologies so I have to assume there's a problem that I'm not seeing here.

[0] https://caddyserver.com/

[1] https://github.com/peterldowns/localias

Sure, but there are also excellent FOSS solutions for this, such as https://github.com/peterldowns/localias which has the benefit of being cross-platform.

Pretty good overview from Baldur — I don't always agree with everything he writes but this seems relatively correct.

One question I'd ask him (and anyone else reading) is: what are some other options for monetization?

Over the last few weeks I had three different VCs reach out to me about some of the open source projects I've been releasing, and ask me if I'd thought about making a business out of them. I told them that no, based on the problem the software was solving, I didn't see how I could adopt open-core or companion-saas business models, and I wasn't sure how else it could be done while keeping the code open source.

Can anyone suggest a viable business model that would allow:

* Code remains at least source available, ideally open source for non-commercial use.

* I can charge for commercial use.

* Actually doing the licensing is reasonable, ie no spyware or phoning home from the tool.

Wouldn't need to be perfect, I understand that if the code is open source a company could easily fork and use it without paying me. The idea would be to make it zero-headache to pay me for a license if the code is being used by a funded team.

The projects:

* https://github.com/peterldowns/localias

* https://github.com/peterldowns/pgmigrate

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....