Mastodon VS nostr

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....

Didn't say anything about freedom of speech. And again: I'm not the one to talk to. I don't have any strong feelings on the topic, but if you do, you should take it somewhere that people who can do something about it will see.

I tried to find an existing discussion to help get you started, but couldn't. You can start one here: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues

It's easy to sit here on Hacker News and say "they should just..."

Coming up with a standard for an international project will be a long, noisy discussion. You'll tread on internecine conflicts you had no idea about. Old wounds from past related discussions will come out. People will soapbox.

This is why I have no interest in discussing it. It probably won't go anywhere in a place where it actually could. It definitely won't here.

Some resources if you're interested in learning more: https://nostr.com/ https://ron.stoner.com/nostr_Security_and_Privacy https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr/ https://nostorg.github.io/clients/

I think your best bet here is Nostr (Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays): https://nostr.com https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr

Nostr isn't a federated platform like Mastodon or Lemmy, it's more similar to the AT protocol created by Bluesky, whilst being far simpler to understand and write apps using it. The nostr protocol is defined by a series of NIPs (Nostr implementation possibilites https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips), the most basic of which can be implemented in a client or a relay in 50-100 lines of code in any modern programming language.

Each user runs a client, anyone can write a relay or run any of hundreds of existing implementations, both clients and relays can choose to support a number of NIPs. Users have a public-private keypair, and distribute notes to relays signed with their private key, which are verified by relays. Clients subscribe via websockets to any number of relays (I usually have 20-30), and receive notes from all users on those relays' databases, or filtered by the public keys of the users you're following. Relays for the most part don't communicate with each other. If you're ever blocked or banned from a relay, you'll still be able to have your notes seen as long as you have at least one relay in common with anyone who wants to see them. I run my own as well for extra resiliency.

At the moment there's ~50 standardised NIPs, which add features like likes, zaps (bitcoin tips for notes), user status, post expiration, mentions, search, DMs, and public chats. Nearly all of these are supported by popular clients and relays. While nostr is primarily used for social media at the moment, it's already possible to build upon as a protocol for pretty much any online service.

The total active user count on most public relays I'd estimate is somewhere around 500k to a million, though the nature of the protocol makes it impossible to estimate its true size. The perceived community on most relays before following anyone frankly can get pretty cancerous, mainly due to a lot of clients sorting notes by new by default, so I can only hope to high heaven it'll improve as it grows.

Though like any new non-centralised platform, it's more difficult to get started on for most non-technical users as they have to pick one of hundreds of clients to install, and requires caution to never leak your private key and be very wary of which clients you trust it with.

I hope this was not too technical and all over the place. If you are interested in knowing more please ask me or check out https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr or https://nostr.com/get-started

Without movement on this [1] I can't see adoption.

[1] https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr/issues/97

I think the next stage is decentralized social media. Something like nostr (1) where there’s no centralized entity determining the algorithm to boost. It’s up to the individual to follow users.

Perhaps the next challenge would be human verification, even with this protocol we’d need something to index public people by to handle discovery.

Even before LLM’s became as mainstream as they are, most social media platforms were riddled with spam: affiliate marketing, drop shipping crap, and people who are running some sort of con.

1 - https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr already has 8k stars on github

Considering that Reddit might not be able to negotiate better pricing for API usage, it's worth considering a different approach. The future of social media seems to be moving towards protocols rather than specific platforms. This means that instead of relying on a single platform like Reddit, Apollo should focus on using a protocol called NOSTR (you can find more information at https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr).

Holding me back from posting updates of what I had for breakfast is the problem of private key sharing with services that I can use in order to post updates of what I had for breakfast.

A client or service will inevitably be compromised. And with it, the private keys of all using it whether stored by the service or logged on entry by a compromised system.

Private keys should be chained, master->subkey, with subkey the public key of the service __or a solution like that or that ends in the same result. When (not if) a service or key is compromised, the key can be blacklisted and/or any key co-signed by a compromised service blacklisted.

I'm confused by the oversight. It's also been raised here https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr/issues/97

Until then, I'll have to keep my updates of what I had for breakfast to myself.