Mastodon VS Reddit

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.

I've written down how I set up my Mastodon server here. This includes some topics that seem not well covered currently:

- use nginx reverse proxy with the official nginx.conf [1], but with some changes needed for compatibility with docker

- use rootless docker, for security, together with bind mounts, for maintainability

- use compose, with some modifications to the official docker-compose.yml [2] that make life easier and are compatible with the reverse proxy

[1]: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/main/dist/nginx.co...

[2]: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/main/docker-compos...

Slashdot, reddit, and HN are similar in that the source code was available. For HN, as part of arc under the Artistic license. All 3 abandoned public source code releases.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/slashcode/

https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki

https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit

While it would likely have zero overlap with the code in use today if you look at the old code Reddit used to publish for voting the model at that point used to have flags/checks for :

I've been trying to host my own instance of Reddit from archived source code on GitHub. Even though I am aware that's probably not a good idea since many dependencies are broken and there's practically no documentation on anything (and it's really old legacy code), but I still decided to give it a shot.

Shh, don't tell spez, the code is already available on the github https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit/

Automod to act based on keywords/domains/etc., ideally using the same language/flags/regex/etc. of the original automod (old code) so that it's possible to use existing code. (For detecting off-topic posts, enforcing a title format, reminding the users to add missing details to post, filtering profanity, shadowbanning spammers, etc.)

Reddit pre enshittification is actually open source so spinning up your own Reddit instance should be trivially easy. I’m very surprised no one did this after the API protests started

https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit

There are already 1:1 reddit clones based on older versions of their software that was open source: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit