nomulus VS Mastodon

It's possible to register at the root, but ICANN has disallowed it for gTLDs (countries see ccTLDs as TLDs they "own" so ICANN isn't interested in trying to impose too many rules on them - http://ai. )

And companies have definitely purchased their own TLD for use cases that don't violate ICANN. For example:

https://blog.youtube

https://applecard.apple

https://pki.goog/

https://goo.gle

and of course https://registry.google / https://blog.google which was the domain submissed.

https://github.com/google/nomulus

That's at least 10 engineers maintaining one component. Add in SRE and product executives, you are looking at expenses in the two digit millions minimum.

The decision is definitely short sighted but somebody high up no longer wants it as a loss leader.

I don't know what to say other than that my experience here is precisely the opposite of yours. Different areas of the company? I use a LOT of third party libraries in the course of my employment, and third_party in my experience is full of legitimate third party libraries, not ones that are developed by Google.

Anyway, here's the list of dependencies for my project. There's a lot of third-party stuff in it: https://github.com/google/nomulus/blob/master/dependencies.g...

Indeed that is correct. For more information see:

https://registry.google

https://nomulus.foo (our open source software that runs our TLDs)

You can escalate to legal for edge cases, but you should be able to handle base cases yourself. As an example, I work at Google on an Apache 2.0-licensed open source project, and we have dozens of third party dependencies: https://github.com/google/nomulus/blob/master/core/build.gra...

It wouldn't remotely scale across Google if we had to escalate to legal every single time we pulled in a new dependency. Instead, there's a company-wide allowlist of accepted software licenses, and you only need legal help for exceptions beyond that.

So yes, we do have to know some basics of software licensing. It's just part of being a SWE.

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....