protocol
Mastodon
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protocol | Mastodon | |
---|---|---|
13 | 1,225 | |
1,782 | 45,916 | |
4.7% | 0.9% | |
6.1 | 10.0 | |
about 1 month ago | 2 days ago | |
JavaScript | Ruby | |
- | GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
protocol
- Scaling Farcaster
- Farcaster is a protocol for building decentralized social apps
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Centralization Possibilities
We have already have a clear stack. there's Gitcoin Passport for sybil resistance, git (and wrappers like Radicle) for version control, Lit PKPs & Gelato for account abstraction, Farcaster/Orbis/Lens for social architecture, OpenStreetMaps for geographic markets, OPStack, etc.
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Nostr.how โ A Complete Guide to Nostr
These services exist outside of the protocol and depend on a few centralized and trusted authorities.
Another solution that is arguably more resistant to capture and censorship would be to use a blockchain to manage user name aliases - like Farcaster is doing with fnames.[1]
[1] https://github.com/farcasterxyz/protocol#22-farcaster-names
- Thoughts on building Web3 social platforms?
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Telegram has stolen my channel's username to sell it on auction
one XMPP server gets big and usernames get squatted and dealt with at the discretion of the server admin.
Only solution is something like how Farcaster does it
https://github.com/farcasterxyz/protocol#3-identity
- Farcaster Protocol
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Mastodon.technology Is Shutting Down
That's sad to hear, but it makes total sense to shut down the server given its sensitive data, rather than hand it off to another person.
Mastodon/ActivityPub is a poor fit for a social network IMHO.
- Accounts should not be tied a single server and their continued maintenance.
- Private data and DMs should be end-to-end encrypted rather than entrusted with a single administrator.
- People don't want to self-host.
The core problem of a lot of social networks comes down to name aliasing, and who controls the name registry. In the case of nostr[1] this is not a problem because everything is using public keys. Another protocol is Farcaster[2] which plans to use a smart contract to maintain a name registry without requiring a single controller.
[1] https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
[2] https://github.com/farcasterxyz/protocol
- Farcaster: A sufficiently decentralized social network
Mastodon
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Alt Text box can't fit one screenshot of text
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
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Open source at Fastly is getting opener
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 worldโs 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; Didnโt Read).
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Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters
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.
- External OpenID Connect Account Takeover by Email Change
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Ask HN: Best practice for posting links to large Mastodon threads?
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?
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CVE-2024-23832 Mastodon Vulnerability: Remote user impersonation and takeover
Fixed in Mastodon v4.2.5 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/releases/tag/v4.2.5
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Unity's Open-Source Double Standard: The Ban of VLC
>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...
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You Can't Follow Me
Mastodon is free and open-source. Go ahead and add the flag:
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING....
- Change Referer value to something generic such as "urn:activitypub:Mastodon"
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Welcome to the public domain, Steamboat Willie
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.
What are some alternatives?
rpmsg-lite - RPMsg implementation for small MCUs
diaspora* - A privacy-aware, distributed, open source social network.
soapbox - Software for the next generation of social media.
Misskey - ๐ An interplanetary microblogging platform ๐
matrix-spec - The Matrix protocol specification
Lemmy - ๐ A link aggregator and forum for the fediverse
multihash-serialise - Haskell libraries for interacting with IPFS
Friendica - Friendica Communications Platform
misskey_ynh - Misskey package for YunoHost
GNU social - GNU social is social communication software for both public and private communications.
nostr - a truly censorship-resistant alternative to Twitter that has a chance of working