Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Items tagged mastodon in 2022

Filters: Year: 2022 × mastodon × Sorted by date


However, with millions of new active users rushing into Mastodon, I’m forced to reevaluate that. I think I may have become too focused on what I saw of as the limits of a federated setup (putting yourself into someone else’s fiefdom), without recognizing that if it started to take off (as it has), it would become easier and easier for people to set up their own instances, allowing those who are concerned about setting up in someone else’s garden the freedom to set up their own plot of land.

Mike Masnick # 22nd December 2022, 10:56 am

Playing with ActivityPub (via) Tom MacWright describes his attempts to build the simplest possible ActivityPub publication—for a static site powered by Jekyll, where he used Netlify functions to handle incoming subscriptions (storing them in PlanetScale via their Deno API library) and wrote a script which loops through and notifies all of his subscriptions every time he publishes something new. # 10th December 2022, 12:58 am

Understanding a Protocol. Andrew’s latest notes on how ActivityPub and Mastodon work under the hood, based on his extensive development work building out Takahē. # 6th December 2022, 12:50 am

Scaling Mastodon: The Compendium (via) Hazel Weakly’s collection of notes on scaling Mastodon, covering PostgreSQL, Sidekiq, Redis, object storage and more. # 29th November 2022, 5:46 am

Weeknotes: Implementing a write API, Mastodon distractions

Everything is so distracting at the moment. The ongoing Twitter catastrophe, the great migration (at least amongst most of the people I pay attention to) to Mastodon, the FTX calamity. It’s been very hard to focus!

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Tracking Mastodon user numbers over time with a bucket of tricks

Mastodon is definitely having a moment. User growth is skyrocketing as more and more people migrate over from Twitter.

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... it [ActivityPub] is crucially good enough. Perfect is the enemy of good, and in ActivityPub we have a protocol that has flaws but, crucially, that works, and has a standard we can all mostly agree on how to implement—and eventually, I hope, agree on how to improve.

Andrew Godwin # 19th November 2022, 4:02 pm

Home invasion: Mastodon’s Eternal September begins. Hugh Rundle’s thoughtful write-up of the impact of the massive influx of new users from Twitter on the existing Mastodon community. If you’re new to Mastodon (like me) you should read this and think carefully about how best to respectfully integrate with your new online space. # 11th November 2022, 12:47 am

Mastodon is just blogs

And that’s great. It’s also the return of Google Reader!

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It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

Elon Musk laid off about half of Twitter this morning. There are many terrible stories emerging about how this went down, but one that particularly struck me was that he laid off the entire accessibility team. For me this feels like a microcosm of the whole situation. Twitter’s priorities are no longer even remotely aligned with my own.

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Nikodemus’ Guide to Mastodon (via) I’ve been reading a bunch of different Mastodon guides and this one had pretty much exactly the information I needed to see when I first started out. # 5th November 2022, 4:18 am