15 items tagged “mastodon”
2023
Guppe Groups. This is a really neat mechanism for helping build topic-oriented communities on Mastodon: follow @any-group-name@a.gup.pe to join (or create) a group, then that account will re-broadcast any messages from people in that group who mention the group in their message.
I found it via the histodons group. I was pondering how something like this might work this recently, so it’s great to see someone has built it already. # 26th January 2023, 7:45 pm
Jortage Communal Cloud. An interesting pattern that’s emerging in the Mastodon / Fediverse community: Jortage is “a communal project providing object storage and hosting”. Each Mastodon server needs to host copies of files—not just for their users, but files that have been imported into the instance because they were posted by other people followed by that instance’s users. Jortage lets multiple instances share the same objects, reducing costs and making things more efficient. I like the idea that multiple projects like this can co-exist, improving the efficiency of the overall network without introducing single centralized services. # 24th January 2023, 11:23 pm
Wildebeest (via) New project from Cloudflare, first quietly unveiled three weeks ago: “Wildebeest is an ActivityPub and Mastodon-compatible server”. It’s built using a flurry of Cloudflare-specific technology, including Workers, Pages and their SQLite-based D1 database. # 23rd January 2023, 12:03 am
Retiring Pinafore (via) Nolan Lawson built Pinafore, which became my default Mastodon client on both desktop and mobile over the past month. He thoughtfully explains why he’s ending his involvement in the project—and why, for trust reasons, he’s not planning on handing over the reigns to someone else. Pinafore is everything I want a good SPA to be—it loads fast, works offline and packs a whole lot of functionality into a tiny package. I’m sad to see Nolan’s involvement come to end—it’s a superb piece of software. # 10th January 2023, 2:05 am
2022
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!
[... 916 words]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.
[... 1534 words]... 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
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.
[... 1546 words]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