I disagree with the current CEO of Mastodon about his stance on mid-sized instances. We don't want to be run in isolation, we are part of the Fediverse. "Normal users just want the default", he can repeat that as many times as he wants, it doesn't make it true because of that.
Diversity is the DNA of the Fediverse and Mastodon is just one part of the whole. Thousands of people spend their time and money to make it successful. Anyone who dismisses that and single-handedly tries to market the Fediverse as a Mastodon brand and use "crowding out" techniques to prevent users from even being encouraged to choose an instance from a diversity will ultimately fail.
I am super disappointed with the direction Mastodon Corporation is taking. If there is not enough headwind here soon, then sooner or later it will lead to a schism.
So its done! I finally released a fairly easy to install (from scratch) Hugo based Static Site generator with full ActivityPub support.
It has step-by-step instructions on how to set it up for your own blog or static website.
One of the coolest features for me, other than having your static site blog posts show up as posts in the Fediverse is the support for interacting with those posts. Any replies you leave, likes, or boosts will show up in the "comments" section of the website on the page associated with the post. How cool is that!
I was looking for a reply in a post earlier this year but then found it's gone. This is kinda a downside, I wish old replies could be re-fetched, never thought it's "impossible to undo".
It could work in a way it would backfill the replies once the post is accessed, but tech-wise I understand if it's not possible.
Question for admins: Are you doing something to circumvent this?
During my one year activity on the #Fediverse I've now seen at least four instance admins quitting from being an admin or shutting down their server. Half of these cases were admins being dickheads and the rest of them were mostly about users being dickheads leading admin getting burned out.
Both outcomes are unfortunate, but the latter makes me sad. Why do we have to harass and doxx an admin here for such pseudetical reasons like extensive open text search feature? I don't get humans sometimes.
I repeat: We are not free from toxicity on the Fediverse. Be kind. Make a chance.
If we ignore the notion whether it should, what would make the Fediverse or Mastodon easier to approach for the majority of people? Getting rid of tech talk around the platform? Better, world class user interface? Somehow dismantling the whole domain and server structure? Just calling it Mastodon as one service instead of a Mastodon instance with domain, obfuscating it somehow? Just focusing on mastodon.social and ignore the rest? Acting as centralized service on the outside? Making it seamless via features and improvements? Is there any silver bullet?
I am not against the current state of things, on the contrary. Just curious and trying to think outside this box… of instances and other techy stuff. Could it even be easier to comprehend, or do we just have to continue educating people on the matter?
This is VERY bad news for users of small instances like myself.
I do understand the reasoning behind it, and I'm not sure there is a good alternative. But it sure feels a bit like a deja vu from the self hosted email days ...
Currently sleeping the sleep of the righteous, @andrew was up way too late building tools to fend off the current wave of fedi spam, playing whack-a-mole with bad accounts, and getting fedi friends up and running with their own blocklists.
I’d like to convene a discussion this week or next to do a mini retro on this attack and some #designthinking work around fedi spam fighting tools. If you’re interested in the discussion, @ me your email or send one to spamretro at hypatia dot ca and I’ll loop you in on it 🙏
Would love to have a proper UR/UX person on the call, I’m a mere amateur at that part 😅
metalhead.club will place commercial advertising in Wacken!
Have I lost my mind? Maybe. metalhead.club will probably be the first Fediverse instance to place advertising in "real life"! I'm super excited about this experiment 🤘
After 8 months working on Mastodon, in particular on infrastructure for mastodon.social and mastodon.online, I have been able to articulate my vision for the future of Trust & Safery for Mastodon : https://renchap.com/blog/post/evolving_mastodon_trust_and_safety/
We need better tools to go along the growth of the Fediverse, and they need to enable multiple instances to work together on those topics and keep our loved network safe for everyone!
Any idea why tootctl search deploy crashes in part Importing InstancesIndex 2700/6715551 to:
PG::UndefinedColumn: ERROR: column "id" does not exist (ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid)
LINE 1: SELECT "id" FROM "instances" WHERE "instances"."id" IN...
Fedi on Fire first beta is now released! I just had to try and do it... Watch those endless Fediverse posts flow! :meow_hearteyes: Check it out at https://fedionfire.stream
We had a redis crash that lead to a downtime since 20:40 CEST. Due the relaxing after 6 hours of maintenance today, we just noticed the problem yet. But the problem should be fixed permanently now. #mastoadmin
Mastodon favorite star ⭐ interaction is changing to the heart ❤️ in the upcoming Mastodon version.
With Mastodon Bird UI I have already built it with heart interaction support à la the birdie site in the past despite it having the star as default and I'm most often than not going to follow the official Mastodon direction. But I still want to ask, what do you think?
There will be a downtime of chaos.social for some maintenance starting in the next few minutes. We will do some upgrades of our systems, reboots and more (including the mastodon v4.2.0 update).
Use this downtime and enjoy some time outside! #mastoadmin