I'd like to see more attention put into carving out a subset of Mastodon's functionality that would allow you to host your fediverse node on a static site, à la blog feeds powered by RSS/Atom.<p>The discovery problem can be handled pretty straightforwardly: if you want notifications of replies to your posts, then that's just another feed that you subscribe to—a <i>separate</i> service. You don't exactly <i>need</i> an always-on "instance" providing an inbox endpoint to relay notifications to you.<p>You give up private channels (DMs), but you gain a lot more flexibility. It's a shame that there are so few server (and client) implementations for "the fediverse". We should have at least half as many options as we have in static site generators themselves. (In fact, with this approach, your preferred static site generator could <i>become</i> part of your "client"...)<p>Imagine your corner of the fediverse being reachable at $YOURNAME.github.io.<p>Prior art: Fritter <<a href="https://github.com/beakerbrowser/fritter" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/beakerbrowser/fritter</a>>
> Discoverability has always been a hot topic on Mastodon. Discoverability makes or breaks a platform, as there is nothing more important to retain a new user than to let them find something interesting to stay for, as soon as possible. In 3.5, we bring a new explore page which features currently popular posts, news stories that people share a lot, trending hashtags and follow recommendations. Furthermore, for the first time, we attempt to bring people content in their own language.<p>An algorithm to rank posts and people? Did we learn nothing from twitter?
Great to see new updates!<p>I run a mastodon instance [0] (themed to look like Windows XP). Overall I really enjoy mastodon (and the fediverse in general), it gives the user an opportunity to carve out their own niche through their own instance, while still being able to interact with the overall system.<p>There are still some challenges with setting up your own instance (I couldn't get the docker image working, the documentation for setting up a dev environment could use some improvement, and email confirmation is difficult without using an external service), but think this will improve over time, and there are managed services you can use to run your own instance.<p>[0] <a href="https://lunadon.org/" rel="nofollow">https://lunadon.org/</a>
As a curious bystander, I am very excited about both the social/ideological and technical merits of Mastodon, but I would never use (what appears to be) a Twitter-like format myself. I prefer content-centric over people-centric and medium/long form text over short form. Even Facebook was a better fit for me, in certain situations (primarily private groups) than Twitter is.<p>Does anyone know (1) if the current Twitter-like format is due to an explicit affinity towards it within the community - or due to some other reason and (2) will Mastodon allow for other formats in the future in some shape or form?
> As we value safety, these new features come with their own moderation tools–nothing will show up in trends unless reviewed by one of the server’s moderators first.<p>That sounds like a lot of work (with the most enthusiastic volunteers likely being the most censorious) while doing little to stop someone who updates the content after it has been approved by the moderator.
Still not recommendation system instead of just chronological posts which makes it really impractical to browse when you follow more than 10 people. This is really where Mastodon could shine with open algorithms an end user could choose from instead of proprietary ones like Twitter and al.
Is Mastodon / the fediverse, the peak of composable asychronous communities (and IRC being the peak of synchronous communities)?<p>Just a question I thought of while staring. I really gave Mastodon a try for 6 months and microblogging was just not for me. I like the underlying technology though and feel it really has potential to creating an alternative to all other social networks and maybe even personal websites.
Congratulations! I remember when Mastodon was first posted to HN. It has become a really polished and thriving project since then.<p>I am a bit jaded about the whole Twitter model though. I haven't really found a nice twitter community, and I consider it mostly "write-only" TBH.<p>I wonder if there is an ActivityPub application that is more like the early Facebook or MySpace. Not so much centered around the feed, but around the profile page. You curate a really nice profile page, add info about you and selected posts. And it can also serve as a landing page for people who are not on the network. You can add people to "collect" them as friends and get updates and chat with them, but it is not about getting a feed with all their tweets. I think I saw a federated VK clone the other day, which goes a little bit in that direction.
I was wanting to host a Mastodon instance to use as a mail/chat/blog/publish/gallery service for myself, but based on an old (from 2017) official document(1) that I found, running a Mastodon instance doesn't come cheap.<p>1: <a href="https://github.com/mastodon/documentation/blob/9efa9b69d8dc44bf45b7becadfecf67869d67f7c/Running-Mastodon/Resources-needed.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mastodon/documentation/blob/9efa9b69d8dc4...</a><p>Their new document stopped providing such information now. I wonder how things improved during the years, does it demands less RAM now?<p>Long story: my plan was to put the instance on one of my Raspberry Pi which got 2GB of RAM. But based on the old information, 2GB of hardware RAM is dangerously close to the limit, so I waited to see if things improves somehow (say Ruby suddenly become more memory efficient, I can dream too).
I'm surprised to see the iOS app ship without a local/federated stream. The local stream especially seems central to the communities that are built with mastodon.
Back when I tried mastodon a couple years ago, the friction required to interact with users and content from other instances was incredibly annoying to the point of turning me off completely. Favoriting something should not take more than a single click regardless if it's from my instance or not. This doesn't appear to be addressed (was it already addressed in an earlier version?)
The example image of the post is carefully done to make appear one side of the political spectrum worse than the other. I don't like this stuff. Specially if this people is aiming for an open place.
Broken Link 404 Not Found. There is not an easy way to send feedback on that article so will leave this here. The text "beta-testing our official Android app" links to <a href="https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2022/03/mastodon-3.5/android-beta" rel="nofollow">https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2022/03/mastodon-3.5/android-b...</a> which is a 404.<p>There is a <a href="https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2022/02/official-mastodon-for-android-app-is-coming-soon/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2022/02/official-mastodon-for-...</a> post.<p>The full context is "just started beta-testing our official Android app with our Patreon supporters."
I self-host a number of products for use between myself and a small group of friends. I like the idea of Mastodon, but due to its requirement of needing an email server, it's honestly more trouble than it's worth to try and host it myself.
i think selective following is the future of moderation, mainly because nobody wants to look at sick crap all day long.<p>brings up the question of having to host the bad content though. this makes me think the client server model for decentralized networks is just dead in the water.<p>selective following + each user just holding their own data on the client = so many problems solved
Adding the editing of posts is a good feature addition, in my opinion. I wonder if posts that have been edited display that they've been edited, though.