Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

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Here are three specifically interesting things about Takahē:

1. The "multiple domains" feature. I'm running my own Mastodon instance right now purely so I can have my simonwillison.net domain as my identifier there (and protect myself from losing my identifier if the server I am using shuts down). This feels pretty wasteful! I'd much rather be able to point my domain at a Takahē instance shared with some of my friends, each with their own domains for it.

2. It's a Django app that's taking full advantage of the async features that have been added in the most recent releases of that framework. Async is a perfect match for ActivityPub due to the need to send thousands of outbound HTTP requests when publishing a message. And Takahē creator Andrew Godwin is the perfect person to build this because he's been driving the integration of async into Django for the past four years: https://www.aeracode.org/2018/06/04/django-async-roadmap/

3. The way it handles task queueing is super interesting. I've not fully got my head around it yet but it's the part of the codebase called Stator and it's modeled on things like the Kubernetes reconciliation loop - Andrew wrote a bit more about that here: https://www.aeracode.org/2022/11/14/takahe-new-server/ - Stator code is here: https://github.com/jointakahe/takahe/blob/main/stator/runner...

This is really interesting. Thanks for writing this comment and sharing.

Async is good for lots of IO work and managing independent tasks with low coupling.

I am interested in task scheduling and asynchronous code I am interested in programming language development and parallelism and simultaneity without parallelism and cooperative and preemptive scheduling.

As an experiment inspired by Protothreads (a C library for implementing cooperative multitasking with a switch statement) I recently implemented async/await in Java as a giant switch statement and a while loop.

Providing that each coroutine only runs once, the amount of memory used shall not grow. The goal is to be stackless.

I began writing a programming language that looks similar to JavaScript but targets an imaginary interpreter that is multithreaded. I hope to think of how to represent async await so that the high level language can target the interpreter. I need to think of the code I need to codegen to implement async/await.

I played around with an C++ coroutines but someone told me that the approach I used is not C++20.

Code is at https://GitHub.com/samsquire/multiversion-concurrency-contro...

The reconciliation loop idea sounds interesting.

You can use your domain on Mastodon via WebFinger, you don’t need to necessarily self host it.

That's what I'm doing right now - my personal site is https://simonwillison.net/ and serves WebFinger - my Mastodon instance is https://fedi.simonwillison.net/ which is hosted by https://masto.host/ (just because I don't want to sysadmin it).

The problem is that you can't have multiple domains point to a single Mastodon instance. I'd like to share my single instance with friends who can bring their own domain name.

Basically the problem is that current Mastodon only supports single settings for the LOCAL_DOMAIN and WEB_DOMAIN.

More details on how mine works here: https://til.simonwillison.net/mastodon/custom-domain-mastodo...

There is an open GitHub issue to add that functionality! If anyone is able to help your work would be appreciated!

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/2668

Ahh, okay, this makes more sense now - appreciate the breakdown!

I know of an organization that just advertised their new Mastodon instance as being at social.[domain].com. Is it too late now for them to start using WebFinger and advertise Mastodon handles at simply [domain].com?

They would have to change all their addresses, but the advertise account change thing might be enough depending on need

Perhaps naive but is it possible to create some sort of Mastodon proxy that exists independent of any specific instance? Rather than run your own instance or point to a shared instance, a proxy could be a fairly simple system that uses DNS records (?) to route requests to the appropriate instance -- much like email.

Unfortunately that doesn't quite work with out-of-the-box Mastodon.

I'm running a bit of a proxy at https://simonwillison.net/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acc... but it still needs to point to my own dedicated instance, just because Mastodon can't have multiple domains pointed at a single instance of the software yet.

I'm using this pattern (also shared by Andrew, before he started to spin up Takahē) https://aeracode.org/2022/11/01/fediverse-custom-domains/

Found Andrew Godwin on mastodon: @andrew@aeracode.org

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