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Comment by jarjoura | Hacker News Reader

I also agree with the OP. My personal take on the experience so far:

Joining a server feels like I'm hanging out in someone else's backyard. There's this feeling that at any point I could be asked to leave if I overstay my welcome. The server I'm attached to is run by someone who seems very friendly and so far I'm enjoying the community they're trying to build. However, I am struggling to wrap my head around this weird intersection of public broadcast over a semi-public (someone's backyard) space.

Unlike Reddit or Discord where I can partake in multiple forums through my single account, my entire public persona on Mastodon is tied to the server I'm on. It really limits what I want to share as I don't feel as free to talk openly about any topic.

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IMO Mastodon will settle like email has. A handful of mega servers and a smaller group of people who run their own for their use only.

Owners of medium sized servers will tire of the maintenance and moderation.

I’m hopeful for this. Email has managed to survive this consolidation without the big providers somehow capturing the technology and squeezing it. I still feel like I could change my email provider at any point. There’s even some options for keeping your address.

I like the idea of leveraging some profit-motivated actors to make the experience smooth, but the open and federated nature helps ensure they don’t “own” the entire network.

Moderation is less of an issue with email, though. Very few people have been banned by their email provider, but how many users have gotten moderated on Facebook and Twitter?

> Very few people have been banned by their email provider

I mean, the contents of my spam folder did originate with someone.

Sure, but for email it's only a few people creating all the spam, which most users would never end up doing.

I’d originally hoped to run my own, but I’d been expecting to see a variety of implementations to pick from and only found the official Ruby server.

Am I missing something, and there are other implementations out there that interoperate? Or is the reference implementation of this standard the only implementation?

Disclaimer: I’ve only been looking into this for a few days, so I may say something incorrect.

My understanding is that there is a single Mastodon implementation, but there are a number of similar projects which can interoperate by sharing data via ActivityPub to become federated. Some of these other projects implement all/most/some of the Mastodon REST API so that GUI clients (phone apps, etc) can be used for reading and posting. There was an article on LWN recently which listed several of these with some commentary [1].

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/916154/

There are others, Pleroma was explicitly designed to be lightweight for small nodes, written in Elixir and thus running on the battle tested Earlang ecosystem BEAM VM. Also have heard and run across a few instances of Misskey which runs on node.js. Both use Postgres and I see from the install instructions the latter also uses Redis. Have heard of others as well but have no idea at all about them, a search on the above two backends will find you more.

You've also got some choices in front ends, I know Pleroma supports several. I strongly recommend not using Soapbox for a variety of reasons unless you really like its UI.

Yes there are a variety of implementations - perhaps you were searching "Mastodon" (the name of a single implementation) instead of "ActivityPub" (the name of the protocol)?

https://github.com/BasixKOR/awesome-activitypub#services

should get you started!

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