Hacker News Reader

Comment by zimpenfish | Hacker News Reader

> there are folks (and I forget the name, doh) working on a Mastodon compatible alternative that doesn’t use Ruby and Postgres

There's Akkoma (Elixir, Postgres) or GotoSocial (Go, SQLite) or Takahe (Python, Postgres) and probably some I've not even encountered as yet.

'KomoD and 'RobotToaster remind me of Pleroma (Elixir, Postgres) which Akkoma was forked from.

View on HN

From

https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/

> Federation Issues > > Since every ActivityPub server implementation has a slightly different interpretation of the protocol, some servers don't quite federate properly with GoToSocial yet ...

How's the specification/validation effort for ActivityPub progressing?

https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/

The only servers I currently have an issue with federating from my GtS instance are Honk instances and that's because (I'm reasonably sure) of a Honk weirdness.

YMMV, obvs.

There's also Pleroma

Some Mastodon instances block all Pleroma instances because they don't like the developer's politics though so you have to keep that in mind

Just my experience, but I think it might also be the type of users/instances.

Haven't had much trouble now (perhaps my current instance blocks pleroma), but a few years ago I dropped Mastodon because I was getting the same amount of attrition than on Twitter. And every time, is was a Pleroma user. I even voted on a ticket to create 'local-only' posts, because I didn't wanna handle Pleroma users...

If anything is going to strangle the usability of federated social networking, it's petty or indiscriminate server blocking. I just saw a popular tips account suggesting that everyone running a smaller server should block mastodon.social if it grew over 50% of the active userbase.

Pleroma was the first ActivityPub server I tried running for myself. I picked it for technical reasons. I switched from it to Mastodon for UX reasons. I don't know anything about the politics of either lead developer, but I think both have crappy design decisions around how they display images by default.

Of course, block anything you want on your single-user server, and any persistent sources of abusive behavior if you're running servers for other people.

I was just adding some extra information/personal experience to the message I was replying to - and mentioning that yeah, 6 years ago, that was my experience - that some folks block based on disagreements with developers, but others, based on their experiences with users. Same that happens in a different degree and reasons, with misskey

But you seem to want to just confirm stereotypes and proclaim you used Pleroma and then be rude and put words in my mouth, so just go ahead.

I probably should have written a separate reply to the other comment that talked more about the politics of the developers.

The fact that it was 6 years ago is relevant. It may well have been the case that Pleroma was an extremely strong indicator of toxicity then, but it's probably not fair to assume that today.

A lot of Pleroma users have different politics than Mastodon users because of the history of infighting between the developers, but this doesn't change the fact that people making stereotypes about the views of users based on the software their instance uses 1) hurts single user instances of Pleroma which are much easier to run than Mastodon and 2) makes the whole ActivityPub network more toxic and cliquish

If one software type is giving you more "attrition" than the others you might be part of a clique

That said I don't know why anyone would assume that the Fediverse would be better moderated than Twitter when the architecture of the protocol makes regulating "attrition" harder, not easier.

> If one software type is giving you more "attrition" than the others you might be part of a clique

At that time, it was just the fact that I was a windows user.

And once because I posted a pic of me watching anime on my TV, and someone asked how I got screenshots for posting them on mastodon/blog later. User was definitely not pleased that I mentioned I got from /r/anime discussion thread for each episode

But yeah, I'm definitely part of a clique of normies that just wanna use a social network to chat with people

Anyone have any insight into the state of Takahe? Progress has slowed down a lot in the last two months.

I can't speak for Andrew, but my contributions to Takahe tapered off due to work killing my motivation to code after hours. It's also been feature complete enough for how I use it for many months.

The biggest missing feature that others want is identity migration. I hacked in support to get my identity migrated to Takahe, but it's not something releasable to the general public.

Answering my own question: https://aeracode.org/2023/04/29/refactor-treat/

“I had taken two months off from developing Takahē in the run up to PyCon US; both due to pressures at work (and then, more recently, half the company being laid off around me), as well as not quite being sure what I wanted to build, exactly.”

Reply on news.ycombinator.com