• 18 Posts
  • 223 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • i’m pretty excited for fedify since i’m unsure if there has been any other activitypub abstraction that feels as comprehensive as it seems right now (from a brief skim, anyway).

    one thing i had in mind ever since i first skimmed the docs some time ago is this:

    federation.setActorDispatcher("/users/{handle}", async (ctx, handle) => {
    

    i would really recommend you to NOT tell people to use handles here. i assume this is just naming and the framework doesn’t actually require a handle there, but documentation matters and if you follow on the footsteps of mastodon, pleroma, lemmy, and friends everyone who follows your docs will lose the ability to change usernames down the line without more pain than it’s worth (and yes, there are software out there that allow it right now! please do not build fedi software assuming usernames are immutable jsut because mastodon doesn’t let people do it)

    just like how you wouldn’t use a natural key in a database, you should tell people to use a surrogate key like an autoincrement id or a uuid on the actor IDs, as they’re effectively permanent. while it may be probably fine for a quickstart thing like this to omit that, a lot of permanent codebases do start up by following these kinds of guides, and nudging people to do the correct thing when it’s not that hard is always a good idea IMO






  • while i don’t have any specific opinions about this that other people haven’t addressed, i just want to flag up something;

    How this could be enforced? No voting from the All and/or Local feed. Seems easy and straight forward.

    this seems unenforcable. as in, you can’t really tell where someone discovered a post from. yeah you can just remove the buttons from those views clientside and it’ll probably work for the majority of cases, but alternate clients or modifications to lemmy-ui can simply put the buttons back in (or in cases of unmaintained or differently opinionated clients, just not remove the buttons at all). the backend can’t really differentiate which view a vote comes from. federation especially can’t differentiate which view a vote comes from.







  • mastodon doesn’t “discover” akkoma content and won’t show anything unless you’re following a user from there, which kinda sucks.

    I mean – that’s how all of them work. Even Lemmy. Unless your instance administrator joins relays (which have tradeoffs between privacy / effectiveness of blocking) your instance is only ever aware of posts from followed people (and reply threads followed people are involved in)

    (also MUCH lighter on server resources, compared to most other twitter-like alternatives)

    Mastodon is just unusually heavy, really. Even Misskey & forks are lighter than Masto on the server side (preferring being bloated on the client instead)


  • Mastodon feels like a fucking funeral.

    You’re clearly nowhere near the good parts, then.

    In my experience, once when you find your way into the correct circles the microblog-verse makes the “shitposting” of Lemmy look like r/memes. I do agree that discoverability could be better though, it took me 4-5 months before I got the hang of it. And now I barely check Lemmy despite my Lemmy account being older than my earliest microblog account (under this name, anyway).

    One important thing is that your instance matters quite a bit more than here. Starting on a large general purpose instance (especially if it’s mastodon.social) and just following Large Accounts and Nobody Else like most people recommend for some reason is just setting yourself up for disappointment. Instead, get on a smaller interest-specific instance (rule of thumb: the weirder the domain the better your experience will be!) and follow the local timeline (and on good software, the bubble/recommended timelines). And post stuff/interact with people. Don’t be that one person that does nothing but boost news bots and occasionally butt into replies of people asking rhetorical questions they already know the answer for.

    (Perhaps Lemmy is better at news or whatever, I wouldn’t know as I block all news communities I can find – I just don’t see the point as all the discussion around most news ends up predictable, unproductive (not that internet communities necessarily need to be “productive”), and unnecessarily angry)

    Also in a world with usable™ Misskey forks and Akkoma I think the limitations of Mastodon the software are really starting to show, and I urge anyone who’s been disappointed in Mastodon to try other microblog software. (Quotes are already a thing if you know where to look! So are emoji reactions, because people have more emotions than :star:)







  • some ISPs may be blocking cat box because there’s a significant amount of porn being uploaded on there, but that’ll happen with any file host as open as catbox

    hosting files, especially videos, are expensive (hence why most instances disable video uploads) and, if public, has a hefty moderation workload, so anything of reasonable size (and isn’t personal) will end up either enshittified a la imgur or die.

    and we shouldn’t expect everyone to have their own webservers just to share their silly stuff on the net. this is a difficult problem to solve