
Show HN: Mastodon, a federated microblogging network - gargron
https://mastodon.social
======
riffic
Is this a re-implementation of GNU social/OStatus in Rails? Nice work, I might
have to kick the tires on this a bit.

Folks at organizations you should start looking at running your own social
infrastructure in the same way you run your own email infra. An org such as a
state agency would prefer to own its own namespace, a huge improvement over
the status quo.

~~~
rektide
For everyone's information: GNU Social/OStatus is also known as the Google
Buzz protocol stack. Weird twist of history how GNU ended up covertly becoming
this federated protocol stack.

~~~
niftich
Can you elaborate or provide sources?

AFAIK GNU social's current codebase is a merge [1] between StatusNet and Free
Social, with StatusNet previously known as Laconica [2] and developed by the
same people behind Identi.ca [3], which itself was later re-made into pump.io
[4]. The OStatus protocol, which is one of the several protocols used in GNU
social, originated from the OpenMicroBlogging spec [5] promoted by the
Identi.ca developers.

What's the Buzz connection?

[1]
[https://www.gnu.org/software/social/merge.html](https://www.gnu.org/software/social/merge.html)
[2] [https://git.gnu.io/gnu/gnu-
social/commit/e3a53251c08ce5245f0...](https://git.gnu.io/gnu/gnu-
social/commit/e3a53251c08ce5245f098bb37ca955016d9d57a0) [3]
[https://jason.wordpress.com/2009/07/02/control-
yourself/](https://jason.wordpress.com/2009/07/02/control-yourself/) [4]
[https://lwn.net/Articles/544347/](https://lwn.net/Articles/544347/) [5]
[https://github.com/OStatus/omb-spec](https://github.com/OStatus/omb-spec)

~~~
rektide

      OStatus is an open standard for distributed status updates that references a suite of open protocols including Atom, Activity Streams, PubSubHubbub, Salmon, Webfinger, 
    

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus)

Activity Streams is new, but the rest of these were all Google Buzz protocols.
[https://sites.google.com/a/going-
buzz.com/tech/developers/un...](https://sites.google.com/a/going-
buzz.com/tech/developers/underlying-protocols)

As weird a twist of history as it was that GNU so readily adopted the Google
Buzz protocol stack, it's far more bizarre how completely undocumented and
unmentionable this legacy is.

It's a pity that Salmon is an awful practically SOAP-like opaque envelope,
because I rather like everything else here. But stuffing really good content
inside a base64 envelope is really not ok with me and my expectation that
casually working with a format shouldn't make me want to claw my eyes out.

------
JustSomeNobody
But that name...

"Can you mastodon me?" Ugh.

I don't see this going mainstream with a name like this. I don't think anyone
at NBC is ever going to say, "let's see what's trending on mastodon."

~~~
daveid
Actually, "let's see what's trending on mastodon." doesn't sound wrong to my
ears at all, but maybe that's because I've been around people who say that for
a couple of months.

For reference, the community-decided verb/noun for posting on Mastodon is
"toot" (as in, the elephant sound), so that would be "can you toot me". I
mean. It's ridiculous, but I like it. It's endearing.

~~~
JoshTriplett
"trumpet" would have been more fun, and sound less off-color in casual
conversation.

~~~
adfm
Oddly, "trump" is a euphemism for fart in UK.

~~~
grzm
What does this have to do with the topic at hand other than a common sequence
of five letters?

~~~
detritus
Because it was raised as a concern a couple of posts up in relation to Tooting
a mastodon message?

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ZenoArrow
The GitHub page offers a better introduction IMO:

[https://github.com/Gargron/mastodon](https://github.com/Gargron/mastodon)

Also made me look up the original meaning of Mastodon (can see now that it's
not named after the metal band):

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon)

------
CM30
Looks pretty good from what I've seen. Set up an account for my site, posted a
few messages to test how it works and found that everything seems pretty much
as I'd expect from a Twitter type site.

Gonna download the source and try out an instance at one point too.

However, I do have one question here:

How are you planning to differentiate this from other microblogging platforms
with very similar feature sets and styles? I mean, GNU Social seems to be
catching on a fair bit nowadays, and that feels a lot like this software too.

Is there a plan to make this the most popular 'federated microblogging
network' rather than one of the other twenty or so out there already?

Just wondering.

~~~
RileyKyeden
Mastodon is packed with LGBTQ+ people and furries. This appeals to me in a way
other platforms do not.

~~~
virgil_disgr4ce
r/Mastodon/This instance of Mastodon/

;)

~~~
RileyKyeden
I see a lot of instances popping up within this instance's community, and they
all seem to fit that profile. Might be a biased perspective. :P

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liotier
"GNU social" \- good, I like that protocol suite... But how do I discover
fellow users to fill my subscription list across different sites ? Can I
search across the whole networks ? These are inherently easier with a
centralized service - and they are critical to adoption... How are
decentralized services going to provide functionality to satisfy those needs ?

~~~
daveid
Discovery:

If someone from your instance follows someone remotely, that account is in the
instance's database, and can be searched (we have account search). Furthermore
you'll see their posts in a real-time public timeline if you wish to view
that.

If you're just kickstarting a fresh instance and are alone, yeah, you kinda
have to browse other sites to find people to follow. But then you follow them
(there's also a "remote follow" button across mastodon and GNU social sites
that facilitates this) and you get that benefit again. And you find people who
the people you're following retweet/reblog/boost (whatever you wanna call it).

I mean honestly, it's not like you can immediately find every good account on
Twitter either. It's not much harder or at all imo.

------
udfalkso
Is there some easy way for me to automatically cross-post my twitter posts to
Mastodon?

~~~
buzzybee
Should note that this doesn't work well for anything but the simplest posts
since mentions and image embeds work differently across the two platforms.

~~~
daveid
Images actually work fine! But yes, mentions don't quite "work", i.e. when you
mention someone on twitter and it gets cross-posted to Mastodon, it appears as
a string "@username@twitter.com" which is informative enough but not really
"correct" if you get what I mean.

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zokier
I might be bit dense, but can you browse this thing somehow without first
registering?

~~~
daveid
Sorry, you can't. I kinda forgot that would be a nice addition.

~~~
xj9
forgot? people have been asking you for this feature for ages.

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smkellat
This doesn't play nice federating with the GNU Social codebase. Things that
should travel across simply disappears. It needs more work.

~~~
daveid
What disappears? Let me know @Gargron@mastodon.social or per e-mail
eugen@zeonfederated.com

Edit: Also as a side note, mastodon.social has been federating with GNU social
just fine for more than 6 months, so I'm inclined to believe this is some sort
of confusion

~~~
smkellat
I would ping you except that your server doesn't talk to Quitter.se while the
rest of the GNU Social federation does so just fine. I'm remote-subscribed to
people there yet they don't show up in my timeline. I just tried to remote
follow someone and Quitter.se failed that out.

~~~
daveid
I have multiple quitter.se followers and am following multiple quitter.se
people. Are you sure it's not some sort of temporary issue with quitter.se?
You could ask @hannes2peer@quitter.se (admin of quitter.se)

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RileyKyeden
I have tooted many a toot on this service and intend to continue doing so.

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macawfish
I like this... especially the private feature!!!!

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bachmeier
I signed up and tried it out. The "Public" thing on the right side apparently
can't be shut off. About every third toot has four-letter words. Racism,
sexually inappropriate comments, politics, you get to see it all. I don't see
that working.

~~~
daveid
I added a "back" button to the headers of the public and hashtag timelines
that takes you back to the getting started page, just for you.

~~~
bachmeier
Okay. Thanks. You might want to think about this going forward, given all the
things Twitter has to deal with.

------
cookiecaper
Pretty cool! I also have a prototype microblogging project I'm hoping to
release sometime this year, but it's very early. Information on OStatus seems
scant right now. Can you discuss what's involved with it and why you chose to
use it?

~~~
daveid
Here are all the OStatus specs and RFCs used:
[https://github.com/Gargron/mastodon/wiki/Specs-and-RFCs-
used](https://github.com/Gargron/mastodon/wiki/Specs-and-RFCs-used)

------
mkj
Are there any docs on how they plan to avoid spam from other federated
instances?

~~~
daveid
There are mod tools like sandboxing spam accounts or outright suspending any
account (preventing it from posting and removing all of its data from the db).

~~~
mkj
I guess that won't really scale if a popular federated server (easy to create
fresh accounts) starts attracting spammers?

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Dystopian
This looks really interesting - going to give it a look.

I could almost see it being an internal Slack-style competitor of sorts for an
intranet (if users are looking to "shout" more into the ether of the
community)

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Gys
How many active users ? Like, accessing the platform once a week or more ?

~~~
daveid
I don't do any real tracking except for login times, so here is the best data
i can offer (for mastodon.social exclusively, other Mastodon and GNU social
instances are obviously excluded but should count towards your question
because of federation):

1687 users active in the last 14 days. 16,744 registered accounts on
mastodon.social. 18,347 accounts in total known to this instance. 460,563
statuses in the database, 306,905 created by locally registered users. 173
different Mastodon/GNU social instances known to this instance (i.e. at least
one account from such an instance in the database).

Hopefully that answers your question!

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automathematics
Didn't Twitter use Rails at first and it failed under load?

~~~
daveid
I'm almost certain that Twitter is still using Rails in parts of the stack
(they replaced the messaging bus with Scala, or something of that sort). Most
importantly, a single Mastodon instance is not supposed to grow as big as
Twitter. Lots of smaller instances don't have to deal with the same load as
Twitter alone.

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mrmondo
I'm quite excited about this, as a concept a decentralised twitter meets
diaspora is something that I'd love to see popularised.

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angry-hacker
I'm not sure if I understand, but other (future) sites using the protocol will
have the access to the same data? Meaning my toots will travel to all of the
implementations?

~~~
daveid
Your toots will travel to all your followers, regardless of which site they're
on.

