Rob Fahrni

Matt Birchler

I continue to be flummoxed by the popular take that Bluesky is doing so much better than Mastodon. Mastodon has 2 million active users and is built on ActivityPub, which means it also communicates with other services that use the same protocol. Oh, and Threads will bring its 100+ million users to ActivityPub soon(ish).

No, Mastodon isn’t “dead” or “dying.”

Look, this platform isn’t something corporations control and isn’t something that needs to make money as a centralized service. It’s run by the people. I run my instance — well, masto.host does — and I don’t require my friends to pay me a monthly fee, some have sent me money to keep it going (thanks Steven!) but overall the $20US per month is cheap for me to have my own instance with a few friends on it.

Anywho, it’s all about the people, not about corporate profits so who cares how many users there are on the network? I don’t.

Elon Code Review

“Most code is reviewed in Github, Gitlab or somewhere online, but that is too efficient. Why not print out your code and submit the printout by fax for review by Elon Musk personally!”

Why not get Elon to personally review your code! It’s a great use of his time and terrific way to line his pockets because the man is leveraged up to his eyeballs! 🤣

Be patient as you create your new Mastodon account. There are many different servers to choose from. If you have the means and feel adventurous start an instance all your own with some friends! I have one and I host it for $6US/month at Masto.host. They have amazing service, my site is always up, and upgraded to the latest versions of Mastodon so I don’t have to worry about a thing. They also scale up so you can have a small group, like I do, or you can have thousands of users.

Big or small it all works together to form a single community with different interests and viewpoints. It’s like the internet was intended to work! A bunch of different sites all talking to each other to form a collective. There is no central authority, like you have with Twitter.

echo: ”Uh I just got DMed by the COO of Tumblr asking about hiring contractors to make us fully #indieweb compliant, and possibly even #fediverse integration. Anyone out there looking for work?”

How cool is that?

It would be really wonderful to see more blogging systems embrace Indie Web and Fediverse integration.

In the end it could mean seeing Tumblr, Twitter, Mastodon, and WordPress all rolling up into your favorite social network.

Love the idea of it!

Dave Winer: “A Twitter-like webservice at AWS. With better docs and a JavaScript API that doesn’t require developer to run a server (big deal). Effortless install on Digital Ocean.”

The post goes into more depth than the above blurb. I picked this bit because some of these things already exist.

There is an open source software called Mastodon that federates with other Mastodon server instances and is easy to host without running a server.

It also supports ActivityPub. Which will let you publish via a news feed. Manton Reese, founder of Micro.blog, has written how he made it possible for Micro.blog to appear as a Mastodon server so you could follow a Micro.blog timeline as if it were a native Mastodon timeline. It’s quite nice.

As far as running a Mastodon instance goes, I have one. I run it on a host called Masto.host for €5 — just over $5US — per month. If you’re interested you can visit Curmudgeon Cafe, my instance. I’m @fahrni@curmudgeon.cafe if you’re interested in following.

Mastodon is also an open source project.

Check out fediverse.info to locate an instance that’s right for you, if you don’t want your own. 😃

Back to Dave

I believe Dave could federate Scripting News with Mastodon using Activity Pub. It would, in essence, turn Scripting News into a Twitter-like instance. I’d be able to follow Scripting News from my Mastodon timeline. I’d like that.

I have a sneaking suspicion that whatever the Twitter Bluesky initiative comes up with will be over engineered and favor Twitter above all other considerations. I hope they’re considering open protocols. Mastodon is built on them as are many blogging tools and blogs.

More

In a recent episode of Pivot, Scott Galloway says projects like Mastodon, Truth Social, Parler, Gab, and GETTR have all failed.

I somewhat agree, if your only barometer is shareholder value.

Mastodon has succeeded if only to provide an open alternative to Twitter that allows anyone to join and/or create their own instance that can participate with the larger network.

Another interesting point: Mastodon was used by Gab and Truth Social as the underpinning of their respective networks. The technology works. I’d imagine both networks have made significant changes to their code bases and they’ve failed to execute as a business. That is not the fault of Mastodon.