Mastodon.social has over 150k users, and there are other large non-Japanese instances. [1] After the SESTA / FOSTA bills, switter.at also became a huge instance for sex workers.
The instance banning thing is a huge problem and it’s not really being talked about much. The only thing you can do really is sign up on an instance like niu.moe that doesn’t filter besides illegal content.
The challenge is: Many of the servers which block other servers will block servers solely because they don't also block servers. "Free speech zones" are considered servers that should be blocked by the most social justice inclined servers. So it's fairly difficult to find a server that can, indeed, talk with everyone in the fediverse.
I don't think that's inherently a problem, decentralization allows people to segment themselves off, and that is okay.
I've found that such servers are usually not worth federating with, though I usually silence these instances instead of full blocking them.
These instances are rare, the bigger problem as administrator is to find and media-block the instances that post NSFW or content illegal in your jurisdiction (switter, most japanese instances...)
Also bot spam if it occurs and the admin on the other end doesn't care...
What would be more interesting as a number is active users.
For example, I've got an account at mastodon.social, but last time I used it is over a month ago and before that there had been several months of inactivity.
When I last looked at my friend list and follower list on mastodon it seemed like most people treated mastodon like that.
mastodon.social has around 10,000 weekly active users (https://mastodon.social/api/v1/instance/activity). Switter is about 2x that. Other instances are bigger or smaller. Pawoo (The largest Japanese instance) has 30,000 but the French & English-speaking fediverse tends to be a little more spread out among smaller servers, so these numbers aren't exactly directly comparable.
Define "pointless". Each word has its own etymology, and if we're going to be honest here, the different spellings aren't _that_ complicated. Take it up with English's ancestors for borrowing words from many different languages, and then with more recent ancestors for the great vowel shift, among other things leading to change.
Language is never going to make sense. It's not prescriptive- we just make changes, arbitrarily, sometimes due to mistakes, and it either catches on or it doesn't. Trying to "fix" language is an impossible task because no one is making the rules. English in particular doesn't have a language council making decisions, unlike say, Korean. It doesn't matter anyways because "Standard English" is quite different than day to day conversation, and even in formal settings it's based on stylistic guidelines, not hard rules.
Just let it be- devising an _arbitrary_ method of attempting to corral an entire language is an impossible task. And any work would be undone within one generation anyways since languages evolve. Esperanto, a manufactured language, has already seen linguistic changes by its native speakers (kids who were taught it growing up).
Something that HN readers often don't understand is that being an engineer or having advanced understanding of a field does not equate having an understanding of linguistics, despite being a native speaker of a language. Merely striking out letters from words doesn't make a language or its spelling any simpler...
I got a client from attending my local monthly meetup group, and I got emailed today about work from someone I met at a local conference (and who goes to the local meetup also).
I don't have a degree or anything, I just have experience with Ruby on Rails.
You don't need to revert your commits if you made them on the wrong branch. [1]
Additionally, you don't need to do anything other than forking the repo on Github. [2]
Git is a bit clunky, but it's also really powerful. It's a tool like anything else that we have to learn- what better alternative is there for version control?. There are some attempts at abstractions, like Git Legit. [3]
Yes, I appreciate git's power. That's why I suggest a layer on top. It's just that for many ordinary use cases, the workflow is too complex. I'm sure that for e.g. the Linux kernel, that power is essential. Thanks for your links.
> I just find it strange how developer-hostile twitter is, considering the community it once fostered.
Think about the money and it's not so strange. Everyone has a price.
I'm not saying it's right, but it's not a mystery. The got big off the backs of others and they've been screwing them over ever since. People building stuff on top of Twitter are crazy. They've been developer hostile for years and years now.
I’ve been meaning to start my own Pleroma instance due do the excessive hardware requirements of the Mastodon client. How would you compare the two projects since you’ve used both?
So currently, choosing Mastodon vs Pleroma boils down to what you care more about: performance/less complexity, or more features/maturity.
Mastodon is really nice, but it's fairly intensive. Precompiling the rails/webpack assets in particular made my tiny VPS choke, even with 4GB of memory I believe. It also requires Sidekiq and other services [1].
Pleroma is newer and written in Elixir/Phoenix purely as an API. It only has itself as a dependency, and it's lean enough to run on a Raspberry Pi. It offers two frontends, pleroma-fe and mastofe, the latter is a port of Mastodon's UX.
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Features wise, Pleroma doesn't really have a lot beyond the basic functionality of subscribing to people, posting, etc. There aren't real moderation tools (yet), since it's mostly a weekend project for the core devs. Blocking instances requires an IP block still, I think.
Mastodon wins features-wise, hands down. But some things aren't really easy to reconfigure- since the frontend is baked in, changing things like the post character limit (500 chars) is tedious. In pleroma it's a simple config file change.
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I like Pleroma personally but it's not for everyone (yet). I plan on contributing more soon to help change that.
I also was only running single user instances so I can't really discuss scaling. @technowix@niu.moe [2] would be better to ask about that, considering their instance has ~3k users [3].
Mastodon and Pleroma are both part of the Fediverse [2]. They work with any software that works with OStatus and the newer ActivityPub. This includes things like GNUSocial, etc.
Mastodon doesn't explain any of this well, or at all, to my dismay. (As far as I'm aware, on the joinmastodon page).
The instance banning thing is a huge problem and it’s not really being talked about much. The only thing you can do really is sign up on an instance like niu.moe that doesn’t filter besides illegal content.
[1]: https://instances.social/list/advanced#lang=&allowed=&prohib...