This sort of website would be incredibly light weight (just API calls, no data storage), and the users would not be tied down to it; as long as they retain ownership of the login credentials to whatever cloud provider they choose, even if this front end shuts down the fediverse instance won't. And if it's open source, it would be easy to migrate to another such 'frontend management' website.

I have thought about this quite a bit, and it seems like a great idea - is there something I am missing (aside from it perhaps being nontrivial to set up a Fediverse instance via API calls to cloud providers)?

Of course, a clear issue is that there would still be (small) ongoing costs even for tiny instances, so it would not be the same as Discord or reddit in terms of having a 'free tier'. But the pitch of a 'personalized social media website' seems like a pretty cool idea and i'd be willing to pay a bit to try it out.

As somebody that used to be an admin of a decently large community, here’s some free advice for anybody that’s trying to start something like this:

Get mods. Get them early. Get them from the pool of your most enthusiastic users. Fire them when they perform poorly. Continuity plans will be a lot easier to come up with if you’ve been sharing the burden of managing the community for a long time, heck they might even be emergent and obvious after long enough.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30447645

I think it was only a matter of time before the human resources issue came front and center. My hope is that there can be a good balance between small federated instances kept alive by altruistic volunteer admins and larger instances with enough moderation and funding to handle the number of users that a social network expects but increase centralization. Maybe the conclusion will be that no matter how the technology scales, finding a way for the instances to be kept alive will be a social problem that requires constant attention.

The reliability issue also makes me wonder how much of the Fediverse is setting itself up for link rot and the loss of unique content after their maintainers lose passion or move on. And that wouldn't be because of a business decision that is hard to empathize with (in the case of Google+), but simply because a single human body has its limits.

Does it mean you can download your messages and put them back in the global conversation ? How does that work ? Are those messages stored only on one instance ? Do they disappear forever when an instance disappears ? Will users switch to new identity from another instance and import messages or is this lost ?

anyone considering setting up an instance and not wanting to worry about having to ssh in during the night and deal with maintence stuff just to talk with friends should 100% consider signing up with masto.host.

I've had an instance there for months now.

While there's some manual setup on his end (the guy who runs masto.host) from the perspective of someone wanting a new instance it's _very_ easy, and he does a great job of keeping everything up to date.

I'm extremely happy to throw money his way each month and _not_ have to worry about maintaining my instance beyond occasionally granting access to new users and proactively blocking remote instances. As a small, invite only, server I don't have to worry about a lot of BS from obnoxious humans.

Note: if you use masto.host you don't get ssh access to your server so there are some settings you can't tweak. I'm ok with that in exchange for never having to worry about maintenance.

What the hell? Is this the 1990s?

Best of luck in the future and best of luck with your family.

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/05/introducing-the-mastod...

I was not part of this community but I wish all the best to OP and his family.

Money solves problems and it shouldn't be considered bad to ask for a little compensation for upholding a service that thousands of people benefit from. That's the basis of anything meant to be sustainable. (I know lichess.org is an exception but tbh nobody knows for how long that's going to work out well.)

Not different enough than Twitter or too different from it?

Not enough marketing?

Bad UX?

May you have all the needed grace, patience, wisdom, and strength (both physical and mental) to navigate this next stage of your life in caring for someone who needs you more than ever right now.

Gaps/opportunities for Fediverse community:

- sustainable mgmt structure and plan for large nodes

- features to import content while not breaking existing ecosystem (it's currently possible to move followers and export content only, but not import)

Maintaining oss-related services can be entirely frustrating https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/

Its the rebirth of the promise of a censorship free internet. A lot of people have decided that its time we shut peoples mouths and stop them from talking 'for the greater good' - this is a pushback against it.

One day we will all remember why we should support free speech - god help us on that day.

Also recent privacy concerns and less recent issues with internet hostility means we're already past peak twitter, so mastodon is having to break into a declining market.

It works for certain demographics but not most.

This explains why they have keep pulling content from and why they keep using Twitter and not the other way round.

I would check my notes on that.

<https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/09/npr-is-not-your-frien...>

The upshot of that piece is that NPR itself remains part of the neoliberal ideological propaganda apparatus:

Like all press outlets, NPR has a particular point of view. Its bias is just as profound as the likes of MSNBC or Fox News. NPR’s ideological bias is toward what we might call the American bipartisan consensus.

My sense is that both NPR and Wikipedia have performed admirably, and far better than their commercial counterparts, but that there remain pitfalls with both any organisation and those which are based on nonprofit / NGO models, particularly in terms of sponsor / donor capture.

The NonProfit Quarterly's podcast Tiny Spark frequently discusses such issues. It seems to be on hiatus but its back-catalogue has numerous episodes dedicated to the topic:

<https://nonprofitquarterly.org/tiny-spark/>

One of the voices heard several times on that topic has been Rob Reich of Stanford (not to be confused with former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich, at UC Berkeley), who's written and spoken on issues of philanthropy. Several articles are listed in his ... Wikipedia ... bio:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Reich#Articles>

I suspect that the OP had another take on this, which I find less credible.

Mastodon might be able to force your followers to follow your new account, but AFAIK it doesn't do that either for reasons I don't know. That would've been cool.

We will ALL collectively move to another platform, instead of some users having to move multiple times because the server they are no closed.

Twitter by all means is superior in every sense, speed, network size, reach and content.

E: called them tweets

> This made me realize how little joy I’ve been getting from being an admin. How I’ve come to resent the work I have volunteered to do. I’ve donated countless hours to running the instance, solving both technical and moderation problems, and I’ve always put the instance above my own needs. But I can’t put the instance above the needs of my family.

> Why Not Transfer to a New Admin?

> Users have put their trust in me with their data. Choosing a new admin would require a massive amount of trust, since they’d have access to over a half decade of user data. Not just data from my local users, but from users they have interacted with.

The ideal inherent in federated systems- "people will use servers run by their anarchist commune's sysadmin" breaks down in real life. Nobody actually has a personal anarchist sysadmin to run their mastodon instance for them. In absence of this, the servers in federated systems are run by strangers on the internet who foolishly volunteer themselves for a huge amount of unpaid work, and who you just have to hope are going to be responsible with user's data.

This is why the anarcho-capitalist philosophy of the blockchain world has been so much more successful. The first thing they figured out was how to reward people running the servers, and how to make it so you don't have to trust them. It's a viable, expanding system, and with improvements to scalability and privacy, it will handle decentralized social media as well.

And one of the weaknesses of a decentralized model compared to a distributed one.

That doesn't seem like something most people are going to care about.

Are we censoring Facebook now? Is this the modern version of using M$ Instead of Microsoft?

Edit: fixed quote, and learned more about hn text styling

Server written in reasonably fast software on $10 (well, probably some extra bux in storage if community is image-heavy) VPS can reasonably serve tens of thousands of users in typical forum/blog/hn-esque format. Mastodon isn't but I don't doubt someone would rewrite it in something faster if there was a need for it.

I'd like to see RSS come back in a big way, but replace RSS with ActivityPub and instead of nationalizing shitty centralized commercial services, adopt the protocols that allow for distributed and federated social activities.

This happens all the time and there are parallels with other format / medium shifts (Gutenberg invents movable type, newspapers supplanted by news reels at the cinema -> people buy radio receivers -> broadcast television -> cable news -> whatever we have today with our always-on internet connections and services.

My main point here is that audiences are fluid, we can respect their intelligence, and they go where the content is.

Where is the line between "trying to make a profit" and "trying to be self-funding"?

Trying to be funded off of donations is really hard and rarely works. Most of the time you need other funding models.

If someone runs a biz where they run mastadon instances and the business breaks even (or just a little more) is that making a profit?

How does an organization behind an instance make money to cover expenses? This has to be looked at.

The whole "millions of users" fallacy is the result of people not being able to grasp what federation is about. The network can easily accommodate millions of users. Individual instances don't need to be able to.

It works best between Mastodon instances, but between different apps the migrations are often also supported. New apps like GoToSocial have the migration still as open issue sitting in their tracker, but will support as well.

For one, maintenance, probably becomes harder even. And it won't be "a docker image", but a docker-network (-compose, k8s or such) because running requires not just a single service, but a webserver (https), runners (async workers), redis, postgresql, elasticsearch, file-storage and so on. You'd need some 4 to 8 images all interconnected to run it. And secondly, docker isn't omnipresent. I can't just copy a binary into /usr/bin , run it. I'll need docker, networking, docker-knowledge, logging, monitoring and so on.

More so: if a docker is a solution to the setup of complex piece of server-software, than certainly docker is a solution to the setup of a simple piece of server-software.

It doesn't scale so well, but if there were an easy ability to (say) plug in an S3 bucket URL for offloading older media, then it might work for quite a while.

I half heartedly look at one of my own projects written in Go and wonder if it would fit the criteria but still some work to do. At the end of the day most people don't want to run anything and those that do end up with pages of documentation and maintenance burden.

No, the old instance will redirect your followers, without interaction. (Though the old instance has to be up to publish the migration.)

So is the answer that I'm misunderstanding, or is the answer that I'm understanding correctly. Are the ramifications that I highlighted true in either case, or false?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory?wprov=sfti1

- Multiple C-suite executives and board members get caught up in a Jeffrey Epstein level underage sex and sex trafficking ordeal. They resist when busted, and it becomes a spectacle. The evidence is just messy enough and the group is just tight-lipped enough that the legal parts of the case take a long time. In the mean time, Twitter loses users who voice their objection via not giving Twitter its attention and moves on to an up-and-coming competitor.

- The US elects a group of politicians who have authoritarian leanings (note that these could be extremists from either side of the politic spectrum, imho). This group of people lose power in legitimate elections. Via various levels of chicanery that revolve around undermining the spirit if not the law around the US election system, this group makes it so that they are able remain in power. Once they’ve started down that slippery slope, they just rewrite the laws so that they stay in power permanently. This group clamps down on free speech. The powers that be at Twitter object. A puppet leader loyal to the leading party is installed in order to manage Twitter out of existence, with a state-controlled competitor being supported in its place.

- The US is successfully overtaken in war by another country. The powers that be at Twitter allow for speech against the occupiers. Twitter is shut down.

- Twitter is found to have facilitated genocide in a foreign country (e.g., Myanmar), and the public revolts. To be honest, this will probably be overlooked, but I thought I would put it here as a thought exercise.

Part of the problem with hypothetical black swan events is that they seem entirely impossible… until they happen. That’s why they are black swan events.

And if you are saying the former, then Twitter and Facebook’s longetivity should be the least of your concerns.

Because Twitter is, so I think I side with the guy that said it’s silly to think it’ll shut down soon.

That seems like a very, very poor choice. I have the same concern with Matrix.

ENS (https://ens.domains/) solves this problem rather elegantly. A single source of truth that is decentralized so any app can use it without trusting anyone. It wasn't around when Mastadon was being built unfortunately but is useful for developers of new apps and protocols.

It's literally the opposite. E2EE means only the participating parties can decrypt the messages.

> In fact, pretty much everyone has to, since raw encrypted TLS data can't just get slotted into your OneDrive/iCloud account.

TLS is not designed for e2ee, it's designed to protect traffic in the client server model. This is referred to as in-transit encryption. SSL got traction mostly due to e-commerce.

> I genuinely don't know how you would engineer a more secure architecture here.

Prior to computers, people pre-shared their symmetric secret keys only with those they trusted, precisely to make their messages secure from spies, couriers etc. This is e2ee.

You are right that "you have to trust our almighty server" is commonplace, but they absolutely do not have to. In 1991 came PGP which let you have e2ee over email (even if your peer is offline). Signal, Matrix etc use more advanced protocols to provide even more security and useful features. Even whatsapp and telegram have e2ee in most ways, although they have been criticized for not satisfying all criteria.

Fully homomorphic encryption is also possible to operate _on encrypted data_ albeit computationally impractical still for a couple years.

Having publicly readable posts is core to the whole idea, just like Twitter.

Note: there are some interesting forks like Hometown[1] that have interesting privacy variants. The big feature I'm envious of in Hometown is the ability to send a message _just_ to people on your server that will never leave it. BUT overall mastodon is 100% about publicly readable information (like Twitter). If someone isn't comfortable with that they shouldn't use Mastodon.

[1]: https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown

But I do think it is worth pointing out there is nothing wrong with folks doing something to scratch their own itch. It does not have to be hugely popular or have a ton of users. If the sysadmins care enough to keep it running, that it literally all that matters...

I may steal this quote.

Now first storage space taken will be ridiculous, and then you will be hosting content you don't want to host because it could be straight up illegal in your country.

Look at any crypto-blockchain and count how many full-nodes vs thin-nodes are running in networks.

Then there is the whole tragedy of commons: average seed ratios and streaming video players for torrent content shows that are not willing to contribute to the greater good.

C'mon. Let's call a spade as spade: you wanted to complain about moderation and you shoehorned it into conversation. In no way does it make Twitter "shut down".

Twitter pays people money to keep their service running, so there's that incentive.

> As for real life scenarios...there are upwards of a million people using it right now. I've made friends, networked professionally and found several homes there. I am literally a real life scenario and so are the people behind most of the posts there.

Twitter is, say, 300m MAUs. That would mean the volunteer Mastodon infra would have to increase 300x (assuming scaling is linear, and the Mastodon community hits Mastodon as hard as Twitter users hit Twitter) to cope with similar traffic numbers.

For servers that run Mastodon.

> But that sort of total exodus would mean a lot of additional people contributing ideas and code to the Fediverse, not just servers, but by making it easier to run your own instance.

Most users aren’t interested in contributing anything to the platform. Social media platforms popularity lays in simplicity. No one wants to run anything, just use service without any hassle.

> there are upwards of a million people using it right now.

Compare that to 200m+ users of Twitter sending 500m+ messages daily. I bet Mastdon can handle this without a sweat.

An actual takeover will almost certainly be a virtual DDoS on Mastodon.

This process doesn't update any of the old content from your account, which was regarded at the time as a necessary simplification because of the issues of updating canonical URIs for accounts on one system to accounts on another system (different software might have different expected routes, you might need to store lookup tables, etc etc. It just opens up a huge can of worms). In practice this doesn't really matter that much since Mastodon is used primarily for microblogging and less for, well, actual blogging. If you were designing a more fully-featured social blogging platform like a Medium or Tumblr equivalent you'd probably want to put some more thought into that side of things.

There are plenty of people using it. It has not “failed”.

so... you never actually used Mastodon? Its users do have the ability to filter content based on keywords, accounts or domains.

You've said this, but didn't bother to give a reason. Can't you go to church even when the plurality of people tolerate porn?

I haven't forgotten about the Freenode hostile takeover.

The other parts are true, but the "manipulation of timelines" is just a question of time because it's useful if you follow lots of people. As long as it remains opt-in and a setting it's a good thing. I'm planning an ActivityPub implementation for myself and "manipulation of timelines" is one of the features I want to add the most for my own use.

Point being that deviating from a strictly chronological timeline isn't the problem. Doing so in a non-transparent way the user has little control over is.

Edit: supported since 2018 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/8703

Cryptographic certainty is fun to think about, but sometimes you just need people.

But when using an independent server, one would need to type your full username, and then try and see if such an account exists. if you only type the display name, or username without the server address, nothing will show up.

Which is fine for chat apps like Matrix or E-Mail, but not for platforms where discoverability is important.

Though it also involves migrating blocklist, followers, some settings, and such.

I don't think it was a deliberate misquote of gp to manipulate readers. Instead, the "anytime soon" was responding to gp's exact statement of : "We'll find out soon enough."

Sounds close enough to "anytime soon" for me.

For smaller instances, I really have a hard time seeing tax authorities going after people because they decided to host a server and ask a total of $100-$1000 per year from a few dozen people.

Lastly, perhaps if you weren't so biased against crypto, you'd realize that this is one actual valid use case for it?

If you use sane software, running a server is not a lot of work.

https://www.google.com/search?q=rvz+mastodon+failure+site:ht...

I wouldn't engage.

Also, I put content warnings when I blab on about some tech thing because not everyone is a techy there. I am friends with lots of people there who will roll their eyes and walk away if you start blowing their timeline up with that kind of topic and you arent conscientious. It isn't just techies all hanging out with no reason to be there other then the tech novelty of it, it is a lot of peoples' home.

Having 90% of registered accounts inactive with only 10% of them actively using the platform isn't exactly 'alive', 'growing' and 'healthy' especially when they occasionally run back to Twitter since they know little social engagement goes on Mastodon. 10 is closer to 0, than 90 and usage is still declining; Hence "Little to no one".

But we both know it is not just that. Not only they can't help using Twitter more, they won't move to Mastodon for the exact same reasons as I said and Twitter's network effect, hence why little to no-one is using Mastodon. The same tech-folks like (Mastodon.technology) are the ones 'self-hosting' these instances and not the regular users, since they don't care enough to even use it.

Not even the one operating Mastodon.technology could handle it. Might as well recentralize back to Mastodon.social just to save itself from the very low levels of social interaction since Mastodon has already repeated the same problems as GNU Social once again.

And you're free to pick a mastodon instance that offers the same (if that's something you cared to do). Do you also complain that it's possible for any rando can spin up their own email server and start passing out free email addresses?

I can't predict what Musk will do, but I'm under the distinct impression he's trying to allow free speech for everybody, get rid of bots, improve the tech (allow editing a tweet), and potentially hold people to account better by not allowing (or deranking) anonymous accounts. There's also leaked chat with Jack Dorsey about making an open interoperable protocol. Twitter would not die if it opened it's protocol and federated. As a public company that would destroy the ability to profit, but as a private company he can do that.

I have a lot of faith in Elon based on past results. He already solved the problem of people who don't believe in climate change - he got them to buy electric cars because they are sexy. Brilliant man.

https://www.imd.org/research-knowledge/articles/why-you-will...

I think you and I were on very different servers, and considering I've perused dozens, you must have gotten a really raw deal.

That's what got reddit to be the biggest forum on the planet. So I guess Mastodon is worth another look then.

You can easily batch writes into neat transactions: make a queue, have your POST handler write (row, callback) onto the queue and await the callback. Have the queue reader grab a chunk, push it to the db in batch, and execute all of the callbacks on commit. The callbacks return a 200 to the client, or 500 if the commit failed. This can all happen fast enough to be done in "real time" (however fast you want your queue worker to flush batches).

You can do all of this in a couple dozen lines of code with something like Scala/ZIO.

Computationally, it is totally doable. The biggest constraint is the cost of storage.

What we need is an AP store, and then applications build on top of it, like your project does. But at this point I question whether matrix wouldn't be a better platform

There’s a Patreon for it that pays the server bills despite it only being a few hundred users. My users even say thanks for running the place now and then. Running a small node of The People’s Glorious Social Network is a very different task than what you are outlining.

But that is even more reason to take away the additional work of keeping a large and convoluted rails-codebase up-to-date, running and performing.

Also, part of why moderation is such a giant task, is that in the fediverse, servers (instances) tend to be big. Huge even. It's far easier to manage a server that hosts your ten friends, or the 30 members of your alumni-club, or the 42 members at the local hackerspace than a server with 2000+ random users.

Another reason why lowering the barrier to the technical part of managing a server must be lowered.

There's even WordPress, with a plugin.

A lot of ~~people~~ entities such as companies, organizations, etc have a WordPress site.

edit: Pretend this site supports basic formatting in comments?

2) https://github.com/soapbox-pub/rebased the rebased backend is a fork of pleroma but it's much better maintained than pleroma

But I'm not entirely sure why you're arguing semantics with me. It can, by their definition, be considered migration.

Think of it like business networking, but for your friends. The connection itself is what matters.

If you do, do not be surprised when the service you're using gains a reputation accordingly.

> And on the odd occasion I do, I just ban the user or the entire instance and move on.

Yeah, that's actually part of the problem. If anyone can ban anyone for any reason then you don't actually have a federation. You have, at best, a gathering of barely-interoperable fiefdoms. You can either have a federation of commoditized servers or you can ban people you don't like -- you cannot have both.

I changed it to "discussion" based on your feedback: https://todo.sr.ht/~mariusor/go-activitypub/261

For your use case you probably need to define your own custom ActivityPub types and logic, but for the default ones, it's a good starting point (I hope). :)

The go-ap org on github has a mailing list you can reach if you have questions or feedback.

[1] https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/go-ap/processing#CreateActivit...

As a user, I only had to point my client from Freenode to Libera (exactly one line change in my client config), run /msg nickserv register to register myself, run /msg chanserv register to register the channels I op-ed, and it was all done.

Total time spent was less than 30 minutes. The next few days, others did the same and the community started trickling in to the channels in the new servers. Seems seamless enough to me. I doubt such an easy migration is possible if Twitter disappears suddenly.

It's probably more about how much the new owners will want to drop into it and how long before it moves to x.com (?) and becomes an everything app

He's definitely a case where I would broadly recommend marginalized groups to stay far away from his tooling if they are planning on interacting with the development team in any way. The man is an demagogue (and openly proud of it) and an understated element to his bad behavior in co-operating with others is that it's in part driven by that demagoguery (just reference the blogpost in the previous comment and how much of it is dedicated to crying about "cancel culture" where the reality is really just that he was an asshole to people and they showed him the door[1], very little about it had to do with his (IMO shitty) opinions.

As far as software choices go; Fully agreed, although I always recommend people to not just go by public reputation and to always investigate before making a decision (in the case of Soapbox, you'll notice I linked both the developers resignation post and the post that caused relations with him and other maintainers to seriously start souring, so that one can make their own assessment).

Pleroma for example got initially accused of being developed by neonazis due to an early instance modifying their source code to ignore incoming message privacy flags, everything was just set to be on the public timeline, all of the time. It's in reality completely wrong; in fact numerous developers to the software have been rather staunchly anti-fascist even since its very beginning, but that wasn't known by the public so the reputation of the project got tarred for years. Similarly, one admin blamed not removing hateful content on not having the tools, again, completely wrong, but then Pleroma got tarred with "not having basic moderation tools", even though it ironically has the must fine-grained moderation tools compared to anything else out there (you can literally write your own bit of code to automatically moderate and integrate it in the software itself if you wanted to).

Finally when it comes to users submitting bugs: with the fediverse that usually doesn't actually directly go to the developer but instead lands at the feet of the instance maintainer, who makes the decision on whether or not to report it to the developers community. There's a certain sense of connection, but it's usually not as deeply tied as one would think.

[1]: https://xkcd.com/1357/

Okthanksbye.

> It was not 100% obvious what you were implying, obviously

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Their email about shuttering went into a tab in Gmail and didn't spot it, a suddenly my entire YouTube channel was deleted.

Hundreds of hours of work of crafting early videos of Elite: Dangerous and the beauty of its simulated galaxy just gone.

Luckily backed up on a NAS but I've never put them back up.

Facebook and Twitter are extremely popular services, and have been at or near the top of their categories for over a decade.

Google+ was an attempt to challenge them, shut down after it failed without ever becoming anywhere near as popular.

It's probably a better example of a service that never got off the ground.

Twitter and FB could survive for decades just on the their current cash positions alone.

It was the best social network that existed, and before it shut down it had so gotten so much right that I think no others have matched anywhere near the complete feature sets.

Despite (and in contrast to) the absolute massive marketing effort that Google put into Google+ right from launch, it never achieved mainstream success as anything other than an OAuth login tool. That doesn't mean nobody used it, but it was always niche.

It's not a proper comparison for Twitter or Facebook, which grew organically and are both mainstream successes as social networks.

Where did they move?

It began as a venture by a couple of graphic artists, focused on artists. It happened to have (for a few iterations) a quite clean design based on Markdown, and (with a couple of what should have been reasonably small tweaks) could have done well in the long-form text+images space (now largely owned / failed by old-school blogging engines such as Wordpress, Medium, and Substack).

The features it had, including Markdown's sections and tables was why I'd posted that particular take on G+ there. It simply presented the information better than any other readily-available platform I was using at the time.

In 2015 a bunch of trans activists and sex performers who'd been hounded off Facebook by its Real Names policy wound up on Ello, and a few people arrived from other platforms (I was at the time a refugee from G+). For about six to twelve months it was the New Hawtness, and attempted a few pivots to the space, but performed fairly poorly in doing so. My own Ello profile has a link to a set of curated posts, one section of which details various gripes and failings.

One thing Ello did do was organise as a B-Corp with a community focus. That went swimmingly until it didn't, with the first accepting VC money then being sold to a collector of such sites. The B-Corp language seems to have disappeared, along with the community principles texts. What's left is now ... a sort of vaguely art-aggregation site with an interesting history but little future so far as I can tell. It's burned virtually all its early adoptors (myself included).

"I'd recommend against this open source project because it has a solo author who has a track record of not playing well with each others" strikes me as statement of fact, not vilifying.

https://blog.alexgleason.me/trans/

would trigger some people

At the same time, based on my own personal experience, it is absolutely impossible to get people to move to another platform or service even for the purpose of discussing future plans.

My exceedingly strong advice is to have multiple points of presence defined as a matter of course, one of which should be a simple email list (which provides persistent contact information), regardless of any awareness of an impending platform shutdown.

Why is it fake just because you don't like the choice of recommended instances. Does it not make sense to recommend instances that are more open to federating with others?

if you want to just live your life, stop posting about how some guy who has no access to your life beyond you looking at his stuff or being shown it on fedi. just block the guy, mute instance, set up a reject, and fucking focus on something else. theres other shit to do that isnt giving a shit about some nerd on the internet that you dont like. theres so many other things in fact that i'd imagine you'd enjoy doing much more than thinking about Alex Gleason. have a good day yo.

Stop bringing your personal drama here please.

I replied to your post, responding to the issues you raised in your original post. Engage with it or don't engage with it, that's up to you, but don't fill the forum with nonsense. Absent any actual interaction with the points I raised this will be my last reply in the thread.

So no, it's definitely you who are bringing the personal drama here. To the extent that one can't help wondering, mr Random-string-of-letters-and-numbers, whether you are that hostile solo developer.