What does HackerNews think of mastodon?
Your self-hosted, globally interconnected microblogging community
Mastodon advertises itself as being a self-hosted project.
> Your *self-hosted*, globally interconnected microblogging community
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon
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> I really do not think that "uses a reverse proxy in the front" and "has a database and a cache store" is a factor.
These things matter at scale, but the typical Mastodon instance comes nowhere near that scale.
A reverse proxy is relevant beyond O(10k) RPS; less than that, and a single process directly serving requests is more suitable. A separate database is relevant beyond O(10M) records; less than that, and any embedded DB, or, frankly, direct filesystem access with any encoding format, is more suitable. A caching layer is relevant at the next order of magnitude for both of those dimensions; less than that, and there's no need.
Mastodon should, by default, ship as a single binary, statically compiled, with no runtime language requirements, and should manage its data storage requirements directly to disk.
The "network effect" isn't some little thing you can easily solve. Like saying "building rockets is easy, the designs are all there, just solve the gravity problem".
is absolutely not a priority for the Mastodon software project.
Try looking on Github:
This is after all, NOT twitter: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon
Brief overview if you haven't used Mastodon before, Mastodon[0] is a Twitter-like, federated social network with an open source code base[1] that uses the W3C standardized ActivityPub[2] protocol to create an interoperable social network.
This is a beta, so expect some theming issues here an there. Source code for this instance is available at github[3], and please open issues if you find any bugs or style issues.
[1] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon
Mastodon:
Source:
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon
License:
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/main/LICENSE
Disclosure and same license are required.
Based on those projects, I'd say the evidence suggests it's a fair amount of work.
Is that true? Wouldn't the actual copyright holder of the software have to assert this? Are the SFC making this specific demand, and are they the copyright holders?
Moreover, before the copyright proprietor takes action, wouldn't there have to be a legitimate complaint from a user of the site, who wanted the source code but had been denied? Otherwise it's a one-handed clap.
I'm looking at a Mastodon repo on github. Is this the right thing?
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/
This has serious issues. There is a LICENSE file in the root directory, but this doesn't mention any authors; it's just a copy of the AGPL. There is a copyright notice in it naming the Free Software Foundation, but that pertains to that file itself, not to Mastodon.
The presence of this file tells us that someone has put Mastodon under the AGPL, as a big umbrella license for everything in this tree.
However, individual source files lack copyright headers.
For instance, no copyright header in this randomly picked file: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/main/app/mailers/a...
I see the AUTHORS file, but this is just a list of poorly identified github accounts and such. It's not clear who wrote what (unless we go digging through git history, I suppose). Anyway, these people don't seem to have assigned their copyright to the project, so the copyright proprietorship (who wrote what) boils down to looking at the git blame of every file to get the set of authors who touched any line.
In summary, this project appears to be a bit of a gong-show, in terms of licensing.
If I deployed this, and some copyleft group started harassing me, I'd ask them to write me another e-mail, this time from one of the accounts listed in the Mastodon AUTHORS file, and specifying a list of the files of which that account is an author, substantiated by git blame analysis.
If I had not modified any of those files, I'd reply "have a nice day".