Self hosting isn’t really compatible with viral content

The post I was replying to claimed virality and self hosting are at odds with one another because it causes skyrocketing expense. My point was that maybe someone selfhosting a server in the fediverse is not as interested in virality. And I doubt even the most viral posts in the fediverse would break the bank of a selfhoster

Virality is nowhere near the only reason for posting videos. People post them to make jokes, teach something, reply to someone else, etc, or all the same reasons someone might make a blogpost or a post on a link aggregator.

Theres no web app? That seems short sighted. You apparently cant access anything without logging either. I dont expect these shorts to get much viewership if you have to register and download an app to see anything. It also doesnt seem in the spirit of the fediverse

Maybe the problem in that equation is the expectation of virality and not self hosting?

That’s not a contradiction, it’s maybe an incomplete argument. And I was relying on my previous sentence that mastodon has a history of steamrolling other implementations to imply that they would do it again and were already warning about that. But none of this even matters; I’ve made a follow up comment that lays it out more explicitly.

I didn’t cherry pick a statement. I included the part where they said the very first draft.

I did fail to explain how its a power grab, but that’s was only because I thought it was a fairly obvious one-to-one point. I’ve also added another example. But lemme try again.

1. Mastodon has a history of pushing features that affect interop with other implementations without seeking feedback from other implementations or outright ignoring the feedback they do receive.
2. A member of the mastodon team wrote a FEP to formalize a setting related to search indexing. This was the right way to go about it. yey Mastodon was working with other implementations. But that FEP didn’t receive positive feedback and it seems like it was abandoned.
3. Now mastodon is trying to standardize something using the ideas from that FEP, outside of the FEP process (which is the agreed upon way to collaborate between implementers).
4. They’re warning on their site that they have deadlines and may not incorporate feedback if they can’t resolve it without breaking deadlines.
5. They are under no obligation to incorporate it after their initial draft and, historically, mastodon is unwilling to update their work to incorporate other implementers’ feedback.

A more collaborative way to do this would have been to seek feedback before making a grant proposal and making the grant proposal jointly with other projects so they weren’t the only ones getting paid for it.

Mastodon has a history of steamrolling other implementations.

This means we might not always be able to incorporate all the feedback we get into the very first draft of everything we publish

The site even warns that theyre on a deadline and may not incorporate feedback.

EDIT: they also mention a “setting” that determines if a user/post is searchable. theyve presented a FEP to formalize this setting but nearly everyone else had issues with their proposal. as usual for mastodon, this looks like them sidestepping external feedback and just doing what they want

I feel you but i dont think podcasters point to youtube for video feeds because of a supposed limitation of RSS. They do it because of the storage and bandwidth costs of hosting video.

chat apps and systems like Twitter and Mastodon aren’t a good place for journalism

Super agree with that. Framing this feature as specific to journalism was a poor choice. The feature is useful for any writer/blogger/joe schmoe on the web

It’s a cool feature, but it sucks that (once again) the mastodon team is taking control of fediverse-wide features and ignoring outside criticism.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/30398

And if some indie dev lasts a little bit longer because I threw away a few dollars, i’m all for it

Doing an AMA on mastodon would be a horrible experience for everyone. Others have pointed out the obvious difference in reach, blocks/defederation means some ppl may not even be able to participate, participants might never receive questions, users from different instances wouldn’t be able to see sibling comments, etc.

PWAs were not liked when they came out.

By some ppl. There were also ppl who did like them. As soon as the desktop support was axed, fans of the feature started complaining immediately.

at the time, people in general did not like PWAs as a concept. Independent of the browser

Again, I think this is a sampling issue, because my experience was the complete opposite.

And one of the key parts of PWA features was the “Progressive” part. The site works without those features and you don’t have to use them so removing the support never made much sense to me.

South Carolina, in the US Southeast

BEAM is the VM that Erlang runs on. It also supports Elixir and some other lesser known languages

Then, there is TikTok algorithm which is a common critic of the app but is how you get a never-ending flow of content which isn’t uninteresting enough for you to turn the app off

I think there needs to be some kind of discovery algorithm for new users with an empty feed (or even existing users who just wanna find something new) but a federated alternative doesn’t need something as powerful as the tiktok algorithm to be a decent replacement. It doesn’t need to surface a “never-ending flow of content” because it doesn’t have a financial incentive to keep you in the app endlessly.

on-demand pods that travel on existing abandoned railways.

They’re reusing existing tracks.

I could see walking through a debug session document with a junior dev to guide them on how to debug classes of issues better. Or if they’re running into a bug and ask for your help, you could write out the first few debugging steps and let them take it from there. That might be easier to understand than “I’d check service X and see if it’s processing Y like it should or just passing it on to Z”. Having a defined way to explain how to debug an issue could be useful

that looks like a console

Not just looks, but provides the UX of a console. So you buy it, plug it up, log in, and immediately start playing. Even consoles don’t provide that streamlined UX anymore, but ppl want all the benefits console used to provide with all the benefits PC gaming provides now. But the key part is the PC benefits don’t get in the way of the ease of it. You don’t have to install or administer a linux distro, you don’t have to twiddle settings for every game (unless you want to), etc

Relying on the competence of unaffiliated developers is not a good way to run a business.

This affects any site that’s posted on the fediverse, including small personal sites. Some of these small sites are for people who didn’t set the site up themselves and don’t know how or can’t block a user agent. Mastodon letting a bug like this languish when it affects the small independent parts of the web that mastodon is supposed to be in favor of is directly antithetical to its mission.