Started contributing to Mastodon development on Patreon a while back https://www.patreon.com/mastodon

I'm contributing because there are a LOT of features on Mastodon's roadmap (https://joinmastodon.org/roadmap) that I'd like to see happen, I use Mastodon a lot, and I can afford to.

they also have merch: https://freshstore.co/collections/mastodon

@b0rk morning Julia! Love your zines! I also run my own instance. Re the local timeline, adding relays via fedi.buzz allows you to pull in whole servers public timelines or public hashtagged posts. This has helped my instance feel a little more homey, and allowed me to follow interesting content.

https://relay.fedi.buzz/

@b0rk “when I look at the replies to somebody else’s post (even if I follow them!), I don’t see all of the replies, only the ones which have made it to my server.”

Oh so that’s what’s going on. As a new Mastodon user, this was confusing to me.

@b0rk this is fantastic! I learned so much, and I've been on Mastodon for years. Like I always wondered why some profiles didn't show up. And I didn't even know about the replies problem.

I've been tempted to run my own instance on my own server (these days I don't trust anyone! ) but it seems like too much work. Maybe I'll do one as an experiment.

@b0rk I *just* published a blog post that explores how replies work on the ActivityPub level, and how this causes replies missing on some instances.

https://seb.jambor.dev/posts/understanding-activitypub-part-3-the-state-of-mastodon/

@b0rk you might also be interested in FediBuzz which is basically "trends".

People can donate their read only tokens to donate their timelines. Amazing idea by @astro:

https://fedi.buzz/

And there's also a single user ActivityPub server written in @CrystalLanguage called "ktistec" by @toddsundsted (super complicated name — I know):

https://github.com/toddsundsted/ktistec/

Also thank you so much for all of the wonderful things you're doing 🙌

@b0rk "Good" news: Full text search on Mastodon is apparently coming, if you enable ElasticSearch. https://dotart.blog/dotart-blog/full-text-search-coming

Among many problems this will cause, this will allow people to search e.g. their own name to see people talking about them, and launch harassment campaigns. Therefore, people will start using code words to avoid saying the name of the person they're discussing, which means that filters will stop working unless you keep updating them with the latest euphemisms...

@b0rk Superb writeup, thanks for sharing! Like @stefan , first time I hear about instances blocking one-person servers... hope it's not widespread.

All the pain points are very accurate. I got used to "open in original site" but it's cumbersome and annoying. And I think this affects all small instances, not only one-person ones. I wish @elk did something about it, or other apps different from Mastodon, like @takahe , were more popular.

@b0rk Thank you very much for writing this up!

I especially appreciate the FediFetcher and combine.social pointers. I subscribe to a bunch of relays on my personal instance. They populated replies to this thread correctly, but I found another one from someone else, where replies were missing. They got filled in within 15mins of setting up combine.social! 🎉

@b0rk To not lose your posts again, you could ask Masto.host to serve your images and media also from your domain. Right now your media URLs are in this format: "cdn.masto.host/socialjvnsca/..."

Meaning your posts have links to Masto.host, thus you can't change hosting provider in the future without breaking the links or renaming those.

You could ask them to use "cdn.jvns.ca" or similar, I know they've done it for few.

@b0rk The downsides you mention are exactly what’s stopping me from self-hosting an instance for myself!

Not having a local timeline and not federating with people I do not follow are probably the main of them

@b0rk To me the easy way to search my own back posts is to download my archive and search the resulting file. (I have a dumb little shell script that hits it with sed to break it into lines...)

There might be a way to do it in the web interface of the android app, but if so I haven't found it yet...

@b0rk Great post! I always learn something reading your blog.

Another ActivityPub compatible service (based on blogs/RSS) is https://micro.blog. It's where I'm replying now 😄

@b0rk @Qyriad oh, thanks for the link to the woof.group moderation guidelines!

It’s perhaps the single best-articulated description of a practical moderation philosophy that I’ve seen

Link: https://blog.woof.group/mods/