I took a good chunk of sunday, but the code underlying my upcoming rubyconf talk is now significantly more evil. A thing that I'd sort left as an exercise to the reader is now actually done, and I learned some cool things while doing it. I can't wait to show it off!
Kevin Kuchta ☑️
@kkuchta
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Snark, code, and politics in some order. He/him.
@tinkerbell there are no good programmers. We’re all just variants of chaotic neutral or evil.
Holy crap. Tailscale's onboarding is just *ridiculously* good. I have a VPC containing my laptop and my phone (just to try it out) set up in about 3 minutes. And I say this as someone with very little experience with networking!
Heck, I'd recommend going to tailscale.com and trying it out right now just to see how neat it is, even if you have no use for it. :)
I should learn how the visibility rules work around here. Could one just hide replies from all users you're not following?
But yeah, I agree that blocking instances is likely to be about as effective as blocking email domains. You could allow-list specific instances that are known to be decent, but then you have pretty much the email server problem.
I supposed sfba.social could be alright too, if I wanted to have a local feed focused on the place I actually live. But then again, there's a reason I'm not on nextdoor. :)
Alright, I really gotta pick an instance. Leaning towards ruby.social, since that's where a lot of people I follow seem to be landing. And my main motivation is: to have something to put on my slides at rubyconf in a month! Historically I've put my twitter handle there, but I'm not so sure now. At the very least, twitter and mastodon will be getting roughly equal billing.
Come to think of it, are there any for-profit mastodon servers yet? It seems like a way to get some of the benefits of capitalism (someone is motivated by money to provide a good experience to users) and some of the benefits of federation (I can easily move to another instance if they go nuts).
I feel like the best outcome for mastodon is a wide variety of instances: some paid, some ad-supported, and some community-supported, each with their own tradeoffs that we can all choose from.
That said, one could argue the root cause here was spam. Anyone can email you, so that hard problem needed a solution.
Mastodon should have much less of a spam problem - I can just not follow people I don't want to hear from. Maybe without that compelling need, we can continue to have a wide variety of small and medium instances out there!
I wonder if, should mastodon succeed, we'll see a gmail-ification.
Like, email was federated.
Then spam became a huge problem and so major ad-supported email providers blocked email from anyone sketchy-looking. Everyone flocked to major providers because they were free and had less spam. Increasingly, 99% of spam came from non-major providers so major providers understandably blocked most mail from small email hosts. Now most people use a major provider and email is only barely federated.
If I were 22, I’d definitely be starting up my own Mastodon instance to hack on right about now. Of course; I know I’d get bored, it languish, and maintaining it would be a huge chore for years until I finally ditched it. Ice definitely gained some wisdom to know what would happen, but I wonder if I’ve lost some of the verve that would have made me try.