A lot of people have talked about the possibility of forking Mastodon to get the many improvements their communities need. Making such an effort successful is another discussion entirely.
@deadsuperhero There are several forks of Mastodon that have been around for years and work well (not only #Hometown) like #Ecko, #Glitchsoc, etc. for years.
They have many more functions such as editable character limit,
editable poll options, local posts, changeable favicon, markdown formatting - and if that's not enough, there is plenty of other software in the Fediverse for micro- and macroblogging
Another masto patch i take for granted on neuromatchstodon that actually makes for a lovely local tl:
glitch allows us to include boosts in the local TL, which makes it so people can "boost in" to the TL: you see not only what ppl are posting, but what they are looking at. boosting shares horizontally within small instances. That gets annoying tho, because you end up seeing the same boost a zillion times sometimes, so we added a filter that makes it so you only see the most recent one.
Just nice quality of life things for small fedi instances <3
Honestly, I think the 500-char limit is dumb. Let people express themselves, already.
#GlitchSoc handles this very well, both allowing 5000+ char posts, and abbreviating long ones in the UI when browsing.
140 characters was novel (and an implementation limitation due to SMS). 280 was iffy. 500 is just weird. Long enough to not develop a habit of brevity, short enough to be really annoying.
Shiny new posting interface in the latest Glitch-Social code, including a much more visible choice of posting modes, and with the 'Unlisted' mode renamed to "Quiet Public".
Likely to be coming to a Mastodon server near you fairly soon.
Hello again #Fediverse, I may need your #fedihelp. So, here's a list of the Fediverse software I'm about to make temporary accounts for to test all the features and differences:
So, did I miss anything noteworthy? Does anyone have any tips or recommendations before I choose a server for any one of these? I'll probably be going for the most popular server on each for improved federation and maintenance.
Note: I'm using #Sharkey right now and Misskey forks are already overrepresented, so that's why it's not included.
Is it possoble to configure Friendica that way that in the timelinines only appear First-posts never comments on first-posts?
Sometimes a timeline is cluttered with comments from one first-post with a subject i'm not interested in.
@shelenn@michel Yes this is v desirable. I'm really enjoying my #Friendica UX, but this specific aspect of its UI is one for which i wish they'd copy the Masto (#GlitchSoc?) way of doing it.
Isn't the internet clever. My little mastodon server is hosted in one country, I live in a completely different one, and at the moment I'm in yet another place on this planet thousands of miles away from either - and I've just smoothly and easily upgraded it to the latest version of glitch-social due to a vulnerability patch being released.
Fosstodon has a lot of reach, though, not that I care so much about such things, but it is nice to be heard from time to time. ;)
I've loved using @gotosocial on @polymaths, but federation issues on a small instance are challenging at times.
I wish there was a #GlitchSoc instance finder out there (haven't been able to find one yet). It seems to have all the features I want, and yet is mastodon-based.
I got in a rabbit hole looking into why md tables weren't formatting in #glitchsoc . Glitch's markdown render, RedCarpet, does allow markdown tables, but Glitch nor does the downline fork (#chuckya ) running my instance enable it. I'm not entirely sure but it looks like the extensions object at https://github.com/glitch-soc/mastodon/blob/8c76a208ed30cc1bd54262302b2aed27ae142509/app/lib/advanced_text_formatter.rb#L106 simply needs to have a property "tables:true" added to make it work. I'll have to open an issue when I finally get past GH's horrible anti-alias policy.
Ich kann gut verstehen, dass Leute, die ihre politischen Tröts nicht hinter einer Inhaltswarnung verstecken wollen, von chaos.social wegziehen.
Warum viele zu 23.social ziehen, verstehe ich weniger. Ich habe das für euch getestet. Erst nach der Registrierung habe ich durch die Bestätigungsmail erfahren, dass diese Instanz von #mastoHost betrieben wird. Das ist eine 1-Mann-Firma <https://masto.host/privacy/>. Der Mailversand läuft über die US-Firma #Mailgun <https://masto.host/infrastructure/>.
@defcon42@caos Um das Zeichenlimit bei Mastodon zu ändern, sind Änderungen in 2 (früher 3) Quellcode-Dateien notwendig. Das weiß ich, weil ich diese Änderungen bei jeder neuen Mastodon-Version vornehme (wobei mir oft git die Arbeit abnimmt). Das würde ich nicht "konfigurierbar" nennen. Es gibt allerdings Mastodon-Forks wie #glitchsoc und #hometown, bei denen das konfigurierbar ist.
Ok I think I have figured out filtering duplicate boosts from public timelines on #glitchsoc. Sort of hard because I have no intuition for order of operations in postgres in subqueries, but I think it should work and only adds 1ms to one of the queries bc of the magic of window functions and snowflake ids
Anyone up for a little light #CodeReview? Glitch has an option to show boosts in the local TL, which I think is lovely for small instances like ours, it really helps new ppl get oriented in the fedi. The problem is public feeds dont filter duplicate boosts in the same way that home feeds do, so you end up seeing the same boost lots of time.
I wrote a patch to only show the most recent boost in public TLs, but since I am a relative noob with postgres, SQL, and rails, and since it touches core feed functionality id love it if someone took a look before we deploy on our instance (after some field testing we'll pull upstream). I tried to make it as contained as I could so other masto forks could merge it in too, if ya interested.
Does anyone know if you compose a toot on #Tusky using a #GlitchSoc#Mastodon account will it give you the drop down options for plain text, markdown and HTML ? Or is that web only ?
I spent some time tonight getting "mastodon-bird-ui" which is self-described as "🐘🐦 Mastodon web UI, but strongly inspired by Twitter" created by @rolle integrated nicely into my #mastodon server (https://expressional.social/) as a #glitchsoc "flavour" 😍
Now it's more prominently featured in the profile UI, further nudging folks towards it over the vanilla experience ✌️
@jerry Atm i am confused about my best course of action [not your instructions; they're clear... just which option might be the least worst for me].
Pros Here:
having done many fedi-hops over my 13 months, this instance is running the sweetest of all for me so far, wrt my custom FOSS emojis [ta, again!], #GlitchSoc, fab 11K toot-chars, correctly functioning news-bots i follow, good Goldilocks size of not too big for good admin & modding, not too small for poor federating, but just right... & ofc your excellent stewardship!
Cons There:
only the standard Masto icon again [joke, albeit not entirely...]
fear that if only small numbers of members from here migrate there, & few noobs join, then it becomes ipso facto a "small instance" with great risk of poor federating [having tried a few small instances during my hopping, they all suffered poor federating, such that lots of peeps that i routinely saw when on larger instances, were invisible [MIA] on those smallies; i never wish to repeat this problem].
YES!
This is precisely what every university (and scholarly society!!) should be doing: have their own instance and drop X like a hot potato:
"an instance has been created [... ] on university servers, which is open to the university's organizational units. The active use of X will be significantly reduced."
The Trouble with Forking Mastodon (wedistribute.org)
A lot of people have talked about the possibility of forking Mastodon to get the many improvements their communities need. Making such an effort successful is another discussion entirely.