Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers
-
The Man Behind Mastodon Built It for This Moment
Since Musk took over Twitter, Rochko has been working long hours to keep his own server, Mastodon.Social, running, while also preparing a major upgrade to Mastodon, but he took time to videochat with WIRED from his home in Germany. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
-
Scaling Mastodon is Impossible
In light of recent events at Twitter a lot of the people that I follow (or used to follow) on that platform have started evaluating (or moved) to Mastodon. And I also have a Mastodon account now. But after a few days with this thing I have a lot of thoughts on this that are too long for a Tweet or Toot. Since some of my followers asked though I decided do a longform version of this and explain my dissatifaction with Mastodon a bit better.
The short version of this is that I believe that Mastodon — more specifically federation and decentralization won't work out.
-
The Fediverse is Inefficient (but that's a good trade-off)
Let's address the mammoth in the room: the fediverse, the network of mastodon servers, is very inefficient.
In this post I'll show why it is inefficient and why that isn't a problem.
A great analogy to explain this with is growing food.
-
On the Mastodon Experiment
Users don't want to host their own servers. Even the most technical ones. SaaS is the optimal solution. I'm an avid believer in running open-source software and controlling your own destiny, but for the vast majority of services, I don't want to manage it.
Moderation and user experience vary from instance to instance. It's hard to sustain at scale. In practice, decentralized moderation ends up as a series of fiefdoms without accountability (e.g., if you don't like it, find another server).
-
Offpunk 1.7 : Offpunk and Sourcehut
Releasing Offpunk 1.7 today which fixes a handful of crashes and brings some nice features.
-
Blender Builds LEGO Models
Blender is a free and open source computer graphics package that’s used in the production of everything from video games to feature films. Now, as demonstrated by [Joey Carlino], the popular program can even be used to convert models into LEGO.