All that’s needed next is feed aggregators as a subscription service, then content creators won’t have to worry about bandwidth costs.
When servers got slashdotted it was almost, even way back then, running out of CPU/Database connections, not bandwidth.
a) you're a hobbyist/minor (effective budget of $0)
b) you're on cloud hosting and go over without a budget set
Like I said above, I did all the stuff I did with nothing more than $5/$10 month cloud hosting plans. Almost no one is going to hit any kind of bandwidth limits these days unless they are trying to run SaaS or just pirating full BluRays in the dumbest ways possible. But we're not talking about those people, we're talking about hobbyist content creators.
That being said, I do pay for a monthly plan, because relying on free handouts for anything that matters is never a reasonable approach.
Simply being sensible about what kind of files you're asking people to download solves 99.9% of this problem and makes your site more enjoyable (faster) for users (especially mobile ones).
A $5/mo digital ocean instance comes with 1TB of transfer. That's a lot unless you're doing something like self-hosting video.
Heroku free tier includes up to 2TB/month.
Even the free tier of AWS comes with 15GB/month.
But all that aside, this product exists already, it's called a CDN.
Not very “next YouTube” in nature.
Well obviously you aren't using the right JS framework then. Modern technology will fix this problem for you. Especially if your pages are loading too fast.
And what are you missing on the current aggregator features? do you have in mind anything more then the normal action of following other users?
[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#shared-inbox-delivery
Will PRs for WriteFreely generally make it into Write.as?
Really glad you're liking it though :)
There are certain features that I've been looking for: mathjax/latex, data visualization (though, this could be using pre-generated images), jupyter notebook compatibility, image facilities...
I know that goes beyond the slick simplicity you've got here, but for the work I do, I want to be able to speak in more than one way.
Is there an opportunity for contributing these features?
Seriously impressive work by the way, and I'm really happy to see such a well-developed project use Go+ActivityPub.
It's kind of like a single-owner LLC. The structure limits the liability by detaching responsibility from the owner and attaching it to the corporation, even though the corporation is in reality just the one person. It's a very abstract concept that just implies a product can be separate from the individual who created it.
As for the code, yep I built everything myself (and wrote about it here [0]). But I've also had the help of people translating the app, giving feedback, and making suggestions along the way. Listening to people and filtering ideas through my own vision has really made the product what it is today.
Thanks, though! I'm just excited to keep pushing the AP ecosystem forward and making the platforms on it more usable.
It's a simple rating by the posting user (e.g. 7 out of 10, you could even just post it with the text like so: [7/10] But that's a little confusing.)
The one other question: If I had this rating, could I sort all posts from the last year by rating? Or is the efficient look-up of posts tied to time and it's hard to scan for ratings through a year worth of posts?
OT, but how did "Mastodon" turn out to be the best name anybody could come up with?
I didn't know they did that. That is decidedly not-metal.
We've been running a Mastodon instance for a while and keeping up with the fediverse, so over the summer as it got much easier to implement, we added support for ActivityPub (the protocol behind Mastodon, PixelFed, Funkwhale, etc.) The fediverse has a strong FOSS culture, so after releasing AP support, I got to work on opening up the source for Write.as, and this is that final result.
Write.as has existed for 4 years, so the application code is very stable. But right now I'm getting the code to a place that works great in any configuration, installs easily, etc.