>Mastodon by Teams (tm), please log in with your active directory credentials to see the latest posts from HR!
APIs are not protected by copyright.
Everyone always just starts a group chat instead, as the reply is always so small and hidden, and the card system makes it hard to manage more than one or two threads at a time.
Yes, and still nobody uses it
The comms team religiously using it, and the ‘what’s happening’ digest being on by default meaning posts are surfaced in to people’s inboxes regularly until they unsubscribe means everyone knows about it.
Eve Online fans literally cheer Microsoft Excel features at annual Fanfest - https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/05/eve-onlines-ms-excel-... /// https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31292593
So this has only gotten weirder recently. Microsoft decided to rename Yammer when inside of Teams to Viva Engage. Nothing about this branding decision makes sense. It's still Yammer if you open a link to the web version. It's still Yammer.com if you want to go to the public web version. It's just called Viva Engage inside of Teams and now Outlook. (To use an ancient dumb aphorism, apparently it is now called Yammer in the streets and Viva Engage in the sheets.)
On top of different brand name (for the same app!) there's also a different UI design. It's almost the most confusing you could possibly make it.
Whoever is at Microsoft in charge of these marketing decisions has either lost their mind or this is some sort of long con that doesn't make sense yet. (There's hints that Microsoft is trying to rename Cortana to Viva, and they did rename what used to be Cortana Insights emails to Viva Insights, all of which are also dumb brand names. This seems an effort play up that these various inside-Teams and inside-Outlook sub-services are some sort of "intelligent business assistant for business users only" to jettison the final remaining ties to consumer Cortana [RIP] and the fun gaming-originated name for something bland and soulless and not-fun capital-E Enterprise, sigh.)
Anecdotally, the rebrand so far seems to be diminishing use of Yammer inside of Teams at my employer. They had Yammer as a default app in the default sidebar of Teams but when the branding switched Viva Engage is no longer in the default list. There's still something of a "well, post it on Yammer" culture here and people don't even seem to realize they can do it directly in Teams anymore because Teams no longer has a "Yammer app" and no one knows to look for "Viva Engage".
This is all just really wild and feels a bit like Microsoft has lost some of its mind here.
The language makes a huge difference as you need to deploy the whole Ruby toolchain, and front it with all the hard choices Rubyists had to deal with for ages to make it kinda work! You don't make a distributed competitor of Twitter following its own wrong design chocies!
Mastodon is old, and it's a shaky foundation, and it should be rebuilt from scratch instead of disappointing the millions of people who suddenly like Dorsey more than Musk... although Dorsey is working on Bluesky, not Mastodon, or ActivityPub!
Might I suggest you take a deep breath and tell yourself ‘it’s ok, I don’t need to pick fights with random people over trivial things’?
> The language makes a huge difference
If a decentralized social network is a good thing (jury is out imho), guess it’s a good thing that there’s ActivityPub implementations in multiple wildly different languages then?
ANyway, just try to imagine the same spammy bots taking down all Mastodon servers when the super eager to leave Twitter move to the next cool thing... It won't be pretty! The Fail Whale will feel like a joke compared to what's about to come.
> How was Twitter any better before him?!
Before Musk took over it wasn't saddled with the $13B in debt he took on to buy it. Before Musk took over advertisers weren't fleeing the platform in droves. Before Musk took over no one could impersonate Eli Lilly with a blue checkmark and cause its stock to crash. There's no indication now that Twitter will do anything to stop hate campaigns and abuse when they arise (hate speech is free speech, after all, and isn't illegal in the US). I could imagine some kind of future for Twitter before Musk, but that's immensely more difficult now.
I don't think Mastodon is the solution, mind you. But it's no surprise to me that a lot of folks are looking for an alternative.
But presumably because very few people cares about that benchmark and what is supported depends on what they choose to add. You're the first person I've ever seen mention it.
For a simple reason: Performance on dynamic requests is a choke point only for a miniscule proportion of sites, and the federation that is a selling point for Mastodon ensures that any single Mastodon instance is far less likely to ever approach a size where that becomes an issue. There are certainly sites where I wouldn't run Ruby, even though it's a language I love to use.
But I'll repeat myself: The choice of Ruby is far down the list of issues with Mastodon.
Returning to the benchmark, it's also contrived to reference as a general measure for a web app. Anyone building actual systems using Ruby puts Ruby behind a reverse proxy exactly because we're fully aware you focus on avoiding hitting the Ruby app server for anything static or cacheable, and so the setups on that benchmark (there are at least four frameworks and a couple of dozen entries) are entirely atypical for Ruby app server setups (they all hit the web server hosting the Ruby app directly).
That's fine - they measure what they measure, but they don't measure a realistic web app setup with any relevance to Mastodon.
E.g. the vast majority of traffic for a Mastodon instance is read-only requests to toots and media that are trivially statically cached, and so the vast majority of hits to a Mastodon server set up to actually scale should never hit the app server at all.
I have a deep distaste for Rails, and think Mastodon is more complex than it needs to, and there's plenty to criticise Mastodon for, but you're barking up the wrong tree.
For any software that embodies an open and formally-specified protocol (in this case, the protocol is ActivityPub), any first implementation of it is a reference implementation (as opposed to a defining implementation), because at any point someone else can create another implementation, and then both implementations will have to deal with adhering to the standard, rather than either being able to bully the other into implementing things a certain way. It's not about whether anyone else has implemented a second client for the standard; it's just about whether they can, and what would happen if they did.
Examples of things that are reference implementations of open protocols/formats, where the protocol/format "came from" the reference implementation but then became its own thing, with other implementations: Memcached, Redis, IPFS; PNG, OpenDocument.
Example of something that's not a "reference implementation of an open protocol", despite seeming like it: Amazon S3. There are many other "S3-compatible" servers; but there's no open, formalized standard for what "S3 compatibility" means; and so Amazon can change S3's API at any time, and everyone else will just have to deal with that. (They won't — it's been the same stable API forever — but they could. And what they can do is the point here.)
Key to remember is yet. The internet started as DARPAnet, after all.
What's old is new again!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezboard [1]
And later,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VBulletin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invision_Community
[1] I'm upset that archive.org can't display any of this content due to the robots.txt of one of the later owners of the domain name.
All of this also coincides with a massive migration to Mastodon v4 adding to current maintenance burdens.
So the short answer is: masto.host probably will open its doors again if it doesn't seem to be hosting too much of the Fediverse, and it will probably be at least a few more days if not a few more weeks before registrations open back up if they do.
(There are some alternative hosts to consider if you don't want to wait on masto.host.)
Finding a mastodon instance is a pain today. And "run your own" is not a great option. (It's a pain to run your own publicly accessible anything, these days. I will never go back to running my own email server ever again)
I have only heard the best about masto.host but they have closed subscriptions for now (which only speaks for them IMHO). I have personal experience with Ossrox and Weingärtner IT, they are both excellent and I can recommend them without hesitation. I have no affiliation with any of those companies except being a customer of the later two.
EDIT: The price of a small instance is less than a Twitter subscription. So, if you want your own instance - which as pros and cons - nothing is holding you back.
https://masto.host/
There’s also an open and active GitHub issue on mastodon discussing how to separate server hosting from domain name so you can point DNS at an existing instance and use it from that domain: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/2668
Many thanks to my friend on twitter for pointing me to both of these: https://twitter.com/__jesse_li/status/1592006641897320448