Re:You Can't Follow Me
by knallfrosch on Thursday January 11, 2024 @05:52AM
(#38950514)
Mastodon is free and open-source. Go ahead and add the flag:
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING....
I only care enough about this issue to post the above comment, thanks though.
This seems to be a common response to people criticizing open source projects. Basically, any criticism can be dismissed by suggesting that the critic should just fix the problem instead of complaining about it. I don't see why someone shouldn't be able to point out technical flaws without spending the time and resources to fix it themselves.
> why can't I just make the two talk without going through the public internet, or adding a self-signed CA to a bunch of trust stores?
Sure you can. Getting a valid, trusted certificate from a public entity doesn't mean that your service has to be public. Just get one and assign private IPs to the domain.
I get the idea of not doing that if you want to be a purist about the isolated approach. But then you should be ready to implement something that others don't care about as much as you do.
No, he's not trying to integrate into a global distributed system without a connection to the internet. He's trying to test locally an app that will eventually integrate into a global distributed system.
It's a valid complaint. If I have a local Mastodon server, and a local static website, why can't I just make the two talk without going through the public internet, or adding a self-signed CA to a bunch of trust stores?
It seems to me like it wouldn't be hard to add a --dev flag to Mastodon that allowed you to forgo the TLS certs, and it would make testing much easier. He's not trying to