Hacker News: gargron

New comment by gargron in "I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon"

gargron — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 02:04:27 +0000

It did not happen in public, and is not related to any public events.

New comment by gargron in "Introduction to AT Protocol"

gargron — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 21:19:38 +0000

ActivityPub is embraced by:

  - Threads  
  - Flipboard  
  - WordPress  
  - micro.blog  
  - NodeBB  
  - PeerTube  
  - Pixelfed  
  - GoToSocial  
  - Akkoma  
  - ...and countless smaller projects

It is by no means just Mastodon.

New comment by gargron in "Introduction to AT Protocol"

gargron — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 21:16:53 +0000

ActivityPub can be used for both public and private messaging, though I don't think the e-mail standard needs to be retired anytime soon.

New comment by gargron in "Tell HN: uBlock Origin on Chrome is finally gone"

gargron — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 03:24:46 +0000

Firefox is still a great browser with probably the best devtools.

New comment by gargron in "If nothing is curated, how do we find things"

gargron — Sun, 18 May 2025 11:58:49 +0000

I'm sorry, but by what metric are musical bands "dead"? I'm asking because I follow a lot of bands that are actively releasing new music and touring across the US and Europe. Not to mention the musical festivals.

New comment by gargron in "Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO"

gargron — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 20:12:28 +0000

Yeah.

New comment by gargron in "PeerTube mobile app: discover videos while caring for your attention"

gargron — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 09:47:27 +0000

Arguably, Bluesky being spun off from Twitter and having Jack Dorsey as one of the founding members is a somewhat Meta-like advantage, in a sense of immediate legitimacy in the press and networking opportunities/connections in Silicon Valley. Mastodon had to start absolutely from scratch. I had zero connections to anyone important when I launched it. Bluesky also raised over $8M in venture capital funding, while Mastodon was being developed on a $0/mo budget for the first year of its existence, and something like $5000/mo for the next 5. Our current annual budget of around $500K still pales in comparison to the money Bluesky has at their disposal right now to spend on e.g. marketing. They also have the advantage of not really trying to do decentralization. That being said, venture capital money isn't free, while Mastodon's funding comes from the community with no strings attached, so in the long term, I believe in our approach.

New comment by gargron in "PeerTube mobile app: discover videos while caring for your attention"

gargron — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 04:10:15 +0000

Mastodon has changed quite significantly since a few years back. We take product design seriously and spend a sizeable amount of our resources on improving usability and reducing friction. If you could, please try again, and let me know how it goes this time. If you are an Android user, I strongly recommend our official app, as in my (obviously biased) opinion it is the best social media app right now and the user experience I am most proud of.

New comment by gargron in "PeerTube mobile app: discover videos while caring for your attention"

gargron — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 03:55:39 +0000

Do you not think that Meta onboarding its 2 billion Instagram userbase into Threads had something to do with it?

New comment by gargron in "Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky"

gargron — Sun, 01 Sep 2024 00:15:02 +0000

Why do you believe that about Mastodon?

New comment by gargron in "Social networks are getting stingy with their data"

gargron — Sun, 11 Feb 2024 21:18:38 +0000

What in your opinion are the pain points in the current sign up process?

New comment by gargron in "The BBC on Mastodon"

gargron — Mon, 31 Jul 2023 23:57:20 +0000

mastodon.social runs nightly releases off of our GitHub. Anyone can run nightlies to get these features. Or wait for the stable. What's hacky about this feature?

New comment by gargron in "Mastodon hit 10M users"

gargron — Sun, 19 Mar 2023 23:56:34 +0000

> But the thing is, I just hate the Mastodon UI. It's so clunky.

I hope this situation improves once we finish hiring a product designer. Personally I don't think the web client is as bad as some people make it sound, but I know it can be improved. In the interim you can try the 3rd party web client Elk [1], some people seem to really like it.

[1]: https://elk.zone

New comment by gargron in "Mastodon: Add support for incoming rich text"

gargron — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 15:14:23 +0000

This PR is just one part of item MAS-86 on our public roadmap [1] "Markdown formatting for posts" which is meant to enable users to use code spans/blocks and bold and italic text as championed by the Elk third-party app [2]. I believe "rich text" in the PR title is a little not nuanced enough because like before I'm of the position that Mastodon is the wrong medium for long-form articles and the various block-level formatting structures that come with it, but allowing users to use bold text without resorting to mathematical Unicode characters is a win for accessibility.

[1]: https://joinmastodon.org/roadmap [2]: https://elk.zone

New comment by gargron in "The AT Protocol"

gargron — Wed, 19 Oct 2022 07:42:01 +0000

The choices aren't "just break compatibility with all de facto standards" and "come up with your own base standard". You can work on an extension to the protocol that everyone can adopt and move to if it's really an improvement.

New comment by gargron in "The AT Protocol"

gargron — Wed, 19 Oct 2022 07:37:07 +0000

Rewriting the user's entire database on each delete sounds like it might become a problem. Especially as some users like to automatically delete old posts on a regular basis.

New comment by gargron in "The AT Protocol"

gargron — Wed, 19 Oct 2022 07:33:56 +0000

"Fuzzy blinky UI features" is what people actually care about though. You can have all the theoretical bells and whistles in the protocol but if you don't have a flagship application that people can use for their everyday needs, nobody is going to care. The fact of the matter is that "porting your account" is just a much less frequent need than literally anything else that people will come across in their day to day use, and the fact that you can move to another account in the fediverse without losing your followers is good enough for most. Of course it would be nice if the old and new accounts were verbatim, not even identifiably different copies, but we're talking about synchronizing (potentially, and likely on average) multiple gigabytes of data across small hobbyist servers that also still have to serve requests from other users. Not to mention the abuseability of being able to import gigabytes of pre-recorded content like that, a spammer's boon. Worth mentioning that the account portability approach described in ATP is just "upload your backup to the other server" which in practice is going to suffer from the exact problems I am describing.

New comment by gargron in "The AT Protocol"

gargron — Wed, 19 Oct 2022 07:14:47 +0000

You're about to reinvent JSON-LD.

New comment by gargron in "The AT Protocol"

gargron — Wed, 19 Oct 2022 07:12:28 +0000

This is not right. First of all, what do you mean by "PublicInbox"? Are you referring to the optional sharedInbox attribute, which allows delivering a payload to a whole server at once instead of iterating over the personal inbox of every actor on the server? Or are you referring to the inbox in general? The inbox is just a mechanism to deliver a payload from point A to point B. It is in fact used to receive messages from folks you don't know, but there is no obligation to share all or even most of your messages with anyone in particular. You can deliver posts to your followers, but you don't have to, protocol-wise, and you can choose, person by person, who to deliver to. The concept of indexers doesn't seem foreign to ActivityPub either. PeerTube runs sepia.search, which is exactly that kind of indexer that powers search for their video platform.

New comment by gargron in "The AT Protocol"

gargron — Tue, 18 Oct 2022 22:07:53 +0000

ActivityPub, the protocol, doesn't actually tie your identity to your homeserver. Webfinger (which is the protocol responsible for the username@domain addresses) is not part of it. In fact, even Webfinger doesn't actually "tie" your identity to your homeserver -- the fact that your identity is "tied" is an implementation detail in Mastodon and other currently popular fediverse software.