Episode 805 transcript

FLOSS-805

Jonathan: Hey folks, this week we talk with Andy Piper about Mastodon. There's a new release, 4. 3, with all kinds of new tools. We get into the philosophy of Mastodon, the cool things you can do with it, and more. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. This is Floss Weekly, Episode 805, recorded Wednesday, October the 15th.

Mastodon, bring your own algorithm.

It's time for Floss Weekly. That's the show about free, libre, and open source software. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett, and we've got something fun today. We're talking with Andy Piper about Mastodon. And of course, it's not just me here. I've got a co host today, Jeff Massey. How are you doing, sir? Oh, I'm doing good.

Doing good. Happy to be here. I appreciate you sort of sort of stepping in at the last moment I've I've had a bit of a health issue that I have been battling through for Well in retrospect over a month now, but past week or so was real interesting So things got a little behind but we're here. We made it and I appreciate Jeff being here

Jeff: Well, I'm just honored to be on the short list to be able to fill in and you know, I, it's, it's sometimes hit and miss based on, you know, my day job, but the Stars Aligned had an, had an opening and said, sure,

Jonathan: be glad to help.

Very cool. Now today we're talking with, like I said, Andy Piper about Mastodon and Jeff, do you have a Mastodon account? I do not. Okay. So our goal today, our goal today is to talk Jeff in to going and getting a Mastodon account somewhere or host it yourself. Like that's even an option. That's one of the beautiful things about Mastodon.

If you really wanted to, you could prop your own account up somewhere.

Jeff: Well, and you know, the interesting thing is I've heard about it quite a bit, but I haven't done a lot of research. I'm not an expert in it, so I'm, I'm really curious to find out, you know, all the. I know the high level stuff, but I, you know, a little under the hood and kind of what's going on and, you know, where's it been, where's it going?

The whole, the whole nine yards.

Jonathan: Yeah. And that's definitely part of something we're going to talk about because Macedon just had a new release. And I, you know, I don't remember what the version number is. It's a 4. 3 Macedon 4. 3 and we've got the man that knows about it and let's go ahead and just bring him on.

That's Mr. Andy Piper, and first off, we sure appreciate you being here. Welcome to the show, sir.

Andy: Hey, Jonathan. Hey, Jeff. I'm, I'm really, really excited and honored to be on a show, which is not only all about free and open source software, which I'm a huge advocate of Floss Weekly but also on Hackaday, which is another one of my favorite sites.

And I'm one of the things I do is I have a small maker studio here with my wife in the UK and you know, I'm on Hackaday. Literally all the time, all the time, every day checking stuff out. So yeah, so that's great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Jonathan: Yeah, we, we appreciate you being here. And now I've got to, I've got to ask, maybe I'm jumping a little too far ahead, but what's, what's the stuffy?

What, what is the, is that an elephant?

Andy: This is our Brand new just launched although we've been talking about it for, gosh, months, I think, because we've been through the whole process, but this is our Mastodon plushie. It's available now in the Mastodon store. Depending on your geography, we are working hard to make sure that as many folks can have their own.

Look at this, look, see, see how squishy he is? But I was away this weekend for reasons I was actually at Ogg Camp, which is something you talked about here on Floss Weekly a couple of weeks ago. And I got back to the studio Monday morning and my new my new work supervisor, let's say, Was here waiting to keep an eye on my contributions to the mastodon project Yeah, really excited.

It's it's a lovely plushie and also got to give a shout out to dopper 2 who is our designer so They've done all of the artwork for mastodon. So you can see the load the mastodon here. Not not this This is this is something different the mastodon logo on my shirt here the the mastodon mascot And all of the beautiful artwork we have You Around our website is, is by somebody who, who I know, only by username doper2.

And that, that's obviously the mascot the plushie. So, yeah, super exciting.

Jonathan: Is there also a rock band that goes by the name Mastodon?

Andy: There is indeed a rock band called Mastodon and so there is sometimes a little bit of search confusion depending on what you're looking for. But if you're looking for the Mastodon social network, then or the social networking software, then that is us.

And Mastodon is also a rock band. That's

Jonathan: fun. So you want to search for Mastodon social to get you guys. That's fun. That's the one exactly right. Yeah. If you're on a website that looks like heavy metal and has whales, you're on the wrong place.

Andy: Reaching down over here because I also have got a little 3d printed Mastodon mascot key ring that I've I made myself over here, but these are not available to buy.

But yeah, I have a lot of fun with it. The mascot is really, really cute. Is

Jeff: the the 3d printer file

Andy: out there so

Jeff: people

Andy: could I I So not at the moment because again, you know, it's done by our designer. I don't have permission to share that. So We'll see whether we can do that in the future. We'll we'll figure that out

Jonathan: There'd be there'd be a lot of fun actually to have that available.

Yeah, absolutely

Jeff: So you'd say with the Oh, I was gonna say with the rock band. Is there any naming conflicts? I mean not counting search but any legal You

Andy: Look, I, I, I am not aware of anything like that. I am not a lawyer, so I I can't comment. But I, I'm certainly not aware of any problems around that.

Jonathan: You mean trademarks? Surely open source projects don't have problems with trademarks. Nobody would fight over stuff like that. Let's not go there right now. Andy, I'm so glad you're here because if you weren't here, that's what we were going to talk about. And I was not looking forward to that. Oh, right.

Okay. Okay. Okay. So let's let's talk about Mastodon. You guys just had a new, a new release and what version of 4. 3? What's, what's the big, what's it, what's new in 4. 3? What's the, what's the roadmap? What did it look like? What new stuff did we get? What new fun things can people do?

Andy: So first of all, I want to say that it's taken about a year to get from 4.

2 to 4. 3. There's a ton of moving parts. We've got kind of the core engine of Mastodon. We've got the web front end. We've got our own Android and iOS apps as well. And then there's an API, which means that anybody can build their own third party client apps if they want to for either for you know, Android and iOS too, cause they, they prefer to, to build something for themselves or for other platforms that we don't currently have apps for, which is pretty exciting.

And. When we think about what's new, there's, there's kind of the new stuff that you get as a user, which is really cool. There's also a bunch of new stuff that if you want to run your own Mastodon instance, because you don't have to come to an existing Mastodon instance, you can run your own for you and your friends or your community.

Hackaday. social. Very excited to see that Hackaday have their own Mastodon instance.

Jonathan: Probably needs to be updated still.

Andy: Need to persuade Elliot. I think he may be the one that runs it to just refresh that up to 4. 3. And then also there's some new stuff for developers. So Mastodon 4. 3 for users gets a nice new look and feel.

It's, it's an evolution of the look and feel, but it's really nice and consistent. We've done a lot of cleanup improvements around, around the user experience. Especially around the media support. So you can now do things like drag if you want to. Attach a bunch of images to your post. You can drag and drop those in the composer to reorder them.

We've got also group notifications. So if you're, if your post gets really popular and you suddenly start getting loads and loads of boosts or likes, then those things will be grouped. The other thing that's really useful I find in notifications in 4. 3 is the ability to filter notifications. So you can do things like filtering out, if you want to, brand new accounts or from domains and things like that.

So there's some really nice stuff there. Another cool thing is you can now add a little tag to your blog posts. Fediverse creator, it's an open graph tag that you add to the top of your page. And then that will add, when you share a link to your post, then that will add a little a credit, an author credit under your blog post.

Link card, so that will enable people if people are sharing your blog posts or for writers and journalists, if people are posting their stuff on, on Mastodon, then it gives a little link to their Mastodon profile so you can discover them and go and find out what they've been talking about, which is really cool.

The embedded posts have been updated as well, so they look a lot nicer, so that's kind of a lot of the stuff for users. That's in the, in the default web interface. Incredible work really by by the very small but dedicated engineering team that do most of the work on the core team and then there's a load of stuff for admins and developers as well.

Jonathan: Yeah,

Andy: pretty cool

Jeff: So that sounds really really cool but i'm pretty new to mastodon. Yeah, never never used it and just just a little background I'm more of a hardware person I'm an open source enthusiast but not Fully informed so I handle some of the basic stuff for Jonathan like asking like at least the 10, 000 foot version the very very simple.

How does it work if everybody runs their own servers? How does how do they connect and talk and

Andy: yeah? Yeah, so I mean the easiest way to think about this and the way that a lot of people talk about the Fediverse or this decentralized system we have is email, right? So easiest way of thinking about it, you might be at outlook.

com and another person might be at Gmail, but you can still send messages to one another, right? So It's it's very similar to that. We have a protocol called activity pub. We have some internet standards. There's one called web finger, which lets me say let's say Jeff at hackaday dot social if I know your address is Jeff at hackaday dot social, I can go and find out where my server needs to send messages or, or, or where your, your server exists.

And then you've got a system of inboxes and outboxes which enable. The service to exchange those those messages. So that's kind of the super high level way of describing it. I can go into tons of detail and we can sort of do this whole seminar on activity pub in the Fediverse, which which is not what we're here to do today.

But that's that's pretty much how it works right now. I've just been at. An event this weekend called Ogcamp, which as I say, I know that you talked about on Floss Weekly a couple of weeks ago, and I was running, running the crew for that. And what we did there was we had a a wall of posts from people talking about the event.

And by the way, tons of hardware people on, on Mastodon Jeff. I, I've got lists of folks that I follow. Who are kind of I've got a group called gadgets and gadgets and makers. So I follow a lot of the kind of hackaday folks. I follow a lot of the people who you'll quite commonly see sharing their, their builds and things on there.

But anyway, back to our camp. So we have this, this, this. This social wall with all the posts and what I did for that was I said, okay, let's get hashtag or camp and hashtag or camp 2024 and anything posted by the odd camp account as well directly. So it was aggregating together all of the stuff that was coming through on mastodon from each of those hashtags and aggregating them onto this nice wall that was in our main social room.

So it was really

Jonathan: fun. Every, every time we have a Mastodon guest, this is at least the third time we've had somebody from Mastodon on the show, which is great, by the way. We're huge fans. The the analogy gets made that it's like email and every time that is said I kind of I have this bit of a shuddery Feeling because I run my own email server.

Oh, and it's a terrible experience one of the reasons is because of It is anybody that runs their own email server will tell you it is terrible It's spam is one of the big problems. Yep, and with mass saddam. We also have to talk about abuse and And let's, let's talk about the spam bit first, and then we're actually going to talk about Matrix for just a little bit, because they've had some of these problems too.

But let me, let me just, let me just ask you this has Mastodon had a spam problem yet? And is there anything new in the new release that helps people deal with spam?

Andy: So, Mastodon does sometimes have. Some, some spam issues has had, it's got way better with 4. 3 and I'll tell you why in a second. But, but let me just describe how that sometimes occurs.

Sometimes if you, if folks do run their own server and then they leave registrations, they leave it on the internet with registrations open with no kind of capture or anything, gating folks signing up. And then they forget about it and then they wander off and they forget that they've set up this container spinning somewhere in the cloud, right, and they're not paying attention to it.

That is sometimes how that can happen. What is, has got a lot better in the last 12 months in particular, A couple of things. First of all, there's an organization called if tasks, which is independent federated trust and safety. And that is an organization, another nonprofit which seeks to provide best practices tools for folks that run either their own instances or small instances, small communities, provide them with some guidance, some education about some of the things they might need to think about.

Around those kinds of topics. They also have a service, I believe, which enables you to kind of get a almost a default block list or a default list of known very bad domains that you don't want to receive information from on your instance. So they're a super, super great organization to keep an eye out for.

Mastodon, the, the, the organization knows, you know, we're in connect, we're in contact with them. But that's a separate organization for, for Mastodon as a whole. And it works to try to bring some of those good practices across the Fediverse, all of the things using ActivityPub. So that's one element here.

The other element is in Mastodon 4. 3, we've got these filtered notifications so you can go in and I did this literally did this in the last couple of days because my instance was the instance I'm on mccall. social got upgraded over this weekend. So again, I came into the studio on Monday morning. I thought, Oh, my friend, Ron, who runs us, our instances upgraded us to 4.

3. I went in and updated my, my, my notification settings and I can do things like filter out posts from accounts that were created just. You know, in the last couple of days don't get rid of it. You can either choose to get rid of them completely and never see them. But then somebody like Jeff might sign up right now or tomorrow or, but, but in the next, I'm going to think Jeff's going to be going to create an account in the next few hours, let's say, right?

Because it's going to make sense. A

lot of sense. And he may, he may post it post. Post it on Mastodon and say, Hey, Andy Piper at McAuliffe social. Great chatting with you. It's been great chatting with you too, Jeff. I'll say that right now. But anyway, let's let's let's carry on. And I don't want to miss that, right?

Just because it's a new account. So what we do, what we do is we have the option to filter those into a separate like inbox, a filtered inbox. So I can go and look at those later and say, Oh, Cool, Jeff's here now. I'm going to follow him, right? And I'm going to allow that, and that's okay. But if I get one from some strange domain I've never come across that may be one of these kind of abandoned instances or that contains something that I don't want to see, then, you know, I can, I know then I can either block it or I can block the domain.

Another feature in Mastodon 4. 3, which is really useful, is because we're talking about these instances that are Separate you can block individual users, mutual block individual users. You can also choose to block an entire domain. Now, if that happens between instances, what that does is it blocks every account on the other domain.

Now, if that other domain has, you know a bunch of people actually you wanted to follow. Maybe something, something has changed around the ownership of the instance or the moderation of the instance. Then if your instance owner, your instance administrator blocks that domain, you as a user now get a notification to say, hey, by the way, your instance owner just blocked baddomain.

com. You were following four users. Bad domain dot com, here's a list, you might want to keep a record in case they move somewhere else in the future. So, we're doing a lot of work to try to improve these kinds of situations. You raised some really good points I beg your pardon, Jonathan, about running a mail server.

And and yeah Unfortunately, we've learned in the history of the internet that some people do some silly things which aren't great fun for the rest of us who just want to have a better experience. But what we want to do with Mastodon is really build a better social web for everyone and do that using open source technologies, do that using internet standards and protocols.

Jonathan: I mean, you sort of, you sort of know that your system Has arrived. You've made it. You're in the big leagues now when you start getting spam through it.

Andy: I, I mean, that's the other argument, right? And, and, and that, that, that could well be the case, but there are controls in place or there are got controls available to, to, to manage some of that.

And we are working on that. There's always more we can do. There will be more we can do. And we, and we listen to the community and we pay attention to, to what's happening.

Jonathan: Yeah, that, that idea of, of an old instance that allows open signups without any sort of protection against it. That very much reminds me of the the open relay problem with email.

Andy: Yeah.

Jonathan: And so I can imagine, I can imagine a future where you, you start having, well you, it may already be here for that matter. You have some sort of a a blocking list service where this server is a known open relay. Therefore, we suggest that you block it.

Andy: That's what if tasks can provide to some folks.

And that's something that we're looking at adding. On our roadmap for the next version of mastodon as well that we'll we'll have some better defaults there But right now you can go to iftas. org And sign up for their forums and they can help you with those kinds of things as well if you're a new administrator

Jonathan: Yeah, so again making the email analogy.

It's the equivalent of spam house Spam host, however they say it. I mean,

Andy: I'm not, I'm sure that Jazz Jazz Michael King who runs that would see things slightly differently but it is similar, there's some similarity for sure. There's enough similarity to make the analogy I think, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And you're right that it's a sign that the Fediverse is taking off that we need to spend more time thinking about things like Things on this.

Jonathan: Yeah, so let's let's talk. I'll let I'll let Jeff go just a second. There's something else. I want to make sure I get to Let's talk about abuse like that's the other the other big part of this when we talk about blocking people and blocking messages those are the two big things you got spam and then you got abuse and the the tricky thing with abuse is it is not a Nearly as binary as spam is.

Right, so an incoming message is pretty much, it's either spam or it isn't, and everyone sort of agrees, looks at a message and agrees that's spam. Abuse, it's different, because some people, their tolerance for abuse is, if someone, you know, has anything political to say, well, it's abuse. If someone is supporting, A candidate that I don't like it's abuse and like that's sort of like on the very very light gray area and then you've got the extreme opposite is And this is something that matrix has been dealing with matrix is sort of the other federated multi user universe out there I was I was in one of the main matrix rooms and I had to leave it because people were Coming in and dropping images that I did not want to see like I don't I don't I think they were getting to the point of being like CSAM that's child sexual abuse material but they were, they were close, like that was the direction people were trying to go, and the Matrix guys were just, they were struggling trying to get a hold of this, and so like, that's the very dark, completely opposite edge of, of the abuse spectrum, and not everybody agrees on how much of this is actually abuse, and one of the things that I, I love about Mastodon is, You can run your own server and you get to make that decision yourself.

Whereas on the other social networks, you've got a company that makes that decision for you. And I just, I just love the fact that I'm asked it on. It's not the way it works. And so I'm assuming that with with the new version with 4. 3, you've also got more tools out there to help people deal with that sort of thing.

So let's talk about that a little bit. What's what's new? What's new in the world of abuse on Mastodon?

Andy: Well, if I can pivot that, I'm going to include that in my answer. Let's let's pivot it and talk about the sort of the admin side. I gave you kind of an overview of what's new for users. And for people using Mastodon in 4.

3 particularly on the sort of the website but also on, on the, on the. So let me start with the basics. So 4. 3, there's some upgrades to some of the underlying dependencies. So we bump up, I think, from Ruby 3. 1 as the minimum to Ruby 3. 3, and a newer version of Ruby. Newer versions of Postgres and, and those kinds of things.

And what that brings as well is better performance. We've done some work to migrate away from and, and, and deprecate image magic for media handling. So we're now using live vs. And, and that provides better performance. So. But there's some sort of underlying stuff that's new for for admins there.

There's also some better stuff around metrics and management. So we've dropped deprecated stats. D. We've moved over to open telemetry. We've got Redis Sentinel support in there. We've got we've got some other nice things and some little nice. Touches like you can now customize your instance icon.

So if you are a hardware community, you can literally, without having to go and change templates, you can just choose an option to choose what icon you want. But to address your point directly, there are some features in 4. 3 that help related to spam and abuse. For example, moderators can now Search for problematic content using hashtags, which wasn't possible to do previously again.

We really I think the, the administrator community, the instance administrators benefit from things like talking to if task, getting some, some advice from them, getting some help from them as well. They've got some services that they, they help to provide in those instances, but but from the administration side again, we know we can continue to improve and iterate here.

It's been a, been a year long process of building the new release. And that seems like a really long time. It is a long time. The team's worked really hard. There's a lot of moving parts. And every time we think about wanting to add a new feature, it means having to, to, to make a choice about what we, what we focus on and things we can't do straight away.

So, you know, I think we've added some really nice things. We've got a decent balance of. Keeping a nice fresh modern look, adding some user experience features, making it easier for folks to get started, making things a bit easier to use, and then also helping administrators to manage their instances.

Finally, there's some, some Stuff features for developers, which will hopefully help them to plug in and improve the situation as well. So we've done things like really improving the authentication mechanisms for the API and enabling developers to also, if you're using a third party client, take advantage of those same notification filtering mechanisms that we provide so, so that they can provide those to their users as well.

Jonathan: Yeah, it seems like there's a, we probably need to, here in a few months, we probably need to have the folks from IFTTTAS on and talk about this because it's, it's fascinating to, to, and one of the reasons it's so interesting to me is because every other social network does this very opaquely. You don't get to look into it at all.

And with Mastodon, just by its very nature, it has to be very transparent. And that's amazing. That's it.

Andy: Okay. There's challenges with that though you know, we can't, I think most instance administrators We can't necessarily you can say that these are the kinds of content And kinds of things that are okay on our server, and you can be transparent about that.

I think that you, the way you get into difficulties, particularly with spam, it's back to the spam assassin, spam house, you know Bayesian learning kind of stuff, you know, as soon as you start to say, this is what we are filtering out, then the bad guys can figure out how to, to get around that. So You know, I think that's absolutely true, and I agree with you that one of the benefits of building an open platform, building in the open and working with others is that we have to be and can be much more transparent about those, those decision making processes.

But I think the technical level from certainly from my past experience. At one of those large platforms that we've referred to you know, there are challenges with, with how much you can share in public.

Jonathan: That's, that's actually a very, that's a really good point and not something I was thinking about, although it definitely makes sense.

It definitely does. I think that's, that is something that Oh, I forget the name. That's Well, is it, is it Spam Assassin That has some, some open source tooling around that. I

Andy: certainly, you, I mean, I'm, I'm going back 20 years when I'm, when I refer to Spam Assassin, I mean, well, that was when I ran my own mail server at home and, and that was a long, long time ago.

But I think that's

Jonathan: still, I think that is still one of the names in the business that do it. And they, they have that, that same problem is that they publish some of their filtering stuff. And so you can just grab it and write spam to avoid it There's another organization. Yeah, find the loopholes.

Andy: Yeah, exactly.

Well, that's that's that's the the loopholes is the challenge there's another organization that i'll mention because I think it's really important and it's another demonstration of the growth, momentum of the social web and and the fediverse is the social web foundation which was founded by Evan Prodromou, who's one of the authors of the activity pub specification, and he's been really active in the Fediverse for a very long time.

Mallory Nodal and Tom Coates. So they founded this thing called the Social Web Foundation, announced it about two or three weeks ago. And it really exists and is supported by a number of players in, in, in this space ourselves. As well as a ghost flip board, a number of the platforms that are integrating with activity pub, and it really exists to tell the story, help people to understand a bit more because, you know, Jeff, you kind of said, look, Hey, I'm aware of the basics, but I'm not quite sure I get it all right.

And so the social web foundation is there to help to tell the story more about, we've got this opportunity as users to. Make our choices, own our data, not be beholden to Jonathan's point to the decisions made by those big corporates that are, you know, very opaque. We get to the, the, the boring thing as users is that we have to do a little bit more brain work.

And, and, you know, my, my background, my degree was in history and I, I have, I have, humans are incredibly lazy. Okay. We are, we are the most lazy creatures we will, we will, we will let, you know, that's why it's sometimes it's very difficult to, to, to make those hard choices to say, I'm going to go and use something different.

It's going to involve a little bit more work to learn. Relearn some, some, some processes and the way things work because I'm so used to this easy thing that I was doing for the longest time to, to, to get out and change the way you do things that can be difficult, but there's so much benefit to it. And the Social Web Foundation is there to help to tell those stories and to say, look, you know, these are the benefits of using ActivityPub.

These are the, these are the benefits to you as a user of owning your network. I've switched Mastodon servers only once so far. I know, I know folks who've switched more often than that. And when I did that, I was able to go from one active mastodon instance to another and it moved my network with me.

I didn't lose followers. I just, they were all, all of their accounts at a protocol level, the protocol said, hey this guy's changed his address. He's over there now. And all of those accounts re followed me and I re followed them and that was super powerful. It's a really big difference to, again, the way that some of those other networks work.

Jeff: I don't think that makes. Good. Sorry. I was gonna say, I think that makes a lot of sense. I mean, as you know, Steve Gibson says, you know, having good security is inconvenient. Well, having control of the social media is maybe a little inconvenient, but it, you know, you, you're better off because you have that power.

And that's one of the things I do like about Mastodon, is I know that you're in much more control of what you, what you see, and, you know, you, you're not at the mercy of some conglomerate And, you know, there's many stories about how they've made decisions one way or the other that have upset people because wait a minute, you're filtering things.

I don't want to see. And as a Mastodon user, I could say, well, I'm really into hardware, I'm into the software, I want to, I don't want to see cat videos, you know, I just, I want to see any of that, you know, I can just block it myself and not have to worry about it. But one of the things I did want to say is like, okay, I'm going to get a Mastodon account.

Yes. Where, where's step one? Where, where, you know, as, as

Andy: a new user. So you. So go to, you can go to joinmastodon. org and there's a page for you to, to find servers by default. And this is, this was done primarily to reduce that mental. Cognitive load of making that choice because before and something we've heard before is people would go to joinmastodon.

org and it would say, here are all the servers in the world and you'd have to choose one, right? And that's the first thing that people tended to, well, exactly. Right. So, so, so first of all, doesn't matter where you start. You can move if you want to. Right. In the future, you can take your network and you can, you can move somewhere else.

So by default, it will, it will suggest mastodon. social, which is the one that the mastodon nonprofit organization that builds the software runs similar to the matrix project in a sense, right? They've got matrix. org, which is where I've got a matrix account. But if you, if you want to you can go somewhere else.

So for hardware folks, If you're into 3D printing, there's 3dp. chat, there's, there's there's bitbang. social, there's, there's hackaday. social, just saying, just saying, maybe have a nice chat with, with Elliot and get that, get that sorted. But If you go to joinmastodon. org, there's there's a service page where you can do things like filtering by by your geographic region that might be important to you for data privacy reasons servers based in the EU may have different.

Data laws than those based in the U. S. For example so it may be important to you from those perspectives. It may be a maybe a topic based community. You're looking for what I did was I moved. I was on Mastodon at Social. I started there back in 2017 or so with my account had a number of years there and then I ended up moving to New York City.

A server run by a former co worker of mine which is called mccaw. social, which has got a couple of hundred of folks that I, you know, used to work with on that platform. And they're all in their own places now. But I know the person that runs that server. I actually donate to him. I give Give him some give him a small amount of money every month so that, you know, it covers the running costs, help to cover the running costs of his, of his server.

And and, and I know, you know, if it goes away, he would let me know because I'm giving him some money. The, and, and, you know, he would explain what was going on. And that does happen sometimes with, with. Mastodon instances or Fediverse instances. But that would be my suggestion. Another tip I wanted to give you, though Jeff is one of the power moves on mastodon you can do is follow.

You don't not only follow. Users and then needing to know who all those users are. Although Macedon 4. 3, if you join a server that's running Macedon 4. 3, you get a slightly refreshed onboarding experience where we will help you to hopefully find some folks you might be interested in a bit more easily.

We do a little bit of additional recommendation to help folks fill up their. The following list a bit more, but one of the power things you can do is you can follow hashtags and that is super useful. You, you know, I, I follow a ton of hashtags for 3d printing, for ESP 32, for micropython, for Lego, for events I'm involved with and and then if I see those things coming into my timeline because I'll find out how there'll be a note saying why that's shown up, why I'm seeing this then I can actually go and choose to follow that user.

Here's another useful tip in 4. 3 that I didn't mention earlier. In 4. 3, we've got these little hover cards on the web user interface. So if you see a post from someone that you don't recognize, you can hover over their name and it's going to pop up a little floating card so that you can get a bit more information about them, where they are, for example, or what their, their profile links are.

And that's in 4. 3 as well. So again, we've really tried to focus on making it easier to find people that you might be interested in following or topics you might be interested in following. Thank you for asking that question because, because it is, I think it is one of those barriers to folks sometimes is either they've previously had an experience coming to Mastodon and having that, Oh my God, where do I start?

Or they just haven't kind of kept at it. And that goes back to my comment about. Yeah, there's a bit of relearning to do here, but it's really powerful and valuable when you, when you get into the groove and start engaging with it.

Jeff: Awesome. Well, now just say I decide, you know, and I'm going to run a server as well.

Yeah. Is, is there any, like, legal risk or burden with that or what, you know, could I get in trouble running it or? Sure.

Jonathan: Is California or Europe going to come after you for having people's personally identifiable information?

Andy: Right, so so look the the answer to that is it depends i'm afraid It's the honest answer.

I I work in developer relations. I I do my best to give those honest answers. If you're running something for yourself, then, you know, it's about the same as running your own mail server in terms of like What's coming onto your server and those kind of things, if you're, if you're running it for a group of people, your friends or whatever, or then you definitely need to be aware of who you're supporting, what data is coming in and what the rules are, what the laws are, and I can't tell you those, it's going to, it's going to depend on where you, where you're located.

Again, I believe the IFTTT knowledge base has some help on those kinds of topics. They've been such a great supporter for folks running, building and running the social web. So I would definitely encourage people to take a look there. And there are also people in their forums who can also probably point you in the right direction, depending on your, you know, your geographic location or so on.

But, you know, broadly speaking. You can spin up a container. You can go to what there's a couple of two or three hosting organizations that I can think of that will let you sort of buy a small bit of cloud container to run an instance if you wanted to, either for yourself or for a group, and they typically will then Do what a lot of these organizations will do though.

They'll charge you based on usage and size and and How many virtual CPUs and all that sort of stuff that you want and how much you might need to support the size of your community

Jeff: Okay, well that and that answers quite a bit now you said A little bit of cloud. So, and I know it's going to be based on users or whatnot, but say I had 20 users on my server.

Do I need pretty powerful or will it run on a potato or somewhere in the middle? Oh, Jeff,

Andy: you're actually, honestly, genuinely, you're, you're testing my, my ability to answer that directly. I'm going to go and quickly go see if I can find, find that out for you whilst we're talking, but I don't have that in my head.

Okay. Off the top of my off the top of my head, I think sort of for 20 users, you're gonna, you know, you're gonna want a fair, a decent amount of media storage, probably, you know, 50 gig or something. And and something like that. I'm looking at one of the pricing pages of for one of the hosting companies right now.

I'm not going to name them because people should go and check those sort of things out. But they are suggesting that sort of thought for a 20 active users But that would be their kind of mid tier package with, as I say, 50 gig of media storage and, and something like that. But, but please don't take my, my, my, Off the top of my head word for it because I don't have it in my head I've made notes on other things we might talk about but not those topics.

I apologize

Jonathan: I'm gonna i'm gonna ask you about something similar and you you may you may have to hit the eject button on this one, too

Andy: Well, no, listen, i'm not going to eject. I will definitely help out and answer these questions In a different

Jonathan: format later, but but yeah go for it so, this is something we covered on Hackaday, actually, you may have seen it.

The website was Itsfoss, which, great website, we cover stuff from there from time to time. And they made a request, please stop sharing our stuff on Mastodon, because Mastodon is unintentionally DDOSing our website when one of these big places do it. And what was happening, it's a real thing. There's There's more to the story apparently they didn't have any caching turned on for their website But what was happening was when someone with a lot of followers would would you know re do we still say retoot repost?

We would repost something from the site all of the federated so In, in Mastodon, you have this idea of federated followers. So, like, someone from your server follows someone from that server, therefore the server follows, gets the whole feed. Well, when that happens, when that server, when person A posts a link, server B, where someone follows person A, will follow the link and grab it to get, essentially, a summary, if I remember correctly.

But they'll do, they'll do a download of the website. And so what was happening is when someone with a lot of followers, or a server with a lot of followers, posted that link, you had, you know, dozens, if not hundreds of Mastodon servers around the world, sort of instantly doing a lookup for the website.

And it was, it was taking at least one website off the air. It was, it was taking them down. It was, it was a DDoS effect. They were getting slashed on it by Mastodon. Yeah. Yeah. It's so late. Is that, is that still a thing? As the message on devs, I, obviously you're aware of that. Have you all, have you all worked on that?

Yeah, I am aware of that.

Andy: No, I am aware of that. And because also I have my own small podcast I, I do weekly and, and, and that one sometimes has a similar kind of blip when I share our weekly episode URL. So look it depends on the size as you just kind of indicated, and we are aware of it.

We're working on it. We've got ideas. Something I want to mention since you bring this up is there's a new project that we've spun up which is funded by and Elna NGI and It's called Fediverse Discovery Providers, and the reason I mention this is because there's a, there's a, there's an additional element to that, which is called Fediverse Auxiliary Service Providers.

It all sounds very fancy

and

so on, and to be honest, it's not very user facing, but the idea is that you might have these services, which are not necessarily just Mastodon. The, the, Fediverse is all using ActivityPub, we've got other platforms, Lemmy, which is like a Reddit sort of similar clone. We've got PixelFed, which is an Instagram similar style thing.

All of them using ActivityPub and you can follow users across them and so on. And we want to contribute to the broader Fediverse. So there's this project that we that we are working on that is funded by NGI, NLNet NGI search, which is Fediverse Discovery Providers, which will enable in potentially for folks to discover content across different types of Fediverse instance more easily.

It's going to all be opt in. We introduced it at an event called Fediforum last month, and we're working on it in the open on GitHub at the moment. Now, the reason I mention it is because what. The idea of this is a Fediverse Discovery Provider could be an instance of what we're calling a Fediverse Auxiliary Service Provider and other things, the other things that Fediverse, future Fediverse Auxiliary Service Providers might do is provide better caching for situations like that, that would, that would, would prevent.

Or mitigate those kind of situations, there was also something we actually added in the in the previous release. And one of the dot point releases to 4. 2, which is that there is, there's a bit more randomization of a delay between when all of those instances are going to go start. Like trying to fetch the URL that's just being shared, so there should be less of a tsunami of requests that suddenly all come in, in a, in a very short period of time.

And, as you rightly say I think the particular instance you were talking about with, with its FOSS or whichever site it was you know, they came out and said, hey, you know what, okay, we, we weren't caching a few hundred requests in 60 seconds, you know, Most website servers are gonna, are gonna be equipped to deal with that.

As I say, I know that the podcast I have, we are running and, and it's terrible and I really need to fix this. We are running in a shared in a shared web hosting thing. That, that I haven't managed to spend enough time to get us migrated off of yet. So we only have a tiny slice of a of a, of a, of a VM somewhere.

That sometimes that sometimes does that does happen. And yeah, it's on my list of things to to resolve because I can't even do things like upgrading PHP and my SQL on that particular instance because of the deal we have with that host. That's my problem, not anybody else's. So again, yes, the answer is yes, we're aware of it.

Yes, we're working on it. We've got ways of mitigating it. Definitely want to improve it in the future.

Jeff: Speaking of the future, we do have a question from Discord and from MashedPotato. He says, is it still the case that quote posts won't be implemented on Mastodon?

Andy: No,

it's definitely not the case. And MashedPotato, if you go read the launch 4.

3 blog post, which I think I sent to Jonathan to include in the in the post later from Hackaday's perspective. If you go look at the blog post, blog. joinmastodon. org and look at the 4. 3 announcement, you will see at the end of that there is a reference to what we're doing next. And this is a really nice segue into that, actually, because 4.

4 4. 4 or whatever the next version is quote post is on the list. We are, we're doing it. At some stage there was a I think some folks felt that this was not going to happen. We recognize the community wants, wants Qt Quote posts. So that's something we want to do. We're trying to talk to other, again, activity pub implementers.

It's not just Mastodon here. The Fediverse is a, is a collaboration of different. Platforms and we want to do this in a way that that works and that is interoperable that extends ActivityPub if needed in the correct ways to enable this to be done well, there's a ton of things to think about, but we are talking about it.

Jonathan: That's a really interesting point. So the quote post is going to be an extension to, to ActivityPub.

Andy: I may have misspoken. We're looking at what I'm saying is we're, we're looking at what we need to do to make sure we do it well. And in a way that, that, that interoperates with other ActivityPub Services.

Right, right. So I'm not 100 percent clear yet on the exact data

Jonathan: format that it's going to look like. Sure, sure, sure. It might be an extension to ActivityPub, but at the very least, it needs, you guys need to think about the ActivityPub backend. So that brings to mind something actually really interesting about quote posts.

They probably don't have to be just Mastodon posts, right? Exactly. So there are a bunch of other services on ActivityPub. But there's there's picture sharing there's video sharing there's you know, yes think think of a Existing big social media service and someone probably has an open source equivalent that works with activity pub Yeah, and so this brings to mind this this This is actually really exciting.

This amazing thought of someone just posted a video on this other activity pub thing. I would like to share it, and it is a repost. And if you click the repost, it takes you over to the video. Like, that's super cool. That's really cool. It is

Andy: really

Jonathan: cool.

Andy: I love, I love, so I've got, I think there's another element to all of this, which is that we as an activity pub, Fed social web community can do more around accounts because I've got accounts on pixel fed, peer tube, lemi, mastodon my WordPress blog is, has got an activity pub plugin and so on, right?

So you can see content from all of those places under, under my username at different domains.

Mm-Hmm, ,

I, I can reshare. One of the things I love is I can, I can post my images on Pixel Fed, I post them on Mastodon as well. But if it's kind of more of a photographic thing that I want to exist in a picture fair sharing site, I'll post it on Pixel Fed and then I'll repost my Pixel Fed account, boost my pixel Fed account into my Mastodon feed so people can see that.

So I kind of love that interoperability. Mm-Hmm. . It takes some getting used to for people that are used to other platforms and the ways that things have worked elsewhere in the past but for them in the past, but I, I really appreciate it. I think it speaks a lot to the power of having this, this social web protocol and layer.

But yeah, look, one of the things I try to do is I try to attend when I can the W3C social web community group, which is being reformed into a working group meetings and take part in their discussions. I go along to something called Feddy Forum, which happens every six months, which is independently run.

By some folks and that brings together a bunch of the different projects that are interoperating in the, in the social web to talk about what's new or what they're building or how we can make things better on an ongoing basis. So, yeah, there's a, there's a, there's a lot to think about here.

You know, it's not a quite just a question of can you just implement quote posts?

Mm hmm.

Tomorrow, you know, there's we're a tiny team. Our team are the core development team is really small. We've got to keep the platform as a whole stable for lots of people fix bugs and, you know, solve problems. If if things get get raised, we need to be.

We need to respond to them quickly because, you Especially in the age of misinformation and spam and all this other stuff, we want to make sure that there aren't too many vectors for bad actors to misbehave. We want to make sure that things are running well. So we're doing, we're fixing bugs. And releasing patches to existing versions.

By the way, now that we've released version 4. 3, we'll be, we'll be retiring version 4. 1 in in the spring so six months after the 4. 1 series will be will no longer receive updates, but we will, will continue to support 4. 2 and 4. 3. We want to install to it to apply, you know, add new features.

We want to build for as broader community of people as possible. And we want to interoperate with all of those other platforms that are part of the Fediverse as best we can. So it's a, it's a, it's a big, big effort for a

Jonathan: small team. So I've got to ask about something and it may sound like a troll question and it only a tiny bit is that's actually fairly serious.

Are we doing anything with AI in Mastodon? Is LLM coming to it? No, no, no. Is there a future that you see where it could? And I think, I think I can see a place where it might fit, but I'm curious. What do you think?

Andy: Well, I personally. Could see a small number of places where something like an LLM could be useful.

However, it is not AI and LLMs are not at all on the roadmap or plan for the Mastodon core team, we are not in any way interested. And if you follow Eugene, who's the founder, the CEO on Mastodon, he's very, very clear that it's not something he finds acceptable. He's that he's interested in I don't want to speak for him too much on that regard.

He speaks for himself. But no, I it's not something that we are going to be going to be spending any any time on we've got much more interesting problems to solve I I'm curious what your thought is jonathan my thought and this is I want to make it 100 percent clear. This is not me speaking on behalf of the Mastodon team or project.

The place where I could see it potentially, two places I could see it potentially useful. And one of them is already being done by a couple of third party clients, which is doing things like image descriptions. Okay. Right. So, so alternative text for images where, where, where the, the, the, the, the, the app would suggest that for you.

But the, the other one potentially would be some element of recommendation or ranking, but a lot of people come to Mastodon and the Fediverse to get away from algorithms. Again, I've got a very complicated relationship with AI and machine learning. I work in a maker studio. I do some stuff with generative art plots, but generative art in the sense of running algorithms to generate interesting swirly circles, not, not taking stuff that other people have created and mashing up another image, you know, so there's, there's, I've written a blog post about that as well.

So again, that's me speaking personally. I don't think that that is something. That any of those things, are Well, I know for a fact that We have no interest in adding those sorts of things to to mastodon.

Jonathan: Sure. Sure, and that's that's fair You know the the the current, AI craze, we could call it, maybe it might be fair to call it a bubble.

People have very strong opinions on it. And I, I find that really fascinating. Personally, I am waiting for the bubble to pop so that AI and LLMs can become basically just another tool that people use as opposed to the big thing that everybody wants to throw money at right now. .

Andy: Yeah. I, I mean, I think that it, it, it's, yeah, you're right. I mean i've been in the tech industry for 20 years and I think that You know, we've been through a bunch of these waves but yeah, I I the thing that bothers me with it is the the clear intellectual property infringement aspect, in terms of like how all of this stuff has been built and trained Yeah and I and again speaking personally I am Very much struggling to come to terms with the way that You The big tech folks have railroaded their way to access to all of this data and used it to train their models.

I have problems with it. Yeah, I don't, but I, but I do find the outputs when you used well with an intelligent human brain. You know interjecting and saying well actually that's nonsense, but these three bits of information you've given me seem to be useful You know, I think I think that that it can be useful in that respect.

Jonathan: We had a we had an awesome discussion I was actually a little surprised at how good it was But just last week we talked with one of the guys from ibm and he's also working with the ai alliance And just a really good discussion about some of these issues And with with With Mastodon in particular, it kinda gets back to, to one of my thoughts about LLMs and one of the things that they're really good for, particularly the conversational LLMs, they work really well as a replacement for a search engine.

Particularly if you do things like in your prompt, you tell it to cite your sources, then it will, it works very well as a as a search engine and. That is interesting. And so you, you hit the nail on the head. The thing that I really, I was thinking about is in addition to, you know, just show me the posts from the people I follow, just show me the posts from the hashtags I follow.

And then you've also got this option to show me the posts from all of the followed federated servers, which is kind of like the fire hose. There might be an algorithm that says, show me the posts that are similar to posts that I've enjoyed seeing in the past. And I think that could be useful for people.

Andy: I think you're right. But let me give you, let me give a shout out to some of the third party developers because that's what I'm here for. Right? I worked in developer relations. My role. On the team. I'm not one of the core developers. I work with the core developers and I help to communicate what we're building to the third party developer community.

So let me give a shout out to some of our awesome third party developer community. There's, there's a, a web app called Fan, P-P-H-A-N-P-Y Social which is a third party web app progressive web app that lets you you know, browse your master on timeline, but it has a catch up feature. So you know.

If you, if you're not on mastodon whilst all of these non algorithmically sorted posts are coming in mm-Hmm, , then you might miss them. Right. But if, but, but if, but, but I might want a summary of the last eight hours of interesting posts. And FPE can do things like saying, well, you know, if that's had, if, if posts, posts that have had more than five likes or 20 boosts or whatever, that might make them interesting to you.

It can show you them in a timescale. There's another. Service I use called Mermel, M U R M E L, which does something similar. It sends me a daily email digest. There's another one to highlight things I might have missed or links that have gone viral that I might have missed because I wasn't watching my Mastodon timeline at the time.

There's another one called Fediview, which does more of the. Machine learning style, LLM style ranking rather than just doing what is you know, what metrics to reply. So these are places where I think having a, an open API, a publicly accessible, easy to use API and having third parties plug those things in is fine.

If that's what they want to do, and the data is being used appropriately and not just being, you know, churned into a Another LLM to generate more stuff. Right. And we know that those kinds of things can happen. But I think that, you know, we as a platform as a core team are focusing on making a, a, an easy to use, welcoming, better open social experience for people, for a large number of people for a broad range of people.

So, When there are features that are really good for power users, we may not spend as much time on those. We may delegate them to, or suggest that third parties can go build those things that have much more of a niche use case. That, that, that, that Feddy wall that I used at OBCAP this weekend, that was built by somebody else, you know, they built that tool.

We didn't need to build it into Mastodon directly. Not everybody needs to be able to run a wall of Mastodon post at an event. So why would we spend a load of time building something like that ourselves?

Jonathan: yeah, I've I've thought for the longest time and I was at first quite hopeful that twitter was going to implement this with the changes and They've only a tiny bit done So and and I guess I still have a little bit of hope for the future, but not a whole lot there.

Anyway, I would love to see a social network where you could bring your own algorithm Yeah. You know, exact, you know what the algorithm does, you have control of it over it, and it does exactly what you want it to. Well, and that's sort of, so Fed, fed view

Andy: kind of,

Jonathan: that's sort of what you're, what you're describing.

Yeah.

Andy: Yeah. Fed, fed View kind of layers that on, you know, they, they've got four, I think four built in algorithms that they, that you can choose from. Mm-Hmm. Yeah. Look, I, I, I'm not. I'm not opposed to that as a concept. A lot of people who use Mastodon would be completely, I believe, would be very opposed to any kind of algorithm.

Because all algorithms are opinionated in the end and have some kind of agenda. Oh, absolutely. If you are going to spend the time thinking about your agenda for applying your own algorithm. All good. Right. As soon as that gets taken out of your hands and is run opaquely, going back to our conversation earlier, that's when things can get dangerous or things can, you know, be misused.

And I think those are dangerous. But yes, I think you're right. I think let's see where the Fediverse goes next. I mean, there's a ton of interesting stuff happening.

Jeff: Absolutely. Brings up, you know, how do you decide what's going to be next on the roadmap? I mean, cause you talked about earlier community, you know, wanted something.

I mean, is there a place that. To give feed feedback or do you survey or, you know, what's up? How loud does

Jonathan: the community have to be before something is implemented?

Andy: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, we, we hear the community a lot and we appreciate them. And, and honestly we do. It's we've got, obviously we've got the atmastodon, atmastodon.

social, and we've also got atmastodonengineering atmastodon. social. That, that second one is one that, that, that, that, that, that. That we've spun up in the last 12 months, and we're also now posting every month. We, we share a monthly engineering update. It's our, our trunk and tidbits blog series which I, I co author.

So we try to help folks keep up with the things we're, we're doing. The last six months have all been about what the changes are that fed into the 4. 3 release. But the other thing I'm very keen to do again in my role is to showcase what the developer community beyond us is doing as well. So I always try to include one or two or three fun things that other people have built on top of Mastodon.

We're on GitHub. Obviously, all of our development is on GitHub. Being FlossWeekly I'm aware that other source control mechanisms exist. We really appreciate all the tools that are available to us on GitHub, and we've used GitHub for a long time, and we don't have plans yet, or any time soon to move off of GitHub.

But again, we hear the community sometimes who suggests that we do that. We, we, we hear, so we hear people talking to us on the platform. We hear people talking to us. We have a discord for people that donate to mastered on on Patreon. They get access to a discord. And, and the, The Patreon donations also, they get a newsletter from us.

I think we just posted one this week to folks that have donated to us via Patreon. We we have people raising issues against the project and raising pull requests. We've got a small team of amazing volunteers who help us to do some issue triage around some of those. But yeah, we, we need to manage a lot of sometimes competing.

Requests our launch blog post of 4. 3 mentioned a few of the key things we want to improve in the next major release, which would be those quote posts and also potentially subscriptions to block lists. We also want to work on better long form content display on Mastodon. So figuring out as more blogging platforms and newsletter platforms start to build in activity pub support, we want to figure out better ways of displaying that content on Mastodon, which is essentially just a.

A short form service and doesn't have plans to move away from being a short form service. We've got a new iOS developer who's joining the core team and starting very soon. So you should see some improvements. We've had, you know ongoing improvements to the iOS app, but, but you should see some more of those coming along soon.

Yeah, I mean, we, we, we we're working on it is all I can tell you. We're a tiny team and the one thing we haven't talked about, and I'm going to, I'm going to make a play for here is funding, right? We're a tiny team. We exist totally on donations. We do not take investment from folks wanting to drive us in particular directions that we've been very clear on, on, on not taking.

Those kind of investments. Okay. So we, we are funded through donations. We really appreciate every dollar that is donated this year. We spun up a 501 C three in the U S to make it easier for you all to to, to, to chip in and support the project. I will also say that If you can and you use an independent Mastodon instance, do try to support that, the running costs for that instance.

I do that with my own instance, but the core team to keep us going to, to, to, to make sure that the developers can eat and, and live and, you know and contribute to fixing, you know, critical security issues quickly needs to be funded. And, and I'm sorry to bang on about it, but we do appreciate donations.

Jeff: And is the core team like full time paid Just working on that I off

Andy: the top of my head. I think we've got three or four members of the team who are are paid full time on the team but you know, there's a there's about 10 or 10 or 11 of us in total including, you know somebody who helps with dealing with sort of admin and management sort of tasks.

We've got folks also that run, help to run, operate our mastodon. social, mastodon. online instances. But the, the actual number of people that are paid full time to work on mastodon is very small. It's, it's three or four folks. And there's an annual report. I think the most recent one was 2022. The 2023 one should come out soon and then there'll be one for 2024, which has You know, it's it's a it sounds really kind of Simple to say but it's been our biggest year yet You know, I mean we've had massive growth the the the the products come on and the platforms come on a long way and You know, we're trying to we're trying to make this thing sustainable and make sure that better social online experiences Scale and can exist for for a long time to come.

So Yeah Yeah,

Jeff: very cool. I was gonna And I will Good. I was just gonna say, I am going to get a Mastodon account. I will, I will do it. I, I know of a couple of stories. Listen, Jeff, if

Andy: you need, if you need any tips and tricks then, and, and you wanna ha get on, jump on a call with me, I'm happy to, to give you some, some of the kind of the, the wizardry that, that, that, that lead you through it.

And hey, also just wanna say, you know, you all can also, and I, they're coming to North America in the near future when we can, when we can get our our shipping sorted. But, but in the EU now, you can get a plushie to support us and, and you know, if you're missing. missing missing your mastodons, then, you know that's a great way to support us as well.

Yeah. Awesome.

Jonathan: I was going to ask about the transparency and the funding. And so I assume that's what that annual report is. That's where people can go and see here's the money I donated. Here's what it went to.

Andy: We're a nonprofit. Incorporated in Germany, and there's a, there's a, there's a non profit board 501C3 in the U.

S. And of course, both of those things require us to be transparent and to provide reports. So as I say, I believe the most recent one that's available on the website is 2020. 22, the 2023 one should be available. And of course, but that will, that will be an ongoing thing. Yes, absolutely.

Right.

I don't think I'm a line item in the existing report yet.

And I've been working with the team for 18 months. Right. So and to be clear, since we're talking transparency, I, I I work freelance. I do one day a week of my life is spent dedicated to the Mastodon project. I have a, I have a, I have a discounted day rate because it's a non profit that I that I offer on top for that and and the rest of my life is currently burning really honestly currently burning down my savings So if anybody else in open source wants to hire me, for the other four days of the week, then then here I am

Jonathan: Yeah, very good Maybe, maybe somebody will, hopefully.

I understand that. I too, I'm in the, I have many, I have many irons in the fire. I do a lot of freelance work on various different things. And so I understand how that goes. And when one of those goes away or several go away, the trepidation you feel, I get that.

Andy: I also

Jonathan: want to be clear,

Andy: I want to spend all of my time on Mastodon, but you know I love, I love this product, this platform, and I love what we're building as a, as a, as a free and open source standards based, better social web platform.

Yeah,

Jonathan: absolutely. Is there anything that we didn't ask you about that you really wanted to make sure and cover?

Andy: Wow. Let me just spin through my list. I think we've covered pretty much everything here. I feel like we did get

Jonathan: through it pretty well. I hope,

Andy: I hope you both are I'm delighted, Jeff, to hear that you're planning to give it a, give it another try or give it a try.

I hope, Jonathan, you'll spend a bit more time interacting with us and looking forward to Elliot getting Hackaday. social upgraded and seeing all those great hacks.

Jonathan: I'll go bug him about it.

Andy: Hey, listen, listen, the other thing to do, Hackaday. Articles should get the Fediverse creator tag added to them, and then you'll get the little author attribution whenever a Hackaday link is shared on on on Mastodon, you can get the author attribution added if you're if the folks that have written that article have the Fediverse creator pointing tag in the in the page pointing to their Mastodon account, then every time one of their articles gets get shared, they'll get a little find more from Jenny or Oh my gosh, my brain is blanking on, on, on all the, the great folks on, on on Hackaday.

So, Al and Elliot

Jonathan: and me.

Andy: Yeah, of course, you know, I listened, I, I listened to, to your podcast weekly, so I should know all the names. I'm just, I'm, I'm so excited to be here that

Jonathan: my brain is going blank. No, no, that's fine. Okay. I got two final questions I've got to ask you then. And that is what's your favorite text editor and scripting language?

Andy: Vi and scripting language. Gosh . I mean, I, I just, I use bash all the time. I mean, I, I write code in Python typically, but my scripting language would be, if we're not calling Python a scripting language. It's a programming language. I would probably say Python bash.

Jonathan: Yeah, that works. I think either of those are, are legitimate answers.

Andy: Thank

Jonathan: you, Mr Andy Piper. Thank you so much for being here. We went, we took up more than an hour of your time and I sure appreciate it. It was great.

Andy: I hope the audience of stuck with us and I appreciate you. You both and floss weekly and hackaday is a match made in heaven for as far as I'm concerned. So this is this has been great.

Thank you for the opportunity.

Jonathan: Awesome. Thanks again. Wonderful. Yeah. All right. So the real question is, what server are you going to sign up on?

Jeff: Oh, that's a, that's a tough one. You know, You've got, you've got

Jonathan: hackaday. social. There's twit. social. We're all good friends with Twit as well. And I'm sure there's some Indian motorcycle that, you know, Massadon server that's just out there for classic motorcycles.

Jeff: Yeah, there probably is. But you know, I, I, I got to stick close to home and it's, it's either going to be a Twitter hackaday. One, one

Jonathan: of those two. You could do it like I did and make one on both places. Oh, you can do that? I mean, there's nothing stopping you from doing it. Now you can't, of course, we let, we let the man that knows the answer to this go before we thought to ask the question, but I don't know of a way to sort of merge the two accounts on two different servers, but I do know that a lot of people have accounts on different servers to sort of keep their various interests separate.

Just something to think about and see whether it makes sense for

Jeff: you. True. I'd probably at least just start with one and then kind of get, get my legs under me and you know, see, see how I do. Maybe, maybe give Andy a call if I need to, to get the, get the crash course and. Yep. But yeah, I, you know, I, I will have one might take me a day or two just to work it, work it in with my day job.

But yeah, get on there, get one. And then I can advertise it like other people we know.

Jonathan: Yeah, yeah. Well, make sure and let me know what it is. If we do it before the show goes live, I can tag you in the Macedon post. Oh, nice. Yeah, yeah, it'll be fun. I will do that. Alright, awesome. You have anything you want to plug?

Jeff: Just check me out on, in twit. tv on the Untitled Linux Show. I'm there almost every week. And yeah. I talk with Jonathan and some other great people that co host and we just Strictly talk about pretty much Linux though. I do veer a little bit into the hardware, you know, benchmarking on Linux, the new processors and some other, other things like that.

It's a little, little of the enterprise. My, my day job, I work in semiconductors. Bleed over into that, but no, no, no inside scoops though. No, no. I, if anything's gray, I always say this is strictly what I've heard on the internet. This is not inside knowledge. This is, you know, I do, I do not speak for the company I work for and I don't mention

Jonathan: them either.

Indeed. Yeah. I don't think we've ever, Maybe once we've mentioned what company you work for on the air, but that's just, it's not what we're about.

Jeff: All

Jonathan: right. Excellent.

Jeff: Listen to

Jonathan: all the episodes you probably figured out, but. All right. Thank you, man, for being here. I sure appreciate it. We we don't, we don't necessarily know.

who the guest is next week. And so if you want to be on the show, if you have an open source project, you want to chat about, or if you have recommendations or leads for us, you can shoot us an email, it's floss at hackaday. com. Shoot us an email that goes straight to me. It's a, it's a mailing list technically, but it comes to me and we'll take a look at it and get some folks scheduled.

So we need the guests for next week. We've got, I think one guest scheduled through the end of the year. So let's let's get the suggestions coming in. But we will be here next week, whether it be a guest or a roundtable, and we will chat about what's going on in the world of open source software.

Also, you can make sure and follow Hackaday. You've got my security column goes live every Friday morning, and we sure appreciate Hackaday being the home of Floss Weekly. You can also check out as As we mentioned, the Untitled Linux Show over at twit. tv and I personally appreciate Twit letting us do that.

We appreciate everyone being here. Thank you for those that watch live and those that get us on the download. And we will see you next week on Floss Weekly.