This is from a recent thread I wrote on mastodon. Reproduced with only light editing. Hm. I feel like I wanted to like this more than I actually do. I definitely think the fediverse needs to continue to grow more capabilities. But this doesn’t feel like the energy I was looking for. Half of it feels like a laundry list of ways to commodify things. Dragging a lot of things people hate about corporate social media into the fediverse.

This is the first in probably a series of posts as I dig into the technical aspects of mastodon. My goal is to get a better understanding of the design of ActivityPub and how mastodon itself is designed to use ActivityPub. Eventually I want to learn enough to maybe do some hacking and create some of the experiences I want that mastodon doesn’t support today. The first milestone is just getting a mastodon instance set up on my laptop.

In my recent side projet, I’ve been deploying to fly.io and really enjoying it. It’s fairly easy to get setup. And it supports my preferred workflow of deploying my changes early and often. I have run into a few snags though. Fly.io builds your project into a docker image and deploys containers for you. That process is mostly seamless when it works. But sometimes it fails, and you need to debug.

I don’t know who needs to hear this. But your frontend and backend systems don’t need to be completely separate. I started anew side project recently. You know, one of things that allows me to tinker with new technology but will probably never be finished. I’m using Angular for the frontend and Nestjs for the backend. All good. But then I go to do something that I thought was very normal and common and run into a wall.