When I say “by default”, I meant the vanilla Mastodon web client. Of course alternate clients could do just about anything.

I’ve self-hosted Pleroma, Hubzilla, Mastodon, and Wordpress with the ActivityPub plugin. I found Pleroma to be the easiest of those.

I think I’d recommend Akkoma today; it’s a fork of Pleroma.

I don’t think long posts in Mastodon are a bad thing at all. I self-host and I changed the character limit to 50000.

By default, Mastodon will collapse long posts in feeds. If you don’t want to see long posts, you don’t have to click to expand them.

If you have millions of people on a social network, and you go looking for toxic shit there, you will find it.

Well, on Mastodon, you might not because by default it doesn’t have a useful text search feature. If you’re on a server running a modified version, or something else with decent text search, you might. My self-hosted server was on a relay that briefly pulled in content from a famously toxic server. At first, I didn’t see it because I didn’t follow those accounts, but later, I added an improved search feature and tried searching for some terms of abuse. I did find a few absolutely vile posts.

Bluesky has had a working search from early on. Turning off some of the default moderation filters and searching for terms of abuse does, in fact find people using terms of abuse.

I’m puzzles as to why anyone would routinely post threads to Mastodon rather than moving to an instance without a short limit.

It’s kind of not. It does appear to be at least theoretically possible to self-host any or all of the major components. Unlike ActivityPub projects, however, it doesn’t seem like anybody is doing that and offering services to the public.

Yes. I use it to post pictures of birds.

Discovery built into Mastodon and ActivityPub microblogging in general isn’t great (and some people claim that’s a good thing). One place to look for people to follow is https://fedi.directory/

It’s absolutely an issue for hobby level open source projects.

It looks like you have to have a paid Apple developer account to do it.

That’s interesting. This post had suggested it isn’t yet possible to host an AppView. It seems the reality is more complex.

Whether it soon becomes possible to self host an AppView, the one remaining centralized component will tell us a lot about where it’s headed.

ATProto is almost there with the only missing piece being the AppView. I’m not sure if BlueSky is hesitant about releasing theirs as open source, but I don’t think there are any barriers to a third party implementing one.

Apple does have an email service, but I think “Apple Mail” is the name is the client, not the service.

This looks like it’s conflating service providers and clients. Thunderbird doesn’t provide email accounts to the public as far as I know.

Yes. I think it’s good not to form opinions about subjects you don’t know much about.

When it comes to voting in an election, it’s possible to make good decisions about candidates without forming opinions about every policy issue. That’s kind of the point of representative democracy.

That’s enlightening. It links to an article about self hosting a relay, which explains that, as I suspected, a relay does not have to mirror the entire network. It also seems that using a relay at all is an optional optimization.

It looks like the BlueSky AppView is not (yet?) open source. I wonder why nobody has built an alternative yet.

I’d still echo the (current) top comment’s advice to use something open source, local, and encrypted.

They’ve already taken the hard stance. If they roll it back, they will lose the trust of their users.

Biowink GmbH is probably not a corporation registered under US law. If I had to guess, the government of Germany will not be particularly eager to force them to turn over data to the USA. The Germans take their Datenschutz very seriously.

Having moderated a number of online spaces over the years, sort of. It’s usually the harshest thing a moderator can do, but it does not have very much real world impact on most people. In many parts of the internet, it isn’t even very effective at keeping the same person from coming back with another account, which isn’t a big deal if they don’t come back with the same behavior.

I’m not particularly shy about reaching for the permanent ban if it seems like someone is being an asshole on purpose. I’m not getting paid for it, and I do not have much patience for dealing with people who don’t want to be respectful toward their fellow humans. There’s usually a way to appeal if it’s a misunderstanding. That’s especially true in systems like Lemmy and unlike traditional web forums where one account and UI provides access to many communities, leading to drive-by comments.

I’m also fond of somewhat ambiguous rules like “be excellent to each other” or “don’t be an asshole”. Without that, if a community gets active enough, someone will show up, act like an asshole, and argue about the rules when they get banned.