Is there a Mastodon instance that's basically Instagram? I suppose all you'd need for a masto insta (mastogram?) would be different CSS to display toots on just those instances that want to do it, and people could still follow from other instances and see the default image display... Kinda best of both worlds, photo-heavy display if you want it, vanilla masto if you don't.
@jasonsteakums This is a cool sounding idea!
I wonder what those who know more about hosting these things might have to say re:the logistics around image file sizes?
@b_cavello @jasonsteakums I'm thinking you'd probably want to use something like S3 for image storage.
This is a really interesting question, actually. I've been looking at Mastodon as a final product—didn't occur to me to look at it as, I don't know, sort of like Wordpress for social networking.
And you could call it "Mammogram" because it's based on Mastodon which is KINDA SORTA LIKE A MAMMOTH
@csilverman @b_cavello I love the "WordPress for social networking" way of looking at it! Actually, there are a lot of former Vine users out there who might jump at a good platform that picks up where it left off, and most of the pieces are in place with Mastodon...
@csilverman @jasonsteakums But maybe if making an account essentially was running your own server...
There are still issues with longevity and so forth, but that's continually the case, honestly. We might do well to have more conversations about the ephemeral nature of our very intimate and significant data.
@csilverman @b_cavello I wonder if you could piggyback off of more robust services and just have Mastodon display media that's linked from elsewhere instead of uploaded to the instance? You could run into security concerns but maybe that's a more easily solved problem than a hosting nightmare.
@jasonsteakums @csilverman You certainly can, although it does go against some of the principles of decentralizing
@b_cavello @csilverman True! I think one thing we'll see if masto keeps growing is media-heavy users running their own small instances to have control over their media hosting. That initial jump to get into the federated TLs of popular instances could be tricky but there's a lot of benefit to going that route - not just control of your hosting but of your security, your blocklist, etc. And fun server side customization to integrate your creative workflow!
@jasonsteakums @b_cavello Yeah—like how fragmented could this get? I've already seen people customizing instance appearances. Part of me thinks "oh cool, there's some real potential here"—and part of me remembers how relentlessly dreadful MySpace looked back when MySpace was a thing.
Also: has anyone done anything like what you're describing with GNU social? That's existed for a while—if anything's the "social-network Wordpress", I'd think it would be that.
@jasonsteakums @b_cavello and also, there's gonna be stuff like
@csilverman @jasonsteakums Ha ha ha! That's kinda lovely, tho. I delight in how people are using the medium itself as art. Pretty cool.
@b_cavello @jasonsteakums yeah, you know a technological advancement's arrived when people get over the newness and start being all "okay, how can we fuck with this?"
Another reason I'd love to see Mastodon shift into a more general-purpose social toolkit: the possibilities for weird artistic statements are endless.
@jasonsteakums @b_cavello I could see it. If Mastodon forked into a general-purpose toolkit for DIY social networking, one option might be storing media via S3, Google Cloud, etc. Sure, you're delegating part of your service to something you don't control 100%, but it might be worth it.
Honestly, right now I trust my web host over the admins of my main Mastodon instance. Nothing personal, I just know that company better than some random person on the net.
@jasonsteakums @b_cavello heh. I mean, there's literally BuddyPress, but somehow that never really took off.
I don't know. I feel like when you're dealing with media—images, video—that increases complexity by orders of magnitude, since you have to deal with a lot more data. I doubt Mastodon has been designed to handle that, beyond embedding the occasional image.
But I'm a technical dunce who hasn't even set up a Mastodon instance yet so what do I know.