Ideally, the comment system should be either self-hosted or more fediverse-like. The rest is a temporary compromise that will sink in the sands of time.
And instances seem to be pretty heavy on resources. Reminds me of why Matrix never really took off, running a Matrix server is just too difficult and time-consuming for what you get out of it.
I know proponents of Mastodon will point out that you can work around these warts, but I don't want to. I don't think the model is suited for me.
Social media needs to be very simple for the masses to adopt. The elevator pitch needs to be one sentence and must not include the word “server”.
Unless you're Discord, who got away with it by redefining "server" to mean something else.
I don't understand the knee-jerk reactions whenever Mastodon comes up here. Someone always has to declare it dead, someone always has to rant about "leftist politics" and "fascist moderators." And then they usually suggest Nostr which is far more dead than Mastodon.
Nothing is perfect but even a moderately successful breakaway from mainstream social media is worth celebrating. I remember when the consensus on HN was that any alternative to the mainstream would be impossible, doomed to fail. The fediverse has its community and its identity, it isn't a flash in the pan.
Edit to remove unintended flame bait.
* CF worker on a subdomain that handles POST requests.
* It stores comments in CF KV and sends me a copy to telegram
* All I need to do is copy it to Markdown (can be automated, but I manually approve the comments in case of spam)
* In Markdown, I'm using frontmatter to store arbitrary JSON data
Everything, including hosting and workers, costs me zero.
Example: https://rushter.com/blog/zsh-shell/
pmb•1h ago