Ellen Emilia Anna Zscheile fogti

A guide for friends considering Mastodon

A lot of my friends have recently been considering leaving Twitter for other networks, and many are considering Mastodon. There are many guides floating about that can tell you about Mastodon and the Fediverse, which is really exciting! It can be overwhelming to sort through them all, though, and honestly I haven't read them since I know my way around.

So, this is the blog version of me sitting down with a friend explaining what I know about Mastodon and how I'd recommend approaching setting up an account there for the first time and getting oriented.

What's in this:

What is the Fediverse / Mastodon?
Why would I want to join?
Where do I start?

undoing the pain

https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/1lR4NWLlCbBAxrXdRiVn82zC3iiF7fATPtVnPA2C1TwU/edit

a guide to being free

for those of us who never learned how

or for those of us who are

Installing Windows and Linux into the same partition

But WHY?

There was a reddit post about installing Arch on NTFS3 partition. Since Windows and Linux doesn't have directories with same names under the /(C:\), I thought it's possible, and turned out it was actually possible.
If you are not familiar to Linux, for example you've searched on Google "how to dualboot Linux and Windos" or brbrbr... you mustn't try this. This is not practical.

Pre-requirements

UEFI system
Any Linux live-boot CD/DVD/USB... with Linux kernel newer than 5.15
Windows installer USB

ES Modules are terrible, actually

This post was adapted from an earlier Twitter thread.

It's incredible how many collective developer hours have been wasted on pushing through the turd that is ES Modules (often mistakenly called "ES6 Modules"). Causing a big ecosystem divide and massive tooling support issues, for... well, no reason, really. There are no actual advantages to it. At all.

It looks shiny and new and some libraries use it in their documentation without any explanation, so people assume that it's the new thing that must be used. And then I end up having to explain to them why, unlike CommonJS, it doesn't actually work everywhere yet, and may never do so. For example, you can't import ESM modules from a CommonJS file! (Update: I've released a module that works around this issue.)

And then there's Rollup, which apparently requires ESM to be u

Pure ESM package

The package that linked you here is now pure ESM. It cannot be require()'d from CommonJS.

This means you have the following choices:

Use ESM yourself. (preferred)
Use import foo from 'foo' instead of const foo = require('foo') to import the package. You also need to put "type": "module" in your package.json and more. Follow the below guide.
If the package is used in an async context, you could use await import(…) from CommonJS instead of require(…).
Stay on the existing version of the package until you can move to ESM.

bachix

Generate nix.conf for Cachix in bash. Because sometimes it's just unnecessary to download cachix the binary.

Detecting the real IP of a Cloudflare'd Mastodon instance

NB: This will not work for instances that proxy outgoing requests!

Reading the docs

I wanted to find a way to detect the real IP address of a Mastodon/Pleroma/Misskey/etc instance hosted behind Cloudflare. How to do that? Well, it's federated, which means I can probably get it to send a request to a server of mine! And how to do that? I tried reading the ActivityPub spec. The following caught my attention:

Servers should not trust client submitted content, and federated servers also should not trust content received from a server other than the content's origin without some form of verification.

Publishing crates to IPFS

This was an experiment in seeing how feasible it would be to distribute crates on IPFS using the alternative registries feature combined with a local IPFS web gateway.

There was very little plan for this originally, and I wish I had kept more of the intermediate states as I went through multiple major design changes. My original goal was to publish my CLI utility [bs58-cli][] and its dependency tree.

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