202301120000, January 12, 2023

Today, Medium is launching a Mastodon instance at me.dm to help our authors, publications and readers find a home in the fediverse. Mastodon is an emerging force for good in social media and we are excited to join this community.

Recently, the Open Collective CTO François Hodierne spotted an upsurge of activity in Mastodon Collectives on the platform. Many instances rely on crowdfunding to cover costs, and are seeking open source, community-oriented, transparent fundraising solutions that meet their needs.

• I suspect one of the reasons for this is that Pinafore is written in Svelte v2 and Sapper – both of which are deprecated in favor of Svelte v3 and SvelteKit. Not only is there no migration pathfrom Svelte v2 to v3, but there isn’t one from Sapper to SvelteKit either. (And on top of that, I had to fork Sapper pretty heavily.) Anyone making a bet on learning Pinafore’s tech stack is investing in a dead framework, so it’s not very attractive for new maintainers.

First off, ActivityPub does have a client-to-server API, but as far as I can tell, it’s not really worth implementing. Mastodon is the 800-pound gorilla in the fediverse, it doesn’t implement this API, and other servers (such as Pleroma and Misskey) implement their own flavor of Mastodon’s API.