I would argue that this is not "a Mastodon instance", since it is not running Mastodon - other than that, very very neat work! I'm excited for that "Source Code" link to be live :)
Yeah, I think this is just an ActivityPub server that supports the Mastodon extensions, right? I think we should embrace the fact that the federated world can be diverse, rather than just call everything "Mastodon"
Mastodon has it's own API. It basically offers a very limited ActivityPub API too, but it's own API is very different.
And it's a very slim ActivityPub inplementation. For example, I don't think you can do basic things like get an individual post in ActivityPub. This should be easy simple json-ld to get but it's just 404. https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#retrieving-objects
It does have a bunch of stuff that isn't federated though, such as Like counts/collections. And of course it only implements the server-to-server (S2S) part of AP, not the client-to-server (C2S) part.
We call it a "Mastodon instance" because we implemented the entire Mastodon API (https://docs.joinmastodon.org/api/). This is in addition to also implementing the ActivityPub API which Mastodon also implements for federation.
"Originally, Twitter was one, monolithic application built with Ruby on Rails. But now, it's divided into about two hundred self-contained services that talk to each other. Each runs atop the JVM, with most written in Scala and some in Java and Clojure"[1]
So is Twitter not a Twitter instance? Like if it looks, walks and toots like a Mastodon, is it not a Mastodon instance?
That doesn't match the way people use the term though. Pleroma and Akkoma implement the Mastodon API but wouldn't be called Mastodon instances since they aren't running Mastodon.
> We call it a "Mastodon instance" because we implemented the entire Mastodon API…
Except "Mastodon instance" means an instance of Mastodon, which is open source. Whether or not it was intended to be deceptive (I'd think a group of smart people would know better), this personally left a bad taste in my mouth.
>We spent nine person-months building our scalable Mastodon instance
They federated this brand new code in 9 months, and bluesky still hasn't released anything regarding federation. Don't keep your hopes up, it would kill their business model to let anyone run part of the network. People-driven networks are just not compatible with commercially driven ones, name one successful example.
I think it's smart from a legal perspective, because the team members seem to partially be coming from companies acquired by Twitter.
So I guess, if you say "it's a Mastodon-clone", you cannot be accused of taking proprietary ideas from Twitter (this is just a guess, they know better).
But technically very interesting and refreshing to see. I really like their approach. It feels they are innovative.
From a legal perspective, it's against Mastodon's trademark policy: "Only use the Mastodon marks to accurately identify those goods or services that are built using the Mastodon software." https://joinmastodon.org/trademark
