sometimes it’s amusing to stumble upon the latest centralization/decentralization debate. You could argue technically against centralization, spof, and censorship until you’re blue in the face.

Decentralization is pretty much a solved technical problem, but for very special non–technical reasons everything only gets more centralized from this point onwards :-)

Just noticed that Mastodon prefixes a user’s homepage URL route with the @at symbol. Pragmatic and clever name spacing? Tempting. Though I’d still prefer a URL of the form:

https://example.com/user

Instead of:

https://example.com/@user

Yeah… superficial, but it looks cleaner.

A lot of websites dump the entire feed — that’s nice. Ideally for bandwidth efficiency, combine multiple delivery strategies.

1. A partial content feed (Atom preferred) limited to the last 3/5/10 posts for quick queries.

2. A full content RSS feed of a similar limit for fresh content.

3. A hidden/unlisted feed for dumping all content (mirror).

Alternatively, just implement atom’s collection partial lists for feed pagination. If your post bandwidth (size/frequency) is low, then pretend you didn’t see this — be lazy and optimize later.

Here’s a great article that implements reading webmentions natively in hugo. There’s always a soul out there who has tried what you’re thinking about.