Cloudflare Announces Mastodon Server Offering Just In Time For No One To Care

Posted on Saturday, Feb 18, 2023 by Ned Bellavance

Featured in this episode of Chaos Lever

Bonus points to SiliconANGLE for shoving in Supercloud for no goddamn reason. It’s not a Supercloud, it’s Mastodon as a service. That’s the definition of a fucking platform.

[DEEP BREATHS NED. YOU GOT THIS.]

Oh dammit, it’s not SiliconANGLE, Cloudflare is using the Supercloud terminology too.

I. Just. Can’t.

[Ed.-MOVING ON]

If we can look past the abhorrent abuse of the English language, the Mastodon server offering, titled Wildebeest- which is not even related to a Mastodon. You know what? Forget it. Cloudflare is terrible at naming things, stick to numbers and letters please.

Speaking of which, the service is not a hosted VPS running the Mastodon stack, instead they have implemented a Mastodon compliant service using their hosted services including, Cloudflare Pages, Worker functions, Cloudflare Images, D1 Database, Workers KV store, and Queues among others. It’s a truly cloud-native implementation of the Mastodon API and ActivityPub spec and I think it’s very cool.

Unfortunately, I also think it might be a little too late for anyone to care. After a flurry of activity and app downloads in November 2022, Mastodon interest has waned, with many accounts going dormant, including mine. Still, it’s impressive engineering by Cloudflare and a great example of how an application spec can be reimagined using cloud-native services.

Maybe they can keep that enterprise spirit focused on software engineering and away from the marketing department.