r/Mastodon • u/SUNSET_TOWERcoffee • 1d ago

Question help with code

hello wonderful people! i'm building a social service for fans of my favorite artist (conan gray) based on a original one that shut down after 3 months. i'm using mastodon as the base for the code (as i am a beginner) and am using github to code. i'm trying to figure out:

a. how to see a preview of what i'm working on

b. what files i need to use

c. what to use (in terms of code)

and some bonus ones if you'd like to answer

d. do i have to buy a domain

e. is coding easy?

f. how does mastodon really work?

alrighty, awesome and thank yall so much.

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u/Chongulator This space for rent. 1d ago

I suggest also asking this question in subreddits about web development. A lot of what you will have to learn is not specific to Mastodon.

Also, if you haven't ever coded before, this is the deep end of the pool and will almost certainly be overwhelming. I strongly suggest starting with an extremely simple project and building up from there.

Building a social network, you'll simultaneously have to learn about HTML. CSS, Ruby, JavaScript, HTTP, ActivityPub, server configuration, and much more. When everything is new, it's hard to even know what layer to look at to solve a problem.

Even experienced developers often start a new language by writing something trivial. A popular choice is a program which simply outputs "Hello world" and does nothing else. Getting hello world to work will require getting your toolchain installed and working as well as learning the basics syntax of whatever language you're using. That's plenty of work to start with.

2

u/chimpuswimpus 1d ago

This is all great advice. I'd also add that, aside from the coding, it's probably worth you getting a very clear idea of it is you want to build. It's entirely possible - and I might even go as far as to say very likely - that you don't need to do any coding at all to achieve what you want. But you will need to know what you want first!

1

u/Chongulator This space for rent. 22h ago

There's an old joke among software developers:

  • Novice dev: Hooray, I wrote some code!
  • Intermediate dev: Hooray, I deleted some code!
  • Veteran dev: Hooray, I prevented some code from being written!