Via this Lemmy post I just bumped into this: An Open Letter Calling for the Resignation of Eugen Rochko (Gargron) from Mastodon Development.
Posting here because the broader discussion on the topic is very relevant and this is a brainstorming area where we can think them over. I hope we can - in a very constructive way - find ways to improve on some of the pain points that are brought up, and possible others that are as yet unnamed.
Also: Note that I do not endorse the open letter.
As with all things Mastodon is not perfect, but I do think that it brings a lot of value. It’s one of the biggest open social media platforms, and it’s done more to help wean people off commercial platforms than any other project I can think of in recent history. ActivityPub and the whole Fediverse are direct byproducts of the effort speared by Mastodon, and probably wouldn’t exit today otherwise.
When somebody starts a project that they put time and effort into because they have a particular vision for it then it is their right to run the project the way that makes sense for them. If their vision diverges from what a significant number of people want, then people should put in the effort to make their alternative vision a reality. They can even leverage all the hard work that was put into making the original project since Mastodon is open source software.
This sort of thing regularly happens in open source world. GNOME forks like Cinnamon and MATE are great examples of this. The original project started getting too bloated for a lot of people, and they got together to fork it and move things in the direction they wanted.
Another option is to make a separate project entirely. Pleroma is an example of an alternative to Mastodon that was made because people wanted to do things differently. In fact, Mastodon is itself is based on OStatus protocol extending the work done by GNU Social project.
Personally, I agree with the reasoning in the reply to the issue on GitHub and I do think it’s valuable for the official client to prioritize the needs for new users. The underlying functionality for supporting local and global timelines is not being removed, and it’s possible to make an alternative client that leverages it. Tusky for Android is the client I’m using, and it supports this feature.
On the other hand, I am ideologically opposed to partnering up with entities like EUnomia, but this being a social media platform the posts are already public and I don’t think anybody should be using such a platform for anything they want to keep private in the first place. Ultimately, you’re trusting server admins for any instance and you have no idea how they use the data collected by the instance.
Finally, as an open source maintainer, I can tell you that it’s hard and thankless work. Funding open source projects sustainably is incredibly difficult, and I’m really glad to see that Mastodon managed to secure a decent amount of funding for itself.
Yes, this is exactly how I think about it too (see below). And I can subscribe to that notion of ‘thankless work’ too, but more from the perspective of doing community work and fedi advocacy in general.
I feel the ball is in the court of the critics to come up with solutions and alternative ways to mitigate the issues they now have. There are valid reasons to cast a critical eye to some of the developments of Mastodon vs. Fediverse at large, and this is a good opportunity to start to address them.
Yeah completely agree with that. It’s also worth noting that even people who are non technical can still create a vision for a platform and then try to convince technical community why it’s worth implementing. Alternatively, it’s also possible to get together and crowd fund a project which lets the funders exercise direct control over its direction.
As you’ve noted in your comment, there are broader issues that need to be discussed here. What makes Mastodon successful compared to other similar projects, what are the problems that can’t be addressed by simply running an instance that’s moderated in a particular way, or developing another client with a different feature set. If these solutions address the concern, then I don’t really see what the issue is.
Yesss! This brainstorming space is exactly that, and an input to the more technical oriented SocialHub community. SocialHub is about technology direction, evolving open standards and the ecosystem that rests upon it. But a lot of feedback for this must come from the fedizens directly. Anyone can help.
There are many interesting topics on the SocialHub forum relating to cool innovations, that would greatly benefit the Fediverse.
Another point where quite a few federated app developers are critical on Mastodon project, is that most of the time they go their own way in their own community, oblivious or ignoring or not participating in developments elsewhere (like SocialHub, which is THE place for this). It is an “our way or the highway” stance, probably resulting from their dominant position, plus the fact that in broader community consensus is harder, and things may move more slowly.
My opinion on this is: No problem. This is also a FOSS project choice. But SocialHub should be more in the lead to set the overall technological direction. Then not following the open standards & best practices would automatically mean that a project would side-track itself. A strong SocialHub is needed for that. Unfortunately many app developers don’t realize that their participation there constitutes a win-win for their project, and are too absorbed in their own work.
There are two threads that more or less relate to this:
Slight word of caution here… one of the grand-daddies of federated communication, the Jabber / XMPP federation has developed over its 20 years existence such governance structures in the form of an officially recognized standards body and so on, yet many of the issues you describe for the ActivityPub Fediverse remain today. Sometimes even causing people to unnecessarily break off and create a new protocol all together, but in the end replicating most of the mistakes (and making some new ones) that XMPP already tried to learn from years ago with varying success.
Yes, important observation. I am very wary of funded efforts, as it is somehow controversial and leads to a lot of complexities to organize it well in any grassroots movement where “herding cats” is the reality and infighting and power plays, conflicting interests and strong opinions are the talk of the day.
Your mention of XMPP led me to write about, what I see as: The Fediverse Challenge. And it rises well beyond this mastodon discussion.
Yeah, SocialHub seems to be exactly the way to go about doing this. I completely agree that we want to have some baseline in terms of protocols like ActivityPub that projects that participate in the Fediverse use, and these need to be flexible enough to accommodate different use cases. Beyond that projects are free to run any way the authors want, but we can create social pressure to encourage project maintainers to not stray too far from what’s considered acceptable by the larger community.
Indeed. IMHO especially stressing the importance of being part of such a community as active participant should be highlighted. To many FOSS developers going at it in their own way individualistically means missing out on a win-win of broader collaboration, that is a requirement for their own project’s future.
Btw, specifically related to the topic of Mastodon vs. Fediverse, there’s talk about creating a community-driven fork of Mastodon based on Hometown. See: Discussion: Mastodon and the Fediverse (comment) by @wakest.
Agreed, I think the main advantage Fediverse has over commercial platforms is being open. Commercial platforms want to keep users on their site and make it difficult to share content between them because they’re in a zero sum competition for the users. On the other hand, Fediverse creates a positive sum scenario where everyone benefits from having more content on the network. So the focus absolutely has to be on growing Fediverse as a whole as opposed to individual sites.
Yes, but there’s a big problem in this. It is already hard to find contributors to a FOSS project. It is even harder to find people to volunteer on all the community work and chores that need to happen to foster good collaboration between different FOSS projects.
Some people don’t see this as a problem, with the argument that grassroots movements just go their own way completely organically and anarchistically. While this can be (and often is) a strength, this is less true for evolving the common technology foundation on which all of the ecosystem has to stand. (I created the Spiral Island analogy for that… there is a hurricane of bad tech trends to withstand),
Yeah, I think coordinated efforts tend to scale better than ad hoc grassroots ones. Having some sort of a central foundation that acts as a governance body for the Fediverse and helps coordinate between different projects would be very helpful.