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.
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.