This is why I see the BlueSky lifetime as a grace period for fedi to get its act together.

toto

@thisismissem @renchap I can totally relate. I avoided grant applications so far but have to do public procurement processes regularly and it’s a pain. As far as I understand there are Orga that have full time staff just for grant applications and that should not be that case

Emelia 👸🏻

@mrtoto @renchap yeah, we had to bring on a grant researcher and grant writer for IFTAS for a bit, so I've some experience with that.

Paul Campbell

@janl @molily — BlueSky has a whiff of “there’s a dark stain in the corner under the lovely couch”, but it’s open-source, the people making it seem friendly and saying the right stuff (too right?).

It’s frustrating that the origin story is Jack Dorsey and the funding seems to come from a questionable source, but the surge of energy the past few days after checking in on it every week for the last few years … it’s infectious.

Renaud Chaput

@mrtoto @thisismissem even worse, you now have companies that you can pay for them to handle this and « guarantee » you will get the grant, that take a part of it if you get it

matthew

Are there fundamental flaws to AP that make it hard to really give the UX that people expect though? Im particular I think of the problem where you don't see all replies from your own app, and need to navigate to the origin thread to see them. That's a hugely confusing and bad experience for users. And from my understanding of how AP works, is that even fixable?

Ashe Dryden

@paulca @janl @molily And that excitement is because of the people there, not the technology. I think this is a major issue that most pro-fedi people miss. It doesn’t matter how great fedi is if your friends aren’t there.

Renaud Chaput

@matthew Those are very complex issues related to how distributed collaborative systems work. There are solutions, but they:
- need to be carefuly considered on the performance standpoint, multiple things we looked at had the potential of multiplying the instance-to-instance trafic by a lot
- same for anything related to privacy and trust & safety
- require a lot of careful and expert work to be done correctly

A contributor is currently attempting to solve this here: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/32615

matthew

Isn't this an AP problem, not a Mastodon problem? I'm replying to you now from a non-Mastodon AP instance, and I suffer from this problem greatly (because I run a solo instance and there's not as much chatter).

What's the AP-level solution to this problem? I have a hard time thinking there can be one, for the reasons you just mentioned.

Renaud Chaput

@matthew The above PR attempts to refresh the replies from the upstream instance when the status context is requested from the API, if it is less fresh than X seconds, asynchronously. Then the frontend can check if the refresh has finished, and get the updated list of replies

matthew

I'm not following. How does a PR to Mastodon fix a protocol-level bug? Shouldn't there be a change to the protocol to address this problem?

Renaud Chaput

@matthew We think the protocol does not need a change, but most implementations do need a change. And it might not work in the real world due to performance issues. I can not say what other AP implementations plan to do about it, but so far nothing in AP has proved blocking on our side from what I understand (I have not looked at this topic very deeply yet)

Jon

. Also I don't think most (white) people on fedi understand the impact of Blacksky, it's a great example of how technology focused on community can lead to people being able to find their people and created a self-reinforcing cycle.

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