”But Mastodon also has [...] a lot on its plate including integration with Threads“It's lines like this that makes me completely unable to take those calling for a hard fork of Mastodon seriously.All Mastodon do for Threads is the same they for any fed...

Andy Piper

@thisismissem as I posted last night... the conspiracy theories and other speculations are (as you rightly pointed out in this thread) exhausting! https://macaw.social/@andypiper/112350599989018985

Emelia 👸🏻

@andypiper yeah, only, as now mentioned in that article at the end, I thoroughly rebuked it in this: https://medium.com/@thisismissem/why-a-hard-fork-of-mastodon-isnt-the-way-b37aecfe5c86

Andy Piper

@thisismissem *nods vigorously*

Natasha Nox 🇺🇦🇵🇸

@thisismissem @risottobias @tamitha Learning from each other is good. Yet we still have to keep in mind that Meta is, as a whole, an abusive and outright dangerous company no matter how nice those who work there are. Those who make the calls are not.

I shall be damned if those tools Meta will offer can be self-hosted without any legal or technical catch to them.

Emelia 👸🏻

@Natanox @risottobias @tamitha short answer is "we don't know" regarding those tools.

Natasha Nox 🇺🇦🇵🇸

@thisismissem @risottobias @tamitha That is technically correct. That doesn't mean one should give Meta even a slither of trust about anything.

If they want to contribute tools by making them Open-Source and self-hostable with a proper license like AGPL, sure. However doing or accepting anything else with/from Meta would just be ridiculously ignorant at this point.

Emelia 👸🏻

@Natanox @risottobias @tamitha for what it's worth, Meta has already been opensourcing tooling for trust and safety, e.g., https://github.com/facebook/ThreatExchange/

The algorithms from which power StopNCII.org to my knowledge.

Hrefna (DHC)

@thisismissem This is a seriously disingenuous crop to do and not explicitly disclaim what you did and why.

Laurens Hof

@thisismissem full poll results are here: https://infosec.exchange/@thenexusofprivacy/112294665652523312

Emelia 👸🏻

@hrefna yeah, I honestly expected better.

Shoq

@thisismissem You often make perfect sense, and I often feel a bit guilty going on about quoted posts. But only because I saw us in a race to capture journalists. That ship has sailed. But we can now pivot and let Threads lure them in, then contribute new tools to support them and everyone else.

Emelia 👸🏻

@shoq quote posts now has funding from NLNet for both several FEPs and implementation in Mastodon backend, web, and mobile.

Scheduled for 4.4: https://oisaur.com/@renchap/112299860209222424

Emelia 👸🏻

@shoq fwiw, 4.3 is shipping "soon" apparently. I'm trying to land a bunch of OAuth changes still and other things if I can rebase them in time.

Shoq

@ThisIsMissEm I don’t pretend to grok all the issues, but I think a massive funding drive to support the core team would make a lot more sense than the distraction of a hard fork which would be unlikey to have the cred, team, or experience to raise much money. And money changes everything.

Emelia 👸🏻

@shoq yeah, that's why the 501(c)3 just setup by Mastodon is so important. It allows tax deductible donations to the project for US residents / tax citizens.

e.g., there's been recently two $100k donations (which is why Mastodon is hiring, iirc)

small patatas

@hrefna
The poll is still there; to me at least, the crop is far less disingenuous than it's been made out to be, if at all https://infosec.exchange/@thenexusofprivacy/112294665652523312

Hrefna (DHC)

@smallpatatas

No, I would still argue that's an entirely disingenuous cut. Possibly naïvely so based on the description of it, but still disingenuous.

This crop could be fully justified if it is written out in text what you did and why, but that isn't what happened here.

@thisismissem

Jon

Very fair, I should have explained what I done and linked off to the original post. I've edited it to include the full poll and a link, and included an update explaining the change -- and apologizing.

For what it's worth, I had made the cuts and edits I did to try to focus specifically on the importance of involving non-developers as equals, which was what that section was about. But the full poll makes that point equally well, so in retrospect I'm not sure why I didn't go with it.

@[email protected] @[email protected]

Jared White 🍃🍂

@thisismissem I have no problem with hard forks (heck, I'm literally a maintainer of of a hard-forked project going on 4+ years now!), but I simply can't take anyone calling for a hard fork of Mastodon seriously. A vibrant and active open fediverse is *still* in its infancy, and any perceived good which might result out of such actions would be far outweighed by the bad of splintering the development community. Definitely not something I could support.

Laxystem (Masto/Glitch)

@jaredwhite @thisismissem I think you have a point there.

A community very similar to fedi is mc modding. There, loaders get forked approximately once a year; initially, there was only Forge; then, Fabric was created because it sucked; then, Quilt hard-and-soft-forked Fabric (it was a hard fork; but Quilt is still compatible with fabric mods, just like here); then, NeoForge forked Forge. (this history is only since ~2018, excluding failed efforts).

Quilt today has almost no developers; it is barely managing to support the latest Minecraft versions, nevermind its own planned APIs. That's our worst-case scenario: the Mastodon fork turns into "yet another runtime" and fails to implement security updates, nevermind Its plans.

NeoForge, on the other hand, succeeded; because when it split from LexForge, most contributors moved with it. Here's my point: if we're to hard fork mastodon, at least half of its current contributors must move to the fork, too.