Beginning to believe that @Gargron doesn't want me contributing to #mastodon — he's now partially recreated three of my pull requests that I've worked on.
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Daveyreplied to Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦 last edited by
BDFL is often fine for very mechanical things like a programming language. Even then it requires being an accomplished domain expert. Someone with so much trust that it's not like anyone is going to disagree much anyway.
Fedi software has a cyclic dependency of voluntary labour by people who trust a dev to do work that supports them. I can''t think of any free software that has that dynamic to this extent.
To survive, it needs to be more dialogue, less monologue.
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@rysiek @stinerman as an admin/mod, Mastodon is fine, on balance, but I really see some of the decision making as a limiting factor on:
- adoption by new communities
- sense of safety
- feelings of independence from corporate interference
- how long some volunteers will hang on or burn out or switch techLike all the getting excited about integrating with Facebook. Can't help asking "why does this lad think people are here?"
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@thisismissem @Gargron 37 open prs? ugh that sucks unless there are actually good reasons for that...
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@logicalmoody I'd certainly seen it before, but usually the original author's implementation was "better" for justifiable reasons — with at least the latest here, he knew as of this morning that I was working on that feature, because I'd told him, but he still decided to open a quarter-implementation of that feature anyway for some reason.
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@kate some are drafts that I can't yet move forwards with, e.g., refreshing & expiring access tokens for OAuth, since we need to make that change very very sensitively, but many are just sitting there waiting for someone to review them.
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@thisismissem Wow. You've done an incredible amount of work trying to make Mastodon better. Thank you for doing that. I hope Eugen will start letting your contributions contribute now that you've called him out.
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@stinerman @gytisrepecka @thisismissem @Gargron
I mean, as long as the code is half decent it's free labor. like, say what needs tweaked in the request.
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@EveHasWords I really wish I didn't feel the need to call anyone out. That'd not how I generally approach things, but after first flagging a conflict last night, then explicitly telling him I'd been working on report forwarding, he went ahead anyway and created a version of report forwarding that didn't do 90% of the stuff mine did.
That's completely baffling me. Okay, the first time, you can claim you didn't know I'd been doing work. But the second time just made me beyond mad.
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Did @Gargron assign you a ticket for that work?
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@Methylcobalamin there were tickets open for many of these thnigs for years before I started to work on them and address them.
e.g., here's the one for report forwarding: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/15526
typically there's not been a “get assigned a piece of work" way. Instead it's been look at the open issue, check there's no open PRs, write a PR, leave a comment to say that you've created a PR.
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@Methylcobalamin e.g., the “improve finding reports” one there was this issue open from 2022: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/22419
Restoring the Report #123 to the reports list goes back to 2018: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/9338
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@thisismissem @Gargron This public callout is brave and not baseless, thank you Emelia for bringing up the issue and especially for your hard work... This is actually something that I've seen and last time when @renchap was wondering about why I'm hesitant writing some UI work or sending SVG stuff ideas to your way in a form of a PR, this is one of the reasons. If the huge time invested goes unnoticed or even exploited, its better to put your efforts to a fork or a mod instead.
The Mastodon core team should have a serious internal conversation about this. Doesn't really welcome anyone to contribute.
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@thisismissem It might be worth considering if forking (Potentially with the longer term view to hard fork) is the right call especially if you've been able to secure funding to date (or are able to do so from the general contributions you receive). There's enough folks out here (I think anyway) that are certainly interested in a lot of the improvements you've worked on to date to be appreciative of future development effort I think.
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Emelia 👸🏻replied to Ryan Wild last edited by [email protected]
@wild1145 the contributions I receive to support my work are barely enough to pay me €20-30/hr for work done on Mastodon.
I definitely couldn't take on a fork alone, which is why I've been so active in trying to get changes made upstream.
In fact, I argued against hard forking here: https://medium.com/@thisismissem/why-a-hard-fork-of-mastodon-isnt-the-way-b37aecfe5c86
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@thisismissem That's fair and the blog post explains it really well. I think I tend to default to a "More options and competition = good" and as you summarise in that post, in this case it might not be.
I think I and a lot of folks got quite spoilt with some fairly major upgrades landing back in Q4 2022 where there were fairly major changes to Mastodon's design and UX and I personally had hoped for a faster pace on development, but equally do know there is a lot going on to keep things going.
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@thisismissem Though it is also a bigger shame just how many PR's and issues are sat open on the Mastodon project effectively rotting because they haven't been reviewed or looked at or dealt with, but then I can see both sides of it, spend all your time reviewing PR's and you get no big picture stuff done, but if you never review any nobody's going to submit PR's. It seems like it's a balance and I think it's fair to say Mastodon hasn't got the balance right yet.
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@wild1145 yeah, it's totally a balance, but like as a project lead the least you could do is look at the issues related to the thing you want to work on and see if there's anything that's needing review before duplicating work.
I get wanting quick wins, but a bunch of the stuff I've been working on is long-term getting us to a better place, there's reasons why the quick route isn't preferred.
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Natasha Nox 🇺🇦🇵🇸replied to Emelia 👸🏻 last edited by [email protected]
@thisismissem Meh… any way you could provide to a smaller fork that moves quicker (like glitch-soc) to not just get some input but also show them to the public to perhaps raise pressure? Perhaps it will even spark interest in another *stable* fork of Mastodon with better governing. Eugen seems to be a rather bad project lead.
Your work is direly needed and extremely appreciated by the whole community!
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@Natanox my stance has always been to try to get work upstream, because the project is complex enough that divergent forks would be hell to maintain
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@thisismissem If your PR addresses problems his PR won't, is it possible to restructure your PR in a way it improves things without causing conflict, on top of his changes? (It will probably be more work to do so, so if you don't want to do that, I think that's fair, though.)
