This is why I see the BlueSky lifetime as a grace period for fedi to get its act together.
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@mrtoto @janl @dansup @loops Well, this is completely not true. We (the Mastodon project) are publicly working on https://www.fediscovery.org thanks to a grant from the NGI program, with the goal to solve the (very hard) discovery/search problem in the Fediverse, in a privacy-compliant way.
Quote Posts are also in progress, well specified so the other Fediverse software can implement them and with a lot of controls to respect users choice and privacy. We publish monthly blog posts with our progress -
Julian Fietkaureplied to Jan Lehnardt :couchdb: last edited by
@janl I've heard that some Cohost fans are currently building something like that: https://websiteleague.org
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@renchap @janl @loops I know you are and looking very much forward to the results (see https://social.mrtoto.net/@mrtoto/113481096839149350 )
And the problems are indeed hard, no question about it. Also that the resources are limited (probably the main problem compared to places like bluesky). My point was more frustration about the speed of progress. The fact that Mastodon does not seem to be more attractive to the new wave of refugees (neither from
nor now the 
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@mrtoto Yes it is, and comes from multiple factors. One being the resources, Bluesky has at least 10x our resources, they have been able to recruit a top notch team, do marketing, comms and overall execute very well. I am personally doing my best to get things moving with whatever means I have, and I like to think that this shows real results (for example the projects mentioned above, as well as tripling the engineering team over the last year)
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@renchap No argument about that. You (Mastodon) are doing what is possible with the resources you have no doubt. It's also clear that Bluesky has way more resources plus the US ecosystem. I personally view the fact that Mastodon (and other Fediverse projects) does not have more resources as a clear failure of EU policy. They are always talking about autonomy but when they can do something about that it's just not done enough.
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@mrtoto Well, there are programs from the EU (at least the EU Commission) like NGI. But you dont get money if you do not fill grant applications. One has been done a few year ago, I did two last year (Fediscovery & Quote Posts), and as a result the EU (commission) is funding those projects.
NGI is an amazing program, but you need to get into their processes and ask for grants, it does not come magically. And I am fine with it, they cant give money without checking how its used -
@renchap @mrtoto yeah, grant funding is a different vicious cycle to the VC fundraising cycle.
It took me pretty much a year to absolutely secure funding for my FIRES project – wrote the draft September 2023, applied for a grant in the October round, due to various reasons it wasn't approved until May 2024, and the Memorandum of Understanding (the document that guarantees the money for work) wasn't signed until early/mid September.
And this was for a project I think we needed yesterday in 2023
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@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
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Paul Campbellreplied to Jan Lehnardt :couchdb: last edited by
@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.
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@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
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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?
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@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 correctlyA contributor is currently attempting to solve this here: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/32615
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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.
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@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
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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?
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@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)
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. 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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