I think it's difficult to strike a balance between "gatekeeping" mastodon and asking the growing number of centralized social media users in the fediverse, "Have you TRULY considered the implications of re-creating centralized control structures in the...
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Katanova, the Forest Nomadreplied to Magister Endomain on last edited by
@endomain I think first we've got to ask Eugen that question and it really get through to him, before we make any headway on the problems with the rest of masto culture.
Structural problems start with who defines and decides what the structure looks like.
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Magister Endomainreplied to Katanova on last edited by
@katanova I strongly disagree. Eugen doesn't matter at all here. I do not understand why people insist Eugen matters so much. I think it's twitter-brained to obsess over convincing Eugen of anything.
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Katanova, the Forest Nomadreplied to Magister Endomain on last edited by
@endomain I agree with you that it's a shitty approach to try to convince eugen of anything. I feel like I failed to effectively convey my point.
You are correct, that mastodon and the fediverse have no mandate to grow and be a live raft, and replace twitter.
However, Eugen, as the sole decider of whether a feature gets into mainline Masto or not, *does* want masto to grow as much as possible, and for it to be a life raft.
His design decisions affect everyone who uses the software.
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Katanova, the Forest Nomadreplied to Katanova on last edited by
@endomain What Eugen decides Masto should be is what gets included in the software. Eugen doesn't think that Masto should be easily expandable past 500 characters, which is why changing maxchar on a post requires fiddling with the code, rather than just a simple modifier in the admin interface.
Eugen designs the software around maximizing growth. As such, the growth-focused form of the software is what people understand as the default.
This has far-reaching effects on the fediverse as a whole
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Katanova, the Forest Nomadreplied to Katanova on last edited by
@endomain My instance runs on standard masto, and lacks cohesive community, because Eugen doesn't like the idea of a fractured fediverse. He's designed Masto to be as invonvenient as possible to operate outside of his preferred standard.
My point isn't that this is good, but that this is the way things are now, the starting point to understand how to build a better network.
Step one is either convincing eugen to stop being a shit maintainer (unlikely) or create more compelling services
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@katanova
If anything, that's probably an argument that there should be greater variety in server software among fediverse servers. And if anything, it should be people working on the protocol that have a say about the direction it goes in, not developer of one (!) implementation. That smells too much of the monopoly on web standards that Google has with Chrome.
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Katanova, the Forest Nomadreplied to Katanova on last edited by
@endomain This is kind of a chicken and egg problem, though.
Since masto is designed to impede the growth of cohesive communities, in favor of blind expansion, any community built on the fedi will be stifled from building the cohesion necessary to switch to different software.
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Katanova, the Forest Nomadreplied to viq on last edited by
@viq I agree. That seems like a really good direction for fedi to go.
How do we get there, when the most popular fedi software has shit compliance with the ActivityPub specifications?
Anyone trying to build software that makes fuller use of the specifications is going to run into problems with interconnection to Mastodon servers.
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Magister Endomainreplied to Katanova on last edited by
@katanova "Since masto is designed to impede the growth..."
I don't understand how you derive this from what I said. It seems backwards to me, anyways. The community will exist and grow and the technology will follow it. We're knee deep in that process and getting deeper fast.
Mastodon, the temporally localized clade of functions encoded in software presenting a microblogging service, has no mandate to grow. Communities do.
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Katanova, the Forest Nomadreplied to Magister Endomain on last edited by [email protected]
@endomain Community stability and cohesion are inverse to growth.
Prioritizing growth will always come at the expense of cohesion and stability, even if the latter are maintained.
Apologies, I don't think I'm doing a good job of conveying my ideas.
A lot of my understanding comes from personal experience with communities of shared values and objectives.
I can also tell that this exchange is very frustrating, so I'll leave it here.