It NEVER fails
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Charles U. Farleyreplied to d@nny "disc@" mc² on last edited by
@hipsterelectron Open discussion would be good, but having that discussion not get dominated by the loudest, and ensuring it produces policies that actually work for real people in practice, would require a level of leadership/governance which does not currently exist in the Fediverse. And then people have to actually write the code. This is why "developer fiat" has been the norm in the open source world.
I suspect it'll end up working out the other way around, where some developer who happens to have some good ideas and care about the right things puts something out there, and a community forms around it. Then that community adopts some more open/democratic method for deciding changes moving forward.
This is pretty much how Mastodon got started in the first place: Eugen had better ideas than the GnuSocial etc folks, so his thing ended up becoming the norm. But "better" was a pretty low bar, and while it's been good enough to get us this far, it's still resulted in a system where Kim Crayton gets called the n-word more times in one day than on any other platform, and is the only platform where she sees racist comments on her posts.
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Decentering microblogging isn't specifically safety-related, it was in response to @[email protected]'s framing of what the fediverse needs to do to thrive long term. Lemmy's a case study in how a non-microblogging platform can have worse moderation and safety than Mastodon! (And PieFed is the link aggregation space's analogue of GoToSocial: more attention to safety, but at a much earlier stage so with a much smaller installed base.)
And yeah there are various existing forks that are better from a safety perspective than Mastodon (including having local-only posts), but almost all the resources still go to mainline Mastodon. Agreed that a culture change in how development gets done is needed, as I say in that article"a more diverse project with a community-oriented focus and more consensus-oriented decision making (as opposed to the BDFL style) also offers significant opportunities for improvement."
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] -
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] Does this admin have a w in their name anywhere by chance or am I thinking of the wrong admin
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d@nny "disc@" mc²replied to Charles U. Farley on last edited by
@freakazoid @jdp23 @moira @inquiline @cmdr_nova @julian i'm aware that developer fiat (a term i adapted from @ariezra's book "industry unbound"; he said "engineering fiat") is the norm in this space, because most open source software is solving technical and not social problems, and because tech is a highly monopolistic global industry which inculcates this exact winner-take-all horserace mentality in the engineers who contribute to it. i'm proposing that one way to avoid this outcome yet again is to explicitly decouple protocol development from the whims of individual implementors and directly include users as stakeholders, just as you said. i'm not proposing trying to convince the main mastodon codebase to accept this decoupled protocol development process! i'm saying that this needs to be built in from the start to the governance processes of whichever codebase wants to actually serve this community, instead of just using the fediverse community to advance its own personal goals as others have.
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@jdp23 @moira @freakazoid @inquiline @cmdr_nova @julian regarding the tech debt of the mastodon codebase itself: rather than a hard fork, a complete reimplementation (which itself implements an explicit spec derived from activitypub and negotiated with users-as-stakeholders) seems like a great way to achieve multiple goals at once. i believe there are already mastodon-compatible codebases not written in ruby on rails (not sure of this), and these would be very good to get on board with the protocol negotiation process or even potentially use as a basis instead. but my impression (i may be wrong here) is that nobody has yet established such a formal spec (derived from activitypub), or an appropriate governance process for it, because "governance" and "the spec" have been effectively defined by "getting mastodon dot social to pull in your changes". any previous work in this regard would be really good to build on as long as the people doing that work accept the terms of communal specification negotiation.
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Charles U. Farleyreplied to d@nny "disc@" mc² on last edited by
@hipsterelectron Building a new complicated open source project and building a decently governed organization are each incredibly difficult problems on their own. Governance is basically the hardest problem in existence. But, yes, if we had a well-governed organization with great decisionmaking processes, who then produced good documentation and came up with the right spec and then we had a bunch of great developers who would listen to them and go off and implement the thing without breaking down in infighting and then going off and doing their own thing, everything would be great.
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d@nny "disc@" mc²replied to Charles U. Farley on last edited by
@freakazoid @jdp23 @moira @inquiline @cmdr_nova @julian governance is hard when people want to influence it via out-of-band methods to achieve their own goals at the expense of other stakeholders. governance requires mutual respect and the will to invest in improving processes instead of working around them. governance requires the abolishment of implicit hierarchy. the group that continually succeeds at this over time will hold the mandate of heaven and will succeed mastodon's unjust rule. cc @ireneista
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Robert Kingett backupreplied to Jon on last edited by
@jdp23 @freakazoid @moira @inquiline @cmdr_nova @julian Do you have a link for LetterBook?
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Jonreplied to Robert Kingett backup on last edited by
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[email protected]replied to d@nny "disc@" mc² on last edited by [email protected]@hipsterelectron @jdp23 @moira @freakazoid @inquiline @cmdr_nova @julian
>i believe there are already mastodon-compatible codebases not written in ruby on rails
What do you mean by "mastodon-compatible"? If it's "talks AP and presents (a superset of) masto client api" then you're replying to one (sharkey) and I'm too writing from one (akkoma), and about every other microblogging software from here (pleroma, forks of misskey other than the mainline, gotosocial, even snac2) count.
And as for development of AP outside of Mastodon, there are Fediverse Enhancement Proposals: https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep but they seem to be largely ignored, unfortunately. -
@[email protected] said in It NEVER fails:
And as for development of AP outside of Mastodon, there are Fediverse Enhancement Proposals: https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep but they seem to be largely ignored, unfortunately.
Sure, but that's because the FEP list isn't meant to be enforced in that manner. It's purely democratic, and individual implementors (Mastodon and its derivatives included) decide whether or not to follow them.
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Oops. sorry I missed this over the weekend. I talked about this some in the "It's not an either-or situation" section of https://privacy.thenexus.today/mastodon-hard-fork/#either-or
"There are hundreds of thriving communities running on Mastodon and its forks today, some of which have been around for years, and there isn't any way yet to move a community to a new platform. A new fork can make a lot of valuable incremental improvements before (or in parallel with) rewriting. And GoToSocial's niche is small or single-user instances; kudos to them for taking that focus, but that also means it's not clear how well-suited it'll be for medium-sized community-oriented instances with several hundred or more users"
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David Gerardreplied to d@nny "disc@" mc² on last edited by
@hipsterelectron @[email protected] @moira @freakazoid @inquiline @cmdr_nova @julian
what do you mean that isn't provided by pleroma, misskey and their forks?
completely unrelated codebases. but the API is incrementally becoming compatible between these and Mastodon just so everyone can talk to each other.
hell, even Lemmy is motivated to interoperate with Mastodon sufficiently that awful.systems has active users on Mastodon instances who participate (mostly) just fine.
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d@nny "disc@" mc²replied to David Gerard on last edited by
@davidgerard @moira @freakazoid @inquiline @cmdr_nova @julian an explicit specification for the API, ideally a w3c spec is what i'm thinking of. agree that most forks are working their way towards this but if we have a formal protocol we can bash eugen over the head with it is all
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@[email protected] @[email protected] there is one, the C2S API for ActivityPub.
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@julian @hipsterelectron oh yeah anything that will get website boy to come to the party will save a lot of annoyance
