Relaxing treatment of non-notes by Mastodon

Luke Kanies

@johnonolan @julian @thisismissem @hongminhee @pfefferle except the maintainers have made it clear they do not want PRs unless you get pre-approval from them for your implementation plan or whatever.

Emelia 👸🏻

@lkanies @johnonolan @julian @hongminhee @pfefferle for big stuff, yeah, talk to the maintainers before implementing — that is consistent for any open source project.

John O'Nolan

@thisismissem @lkanies @julian @hongminhee @pfefferle yup, 100% — You can't just walk into someone's house and start re-arranging the furniture and expect them to be pleased.

Always good to start with bugfixes & smaller things to learn the codebase, and for maintainers to get to know+trust you.

Once you've showed that you're going to stick around, you generally get more freedom and approval to take on larger things.

Source: Years of contributing to WordPress, long before Ghost

Emelia 👸🏻

@johnonolan @lkanies @julian @hongminhee @pfefferle I can also attest that that's the case with Mastodon — I did a heap of small contributions before being able to drive bigger changes.

Luke Kanies

@thisismissem @johnonolan @julian @hongminhee @pfefferle that’s good to hear. Because… that’s not the way I see them talk about it. Literally every time someone talks about doing a PR, there’s a request for consultation beforehand. I’ve never seen that in any other community.

(It’s true that my OSS contributions were mostly quite a while ago. And a lot of them were to the project I started, which I absolutely did not run that way.)

Luke Kanies

@johnonolan @thisismissem @julian @hongminhee @pfefferle it’s only rearranging the furniture if they accept the PR, as you know.

OSS is supposed to be about permissionless innovation, so it’s weird to have to get permission first.

julian

@[email protected] well, if we're going to beat this analogy to death, then it's more like you're free to copy my house and everything in it, and re-arrange it (now your furniture) as you see fit.

I'd prefer if you didn't re-arrange my furniture though.

Emelia 👸🏻

@lkanies @johnonolan @julian @hongminhee @pfefferle

tbh, no open source maintainer likes suddenly receiving a sizable pull request out of the blue, it tends to be disruptive or require additional time input to review/correct/review, hence nudging folks towards discussing with the team first.

Luke Kanies

@thisismissem @johnonolan @julian @hongminhee @pfefferle totally. These just don’t feel like nudges.

And sometimes, those big pull requests are the only way someone can work. It doesn’t mean the maintainers owe the author anything. But there are a *lot* of people whose first step cannot be “have sizable organization and permission meeting with stranger”.

All of my major pre-puppet contributions started with experimenting with code.

Luke Kanies

@julian I agree, you have beaten that analogy to death

You are welcome to do whatever the hell you want with code I post for free on the internet. And I am welcome to ignore all of that work, or not.

Nothing you do to my code intrinsically affects anything in my life.

Emelia 👸🏻

@lkanies @johnonolan @julian @hongminhee @pfefferle In the past when the project has closed sizable pull requests, people have gotten pissed, so... yeah

John O'Nolan

@lkanies @thisismissem @julian @hongminhee @pfefferle it is permissionless innovation: In your own fork.

A pull request is a proposal to make changes upstream, if you want to do that then there’s nothing permissionless about it and never has been

Modern OSS maintainers are remarkably polite about it, too! Have a read through Linus Torvalds old mailing lists if you want to see how OSS really started. Big contrast

Luke Kanies

@johnonolan @thisismissem @julian @hongminhee @pfefferle thankfully Linus has never been a reasonable standard for how to treat other people, not now, and not then.

And there is a huge difference between “we will not merge your code without talking about it first” and “if you write code without talking to us, we will not merge it”. I hope you can see that.

Sam Sethi :pc2red: ⁂

@thisismissem @pfefferle @julian @hongminhee @johnonolan We wanted to originally publish the activity out of Truefans using the Summary verb but it marked everything as sensitive. After some digging and help from the AP community it was a known bug so we switched to using Notes. We also tried the Listen verb but that didn't work in Mastodon or clones so we abandoned that idea. TreuFans will now build our own full AP client and support the verbs and display them correctly in our app.

julian

@[email protected] open to supporting as:Listen if you publish it. Can you send me a sample activity, and what you expect? Embedded audio player, etc?

Sam Sethi :pc2red: ⁂

@julian thanks, Yes an embed player so users can hear a clip in situ. I am not sure we want users to hear the full podcast episode in the AP client.

Jenniferplusplus

@samsethi @julian this seems like a weird expectation to me. As:Listen is an activity. It's a thing that the (sending) actor did, or is doing. It would make sense to put an audio clip in an audio object, but not directly in a listen activity.

Anyway, since I'm not building a podcast app, I would be inclined to interpret a listen activity as a kind of presence update. Like an AIM away message. If you want something like a share or recommendation, I would expect that to be an announce activity

julian

@[email protected] @[email protected] yeah, as:Listen(object) or some such.

I'd have to refactor a bit since my code pretty much expects either Announce or Create, but it's for the better anyway.

John O'Nolan

@lkanies @thisismissem @julian @hongminhee @pfefferle and I think this reasoning has been explained to you in some detail by several people. Hopefully you can see that

Luke Kanies

@johnonolan @thisismissem @julian @hongminhee @pfefferle definitely a situation where neither of us is convincing the other ‍️. But I’m just some guy with opinions on the internet (and experience in other OSS projects). My opinions deserve no weight here, so I will slink away