The thing I love about this post and all its replies, is the stark difference in replies in answer to Brent's very reasonable question.

Earthshine

@mekkaokereke @Badgardener @thisismissem movements founded on anti-capitalist activism are categorically impossible to finance in a manner that is competitive in a capitalist system. Unpaid volunteers are unpaid because there is no source of money to pay them. People operate all of this on pocket lint budgets. They can only afford as much in operating costs as their ever shrinking discretionary income from their day jobs that fund all this allows. People absolutely deserve a living wage for their life's work, but the path to that has to start with changing the system to value and compensate non-capitalist activities.

Christian Kent

@mekkaokereke @Badgardener @thisismissem If Twitter was sold at a free and fair price, wouldn’t it be closer to $5b though?

Emelia 👸🏻

@earthshine @mekkaokereke @Badgardener ah, yes, rather than chipping in a small amount per person to support the services you want to see and use, we should totally dismantle the current capitalist system that none of us have any real control over.

This is such a silly suggestion.

Yes, we can work towards better financing the things we want to see, whilst also working within the capitalist framework that we cannot easily change.

Emelia 👸🏻

@whophd @mekkaokereke @Badgardener now it would be, not sure pre-Musk.

Some research suggests pre-Musk the share price was $38 giving total value of $30 Billion.

Twitter's Share Price is Back to Where it Started Before Musk's Bid

Despite all the twists and turns, the company's value is back to where it was before Elon Musk became interested in purchasing Twitter

Newsweek (www.newsweek.com)

WTL

@mekkaokereke @Badgardener @thisismissem The expectation that open-source software development should be done for free really irritates me.

That means it can only be done by people who are well off enough to take the time to do it. Development driven by the rich looks very different than development by the poor. Find a fair medium?

I'm all for accepting free work from those who can donate their time, but want to see more support more developers who need the financial help.

mekka okereke :verified:

@fembot

I'm not sure, but probably?

Chris Alemany🇺🇦🇨🇦🇪🇸

@smach @violanders @mekkaokereke the only response I can ever have to the “I only want Mastodon to ever be the way i want it from 2010” crowd is: “You are not the master of the Internet, bye”.

Those people are just silly and deserve to be auto-muted. Though I know the need to do that is part of the annoyance.

I do hope in time, their proportion will be such that they become irrelevant and most people won't know they exist at all.

flere-imsaho

@Badgardener @thisismissem @mekkaokereke you cannot build and maintain crucial infrastructure on goodwill and strings, especially with low bus factor numbers.

if you're doing something that needs to be around for years, possibly decades, you need space for both new features, and maintenance of old ones, and outreach and teaching of new project members, and well-designed succession plans.

this should not be done in a way we learned to tolerate from the non-profit sector, on a shoestring budget, underpaying for labour, and with no way to plan the work for longer than a year or two.

Emelia 👸🏻

@can @mekkaokereke @Badgardener freelance work as an advisor for fediverse projects, sometimes freelance work on fediverse projects.

I literally work exclusively on the Fediverse. That's my full-time job.

TomKrajci 🇺🇦 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️

@mawhrin @Badgardener @thisismissem @mekkaokereke

"...this should not be done in a way we learned to tolerate from the non-profit sector, on a shoestring budget, underpaying for labour, and with no way to plan the work for longer than a year or two...."

About that:

your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦

"Mastodon in it's entirety"

conflating Mastodon.social with Mastodon *IS* the problem. seeing a litany of sites co-branded sites as mastodon is confusing.

what's worse: for an instance like Black Mastodon, you have to apply and wait for an answer. to this day i never received a yes or no. if you notice, AM BLACK.

came to .social because after literally YEARS , found people i know here.

so, no.

there is no ease of joining.

at all.

@juergen_hubert @ckent @larsivi @mekkaokereke

.

@mekkaokereke Thanks, I hadn't heard mention of it lately. As a creative, it's put the urch on my posting my own work here again until I can find a way past that. I've heard the #NoBot tag isn't effective outside of Masto ‍️

tom jennings

@can @mekkaokereke @Badgardener @thisismissem

I'd gladly pay a small monthly fee that went to a pool of developers. If 0.1% of us paid $5/month, what's that, 50k/mo?

Emelia 👸🏻

@tomjennings @can @mekkaokereke @Badgardener

My goal isn't to get rich either, I want to meet my needs (€68k) and have maybe €250-500 per month I can put into savings.

Outside of that I'd be finding ways to work with others & paying for their time

Jon

Everything on Bluesky is public, and it's very easy to get access to the firehose, so somebody is almost certainly scraping them. Not sure whether Bluesky themselves are curently doing it but they easily could. Also, they send them to an automated moderation service (Hive) ... although people have otld me that the terms of use prohibit that being used for anything else.

That said spublic and unlisted posts here are in general scrapable; and unlike Cara, instances' terms of use dsn't e prohibit it. (Although, I don't know if Cara's prohibitions would hold up in court, so it mifht be a moot point). . Also it's possible that some instance has set things up so that everything federates there gets scraped, even followers-only and private posts. In fact Threads privacy policy is written so that they're explicitly allowed to do that (although I don't know if they are yet).

@[email protected] @[email protected]

Jon

Yep. Starter packs are attached to people's profiles, individuals maintaining the starter pack manage them, this could in principle work just as well in the fediverse -- in fact @[email protected] pointed out that Mastodon used to have list of recommended accounts attached to people's profiles, which isn't so far away from starter packs (which also have a "follow all" button). Agreed that an equivalent here should be opt-in here -- and also you should be able to know what starter packs you're part of, which isn't the case on Bluesky -- but that's not a decentralization issue.

So @[email protected] I agree that we shouldn't just copy the UX improvements there, but in general I don't think fedi's decentralization rules the significant ones out. Multiple implementations make things more challenging here, but GoToSocial's approach to reply controls illustrates how to move forward without waiting for consensus (which BTW is how we got scoped visibility and blocking back in 2017 -- Mastodon unilaterally extended the standard at the time and it was messy for a while but most implementations wound up going along with it). One thing that is much harder to do in a decentralized way is private profiles, but Bluesky hasn't done those.

As for their moderation tools, it's an interesting idea, and there are a few examples that work great -- Aendra's XBlock Screenshot Labler, the opt-in prounouns labeller where you chose your own labels. In general though I think it's best to look at the current implementation as a prototype with some major flaws, and some assumptions that might not apply so well over here.

@[email protected]

Urzl

@mekkaokereke I think the distinction between BlueSky as an org set up to suffer the same enshittification arc as Twitter and BlueSky as a platform and a suite of features really needs to be thought about for the next big thing.

The BlueSky platform does some things right that others should learn from. I was looking over the ActivityPub docs today to try to distinguish whether the moderation stuff we want is even doable here.

Jon

Also, Blacksky is a great example of how the different pieces of Bluesky's technology fit together -- a feed, a starter pack, a moderation service, and a (still-under-development) PDS. That's why Black Twitter is moving to Bluesky. There' a lot to learn!

EDIT: I talked more about Blacksky here

All that said, even though I think starter packs are useful they're also likely to lead to rich-get-richer dynamics in terms of followers, and magnify existing equity issues (because in general, white people tend to recommend mostly white people, and guys tend to recommend mostly guys). So I really don't mean to say we should just copy Bluesky's approach -- I very much do agree with @[email protected] on that! And there's an open question about how discovery of starter packs and feeds will work, do you opt in to have your starter pack listed in various directories? Is it searchable via fedidsovery services? etc. etc.

I'm mostly just saying not to get hung up on the different decentralization models. My intuition is that in general it's the different consent models that will make it more challenging to adapt things (and that in some cases it might well be better off to look at completely different impementations). So, view it all as a prototype that they've invested in on our behalf!

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]

Emelia 👸🏻

@gooba42 @mekkaokereke if it's not, let us know! https://github.com/swicg/activitypub-trust-and-safety

I'm leading this taskforce and really pushing for better moderation at protocol level

.

@jdp23 @mekkaokereke
Thanks for the info. I gather it's pretty pervasive then, generally.

It seems that many ppl have either accepted scraping, haven't considered it, or use apps that prevent their creative content from beng scraped (not sure how many use those apps, but some apparently do).

I appreciate the overview, Jon!