Over the past 24 hrs while Mastodon was discoursing about whether or not starter packs are OK, and if slow progress is more due to lack of funding or different priorities, and if people that choose other social networks are just evil, lazy, shiftless p...
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@thisismissem @juergen_hubert @mekkaokereke @stooovie @Remittancegirl Exactly my experience for the back half of my tenure at Stack Overflow. Product managers couldn’t make a name for themselves on that work, so the work never got scheduled.
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Peter Nelsonreplied to mekka okereke :verified: last edited by
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]
Funding could help. Who is expected to fund it though, VC or individuals?
Where do I (on a single-user non-Mastodon instance) help with funding? -
Katja ｢Amethyst｣replied to Jiří Fiala Total Landscaping last edited by
@stooovie @Remittancegirl @mekkaokereke
I find this whole attitude repulsive, frankly. There is no excuse for bad user experiences. Period.
If we want people to use our tools, we need to make those tools simple, easy to use, and welcoming. Failing to do so means they will find tools that are simpler, easier, and more welcoming—and they won't be the ones we'd like them to use. Deriding people who expect those affordances is just asinine.
Moreover, this attitude that better things aren't possible because XYZ is self-defeating and surrendering the initiative to the very same oligarchs and techno-feudalists you cite.
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db0replied to Katja ｢Amethyst｣ last edited by [email protected]
@VulpineAmethyst @stooovie @Remittancegirl @mekkaokereke I think the point being made here is not that we don't want the sleeker experience, but we just do not have the funds to deliver that experience. #Bluesky has gotten millions from crypto-bro VCs to make that sleek experience, while Mastodon can barely support 3 developers at the minimum wage for their country (and #lemmy devs are below that even)
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@db0 @stooovie @Remittancegirl @mekkaokereke
Is funding the actual issue, or is it being waved around in order to avoid expressing an objection that nobody is going to like?
Mastodon already has support for lists. That support can be extended to create a shared list, which is what BlueSky's 'starter packs' actually are.
It's not an issue of cost, it's an issue of someone wants to kill it without explaining their real objections.
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db0replied to Katja ｢Amethyst｣ last edited by [email protected]
@VulpineAmethyst @stooovie @Remittancegirl @mekkaokereke I think you're being way too dismissive. We're not talking about this one particular feature. It's absurd to think that just this one thing missing would make mastodon popular, when it's not even the thing most people complain about. To make a service as sleek as bluesky can become in a couple of year absolutely requires appropriate funding or sufficient volunteer work.
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If I'm being dismissive, it's because I'm already aware of a fair amount of work that has been done in forks of Mastodon over the past several years that hasn't made it upstream, for one reason or another.
It's not a funding problem, it's a "having one person in charge making all decisions is bad, actually" problem.
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@VulpineAmethyst @stooovie @Remittancegirl @mekkaokereke Work being been done and explicitly being rejected from mastodon maintainers due to their own ideological hold-backs is certainly a problem and I agree that the lead devs have held the project back with their stubborness and privilege-blindness on these issues. I just don't believe it's the only problem in onboarding, and the sleeker experience and lack of progress on big features is also due to lack of funding.
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@petererer I'll try the second question:
You can help support @thisismissem, who works on T&S standards/guidance & related parts of Mastodon. Sustained support for her could enable positive movement on several axes.
GoToSocial has established a pattern of taking ideas for safety features that were stuck in committees & forums and unilaterally making them real, regardless of what others think. If this approach resonates, you can donate: https://opencollective.com/gotosocial
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You could donate to spaces run by and for marginalized people to lighten the load on those who currently put in the work. E.g. https://blackqueer.life and https://diaspora.im accept donations.
There is a convincing (to me, you might also like to listen to people who disagree) case that contributing to Mastodon through Patreon will, medium & long term, lead to better UX and safety for all Mastodon users, improving the fediverse as a whole.
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@JasonPunyon @juergen_hubert @mekkaokereke @stooovie @Remittancegirl yeah, so this is what we're fighting + distributed systems problems + problems in the protocol + people wanting features that'll almost certainly exhibit the scunthorpe problem.
Right now my focus has been on making sure information is clear and the pages are usable + do the thing you expected.
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@thisismissem @juergen_hubert @mekkaokereke @stooovie @Remittancegirl Y’all are hamstrung in so many ways. When I stop and think about just how much harder a problem it is than the one we had, it makes me appreciate your work that much more.
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Emelia 👸🏻replied to Jason Punyon last edited by [email protected]
@JasonPunyon @juergen_hubert @mekkaokereke @stooovie @Remittancegirl yeah, it certainly makes doing a bunch of things "interesting" to say the least, and we generally get pushback if we were to add ML models that typically get employed in trust & safety tooling.
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@vanderZwan @mekkaokereke I bookmarked this to reply later and forgot.
️ Sorry for the delay but I figured you might find this interesting anyway, even though it's beside the point of the thread:Inkscape actually has pretty solid CLI support!
I use it several times in the build script for my website to take an SVG file I generate dynamically and turn it into a PNG. You can also use it to query information about specific objects in the SVG.
