Beginning to believe that @Gargron doesn't want me contributing to #mastodon — he's now partially recreated three of my pull requests that I've worked on.
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@thisismissem
I wish I could say this is surprising, but my understanding is that it's actually pretty common behavior for him. -
Emelia 👸🏻replied to Emelia 👸🏻 last edited by [email protected]
I'm no longer just some "new developer" working on the project, instead I've 92 merged pull requests, and 37 open, waiting for review.
I'm fairly certain that @Gargron only even thought of report forwarding because after his first PR that conflicted with my ongoing work, I mentioned that I'd been working on report forwarding in a conversation.
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@jenniferplusplus like, usually I'm able to get things to ship, but everything got backlogged due to the release, and I'm waiting for the team to green light continuing on work, because rebasing constantly is a waste of time.
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this is really pissing me off, because like, I could've been spending that time working on other things, like FIRES, but instead I pushed hard on Mastodon moderation features to *try* to move things forwards for 4.3
Features that @Gargron had left underloved for months or years, not responding to moderator feedback.
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Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦replied to Nathan A. Stine last edited by
@stinerman I have a serious problem with the very idea of a BDFL in the context of a project that important for so many underserved, at-risk communities as Mastodon-the-software.
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Lars Marowsky-Brée 😷replied to Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦 last edited by
@rysiek @stinerman @gytisrepecka @thisismissem To be more correct: this is how BDFL projects *stop* working.
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@thisismissem @Gargron you know, I saw this on a totally unrelated repo — someone submitted a feature PR, and instead of building on that PR the maintainer put up a duplicate with slightly different implementation and then deleted the original. It seemed like a rude one-off to me at the time but maybe this is a larger trend.
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Daveyreplied to Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦 last edited by
BDFL is often fine for very mechanical things like a programming language. Even then it requires being an accomplished domain expert. Someone with so much trust that it's not like anyone is going to disagree much anyway.
Fedi software has a cyclic dependency of voluntary labour by people who trust a dev to do work that supports them. I can''t think of any free software that has that dynamic to this extent.
To survive, it needs to be more dialogue, less monologue.
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@rysiek @stinerman as an admin/mod, Mastodon is fine, on balance, but I really see some of the decision making as a limiting factor on:
- adoption by new communities
- sense of safety
- feelings of independence from corporate interference
- how long some volunteers will hang on or burn out or switch techLike all the getting excited about integrating with Facebook. Can't help asking "why does this lad think people are here?"
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@thisismissem @Gargron 37 open prs? ugh that sucks unless there are actually good reasons for that...
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@logicalmoody I'd certainly seen it before, but usually the original author's implementation was "better" for justifiable reasons — with at least the latest here, he knew as of this morning that I was working on that feature, because I'd told him, but he still decided to open a quarter-implementation of that feature anyway for some reason.
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@kate some are drafts that I can't yet move forwards with, e.g., refreshing & expiring access tokens for OAuth, since we need to make that change very very sensitively, but many are just sitting there waiting for someone to review them.
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@thisismissem Wow. You've done an incredible amount of work trying to make Mastodon better. Thank you for doing that. I hope Eugen will start letting your contributions contribute now that you've called him out.
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@stinerman @gytisrepecka @thisismissem @Gargron
I mean, as long as the code is half decent it's free labor. like, say what needs tweaked in the request.
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@EveHasWords I really wish I didn't feel the need to call anyone out. That'd not how I generally approach things, but after first flagging a conflict last night, then explicitly telling him I'd been working on report forwarding, he went ahead anyway and created a version of report forwarding that didn't do 90% of the stuff mine did.
That's completely baffling me. Okay, the first time, you can claim you didn't know I'd been doing work. But the second time just made me beyond mad.
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Did @Gargron assign you a ticket for that work?
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@Methylcobalamin there were tickets open for many of these thnigs for years before I started to work on them and address them.
e.g., here's the one for report forwarding: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/15526
typically there's not been a “get assigned a piece of work" way. Instead it's been look at the open issue, check there's no open PRs, write a PR, leave a comment to say that you've created a PR.
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@Methylcobalamin e.g., the “improve finding reports” one there was this issue open from 2022: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/22419
Restoring the Report #123 to the reports list goes back to 2018: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/9338
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@thisismissem @Gargron This public callout is brave and not baseless, thank you Emelia for bringing up the issue and especially for your hard work... This is actually something that I've seen and last time when @renchap was wondering about why I'm hesitant writing some UI work or sending SVG stuff ideas to your way in a form of a PR, this is one of the reasons. If the huge time invested goes unnoticed or even exploited, its better to put your efforts to a fork or a mod instead.
The Mastodon core team should have a serious internal conversation about this. Doesn't really welcome anyone to contribute.
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@thisismissem It might be worth considering if forking (Potentially with the longer term view to hard fork) is the right call especially if you've been able to secure funding to date (or are able to do so from the general contributions you receive). There's enough folks out here (I think anyway) that are certainly interested in a lot of the improvements you've worked on to date to be appreciative of future development effort I think.
