i think we need our own consortium of flagship servers
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i think we need our own consortium of flagship servers
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scott freplied to malena / bikes not bombs last edited by
@seachanger ok i have ideas about this but curious what you mean by flagship here? and what needs do you anticipate this filling?
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malena / bikes not bombsreplied to scott f last edited by
@scott just picking up on the multiple signs pointing to a need for a fun and user friendly outpost in the fediverse that is not controlled by eugen, is capable of responding to user requests relatively quickly, and takes moderation very seriously
tho tbh i'm disheartened by people telling me activity pub will not allow the turning off of replies, so is it worth it idk
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scott freplied to malena / bikes not bombs last edited by
@seachanger yeah that's mainly what i want it for
i was telling a friend recently that while part of me wants to use my tech skills to just jump in and start coding, i think it's a social problem first. extending ActivityPub to allow limiting replies is not technically difficult (a Mastodon dev outlined how it might work; GoToSocial is doing it and has documented how their extension works)
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@seachanger social problems being:
1) how do we fund this work to improve anti-abuse/moderation?
2) how do we ensure that a critical mass of fedi users have access to software that supports the improvements (be that a Mastodon fork, or a different project like GTS, or just client apps that know what to do when they encounter a non-replyable post)?
3) more generally, bc Mastodon is open source, in theory we shouldn't be blocked by the Mastodon nonprofit's bad priorities; why are we in practice? -
malena / bikes not bombsreplied to scott f last edited by
@scott
you know, all roads point to this tension in which the demands of a modern internet user are just very expensive.bluesky scooted around all these problems by getting a huge cash infusion from jack dorsey, and unclear what they're gonna do when the money runs out
without a similar huge infusion to our hypothetical project, its hard to compete right
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scott freplied to malena / bikes not bombs last edited by
@seachanger while you're absolutely right, i think within that there's a lot we can do. a lot of people might donate labor or contribute to crowdfunding campaigns with the right structure.
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malena / bikes not bombsreplied to scott f last edited by
@scott the process of coming up with that structure, following through with it over the long term, and managing different personalities within it is not for the faint of heart. i would help tho! lol wahhhhhhhhhh
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malena / bikes not bombsreplied to malena / bikes not bombs last edited by
@scott but if the goal was just:
develop some flagship servers that embody everything we want to see in mastodon, and then follow through with maintaining them and attempt to get some larger funding happening (and/or an easy user subscription fee or something idk)
i would be down to organize
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scott freplied to malena / bikes not bombs last edited by
@seachanger i was envisioning a "small servers council" that like, meets on videoconferencing to discuss what we want to see, and how we might achieve it. maybe north america specific for time zone reasons
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malena / bikes not bombsreplied to scott f last edited by
@scott a Union of Concerned Servers, as it were
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malena / bikes not bombsreplied to malena / bikes not bombs last edited by
@scott scott this is a deja vu of a convo we had a year or two ago right
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scott freplied to malena / bikes not bombs last edited by
@seachanger probably. see you in august 2025 to have it again
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malena / bikes not bombsreplied to scott f last edited by
@scott ha ha, well i do feel like i understand the terrain a lot better, which makes me slightly more willing to be an organizer in this space. also Erin and Darius's paper is out now, IFTAS has gained steam, and the need is still painfully there
i like your idea of starting with existing servers and perhaps outlining common needs/goals
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Jenniferplusplusreplied to malena / bikes not bombs last edited by
@seachanger @scott
Fwiw, activitypub doesn't specify any handling at all for replies. The choice to let anyone anywhere attach a reply to anyone else's post with no consideration for what the OP wants is a choice made entirely by mastodon, and different software can do different things.A lot of projects that aren't mastodon want to give people control over their replies in some way.
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@scott @seachanger
In answer to 3)forking mastodon in order to improve the moderation and safety features is uniquely unappealing on technical grounds. And the commiters like it the way it is so they won't support upstream changes on the scale it would require to make a meaningful change.
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@jenniferplusplus Why uniquely unappealing? In principle, forks of Mastodon that already have significant usage such as Glitch and Hometown could add improved safety features, and maintain them while periodically merging changes from mainline Mastodon. This probably involves a greater maintenance burden than those projects are currently prepared to take on, but that's the social problem I'd like to find a way through.
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Jenniferplusplusreplied to malena / bikes not bombs last edited by
@seachanger @scott so, this is a social problem, but it's rooted in the influence that Eugen has due to how widely deployed mastodon is. And that is addressable from a technical angle. I'm building alternative software, and there's a couple other serious projects also doing that. Contributing to one of those would help. Another option would be to build migration tooling to let existing servers go from mastodon to something else.
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Jenniferplusplusreplied to Jenniferplusplus last edited by
@seachanger @scott and my last idea is to build a SaaS service for some other software, in the vein of mastohost.
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@scott @seachanger mastodon's architecture and schema are both pretty convoluted. If the goal is to maintain compatibility, that will quickly swamp out everything else. And if maintaining compatibility is not a goal, then you'd just be adopting some really extreme technical debt for very little benefit