An excellent thread from @[email protected] The links to oliphant.social probably won't work if you cllick on them directly.
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An excellent thread from @[email protected]
The links to oliphant.social probably won't work if you cllick on them directly. Instead, you'll need to cut-and-paste them into the search tab in a tab that's logged in to your Mastodon server. That's because @[email protected] has very sensibly disabled public viewing of his site -- a very useful technique to reduce risks of harassment and keep your data from being scraped for AI training or surveillance. Unfortuately, the Mastodon web ui and mobile apps not-so-sensibly don't check to see whether links are to another instance and do the right thing, but instead open them up in a new window.
RE: https://social.polotek.net/users/polotek/statuses/113137088541272027 -
Esther Payne :bisexual_flag:replied to Jon last edited by
@jdp23 @oliphant @polotek I think that thread is great, especially as it doesn't just cover support for Mastodon development and instances. We have a sustainability issue.
We're seeing burnout in Kernel maintenance and with developers in general. The community has to want to support the projects and instances they love. It needs to be reciprocal. There are spaces where funding drives work.
I wrote this about xz, but it does apply to our community spaces.
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@jdp23 @oliphant @polotek i obviously think that people should not overwork and burn out. but i’ve also never seen anyone suggest that as a solution.
what people HAVE said is that not everything in the world that is worth doing makes money. and maybe one of those things is social media. and maybe instead of trying to make social media make money, we need to find ways of living with the fact that it doesn’t, and finding ways to do it anyway.
i’m definitely not one to defend the fediverse’s current funding model or say that improvements can’t be made. i’m maybe one to say that improvements WON’T be made, and it’s ahistoric to suggest that they will. so where does that leave us? how do we move forward from here?
there are lots of volunteer organizations in this world which don’t leave their workers overworked and burnt out. why is that route considered idealistic, and “profitability” considered viable?
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@u2764 @jdp23 @oliphant if there are "a lot" of them, then why isn't this a solved problems? Why haven't all the devs who care deeply about this found those orgs? Why is there still so much angst? You're speaking very confidently about what you think is true but not addressing why there doesn't seem to be any actual evidence to support it.
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@u2764 @jdp23 @oliphant any individual person can choose to do things that don't make money. But this isn't about individual actions. Social networks only have value went why attract a critical mass of other people. It only matters because either people are there. Otherwise you can just write your thoughts in a google document. That's "free" too. Maintaining a network costs real money. Either in dollars or on free labor.
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Oliphantom Menacereplied to Marco Rogers last edited by
Social networks only have value went why attract a critical mass of other people. It only matters because either people are there.
People need to be there, sure. I disagree about the critical mass part. It’s like there’s some sort of intangible target. It matters that people are there, but how many is “enough?” Does it need to be “The place” or can it just be a place? One of many places, perhaps. From what I’ve seen, people want different things out of social media.
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Marco Rogersreplied to Oliphantom Menace last edited by
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It depends what you're looking for. Group text/chat's great for some stuff but very limited. I've run a small social network for a handful of people for the last dozen years (code I wrote myself) and for us it's light-years beyond the group text experience: vibrant and customizable visual appearance, rich formatting with a visual editor, multiple forums, a tarot journal, etc etc etc. Try doing that in group chat! Or today's fediverse of course. But even there a lot of groups see enough value in having a place to hang out with their friends and/or family, many prefer microblogging and/or journalling, and either don't care about the broader fediverse or are okay having another account for that.
My perspectives on this in general are in https://privacy.thenexus.today/mastodon-hard-fork/ are how I think about it in general:Even though volunteers are the lifeblood of community-focused open source projects, paid positions and project-based funding are vital as well.
Hmm, room for improvement on today's fediverse on multiple fronts. More positively, there's actually a fair amount of money going to the fediverse these days, it's just that a lot of the money is used very suboptimally and that's (in theory) fixable. And there are also a lot of people who are interested in helping, so it's a chance to create a sustainable, non-exploitative, redistributive ecosystem that also supports mutual aid (in the general sense, not just monetarily). Details TBD but the opportunity's certainly there.
Whatever funding structures are used, it's vital to ensure that most of the funding goes to marginalized people and projects they lead.
Also there's a great suggestion from Lady in that article:"fund INSTANCES, and then have instances pledge hours, not money, to fork development. i like this model because it is very community‐oriented, and it ensures that the people who are using the software are the ones deciding its development direction. but it’s also a lot harder to implement—it requires gathering a large enough community of instances together and actually having them pledge that work. it would be great if we could rely on hosting services to pledge some of the hours here too."
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] and ccing @[email protected] -
Also @[email protected] on your question "then why isn't this a solved problems?" ...
My take is that there are patterns of existing solutions in various circumstances. The most-visible (and best-funded) players in today's fediverse don't align well with them. Valuing software developers more than others, preferences for a BDFL model are antipatterns and there are plenty of others. And power dynamics have unsurprisingly reinforced that.
Again this is all very changeable in theory, and now's as good a time as any. It'd be interesting to come up with a list of open source projects as well as non-software community projects which have solved this (at least to some extent) in various circumstances.
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] -
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Esther Payne :bisexual_flag:replied to Jon last edited by
@jdp23 @oliphant @polotek @u2764 We saw recently that it's more than a matter of money to change how projects like mastodon work. So funding instances and Dev's is a good idea.
Although it can be hard to maintain a fork. We're starting to get more developer tools for Activity Pub, so the more eyes on those projects the better. We've recently seen firefish fail for a variety of reasons.
There was a community cheering on the developers, but it needed more support.
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Esther Payne :bisexual_flag:replied to Esther Payne :bisexual_flag: last edited by [email protected]
@jdp23 @oliphant @polotek @u2764 We need to remember that developers code in their worldview. Which means if that developer is privileged, it's harder for them to see the harms.
People in the community can suggest changes, but if the developer isn't listening from the beginning, well, that's how you get where we are with Mastodon.But perhaps as more folks get to grips with the code and Activity Pub, we get a greater understanding of what's involved as a community
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Esther Payne :bisexual_flag:replied to Esther Payne :bisexual_flag: last edited by
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@jdp23 @oliphant @onepict @u2764 so for the non-technical people who want this experience without joining a full public network, how do they get it?
How do they find a dev to put many, many hours into building it for free? How do they convince that person to host it and maintain it for them for free?
I don't know why people insist on arguing with what I said without actually thinking about why I said it.
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@jdp23 @oliphant @onepict @u2764 people who want a private social network today can have one. They can stand up a mastodon instance and just lock it down from federating with any other instance. Many people use private slack or discord channels for this.
And yet still, those people also want to be on a social network. And they're participating in this conversation about how they can get one that is not captured by capital.
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@jdp23 @oliphant @onepict @u2764 I'm making the case again that the core value prop of a social network is a place that gains value as more people join. There are other kinds of experiences that people may also want. They're not mutually exclusive. But in either case, there still remains the problem of paying for it. With social networks, the cost tends to scale with the user base. So it's a bigger problem. Small scale costs don't tend to warrant this much discourse.
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Esther Payne :bisexual_flag:replied to Marco Rogers last edited by
@polotek @jdp23 @oliphant @u2764 I think the answer comes from looking at other community spaces. Which are smaller, like dreamwidth which still exists.
Development still happens on that platform which was a fork of livejournal. But Livejournal also had similar issues for it's forks. The skillset of folks were limited.
Community is what keeps a dev going when there's not money on the table or little money.
Healthy online spaces still need moderation etc. Otherwise it's load on Devs.
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Esther Payne :bisexual_flag:replied to Esther Payne :bisexual_flag: last edited by
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Esther Payne :bisexual_flag:replied to Esther Payne :bisexual_flag: last edited by [email protected]
@jdp23 @oliphant @u2764 But we also need to consider why people form communities on telegram, WhatsApp , Facebook etc. @polotek is right.
It's the relative ease of use, with alot of the technical labour handled by those platforms.
Which I don't think we have an answer to yet.
Other than education and making easier for non technical folks to group their instances.
This issue isn't a technical problem really, it's a social problem. We don't engage with non techies.
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witchescauldronreplied to Esther Payne :bisexual_flag: last edited by
@onepict @jdp23 @oliphant @u2764
Where is the hub to talk about this and rally round to make the change and challenge that is needed to take this path?
This used to be https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/socialhub-community-values-policy/1391/71?u=hamishcampbell, but is not at the moment.