When you consider relative install sizes of various Fediverse software, it becomes clear why #Mastodon often needs to move in ways that ensure we don't break things and do right by all to ensure interoperability and trust & safety in the new things we ...
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When you consider relative install sizes of various Fediverse software, it becomes clear why #Mastodon often needs to move in ways that ensure we don't break things and do right by all to ensure interoperability and trust & safety in the new things we put out — move fast and break things isn't an option.
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Being responsible and careful is a necessity when you carry 70% of installed software by user count.
If we roughly implement things or release stuff without properly testing it and finding rough edges, we risk breaking or making worse, the Fediverse experience for 70% of all its users — that's a huge responsibility.
Trust and safety *must* be considered, protocol design and interoperability with other software is a must, not a nice to have.
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We need to lead which sometimes results in needing to slow down feature development to ensure all aspects are considered.
Yes, sometimes big regressions make it in, but they're usually something to be avoided at all costs, and we prioritise fixing a bunch of bugs & performance issues.
And yes, there's our own internal issues with how we work that slows us down, but there's a lot of work going into improving that situation too.
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That does also mean we can't immediately work on $HotNewThing because we've people busy working to solve the things we couldn't the last time.
Like Quote Boosts, you know that thing everyone was yelling for last year before clients hacked it in without any of the trust & safety controls? Yeah, that's what's currently being worked on — I've seen blts of early work and y'all would be seriously impressed.
We've also folks working on improving discovery and connectedness for smaller instances.
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The harsh reality of 3 core developers and a handful of regular contributors is that stuff does take a long time to build. If you want stuff faster, help fund the people & project.
The only way to move faster is to be able to pay more people to do the work to support 70% of the Fediverse.
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@thisismissem what's the best way to support the development of mastodon without supporting mastodon.social?
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@joshix you could support me, but in truth, a very very tiny amount of money goes towards Mastodon.social — most of it is salaries, for development.
Renaud was saying it costs them like less than 20 cents per user per month the other day (but I'm pretty sure it was lower like 5 cents) for operating mastodon.social
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I should also note that there is a cool new thing that's being released soon-ish I believe, that some folks have been quietly working on over the past year or more. (I'm not going to say more than that for now)
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It's frustrating when people want quick fixes, but sustainable progress takes a long time.
If mastodon had accepted VC funding, some of the features bein requested could have been implemented by now, but then the priority of the devs would change for the worse in the long term.
Some people think Mastodon doesn't care because they are not acting promptly enough to requests for change.
But, in reality, I know that part of the reason things are taking longer is because they do care.
There are probably small changes that could be made to make this all more transparent - improving the workflow and communication etc. But what has been acheived so far has been a monumental feat.
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this is a good question & I have read that before …
beside supporting our instance and some individual developers, it would be very helpful to have a fund or foundation or similar to point people to …
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@benx yeah, there's certainly a lot of work going on to try to improve communication & transparency.
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@wigbert @joshix you'd actually result in less of an impact funding a foundation that then funds developers due to double the taxation, double the bookkeeping & accounting costs, double the management costs.
So supporting existing non-profits like Mastodon, or supporting individuals really is the way to go.
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@thisismissem with 260_000 users (on .social) and 0.05 € per user per month that would be 13_000 € per month.
With 326_000 € in donations in 2022 that's a big chunk.
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@wigbert @joshix personally once I reach my target salary of about €68k, I'll be trying to pay things forwards (already privately put forward €150 this month to support some folks who needed it more than me right now — I've a bit of a buffer if absolutely necessary on a month-on-month basis)
I'd be fantastic to be able to pay folks to help me work on the things I do, since I know I'm incredibly lucky to have built up all the support I have.
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Emelia 👸🏻replied to Joshix last edited by [email protected]
@joshix I'm not sure if I got the numbers right there. But the general gist was "operating the flagship server really doesn't cost us that much money"
The amount probably also varies based on MAU and a bunch of other things.
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@thisismissem Sorry to come into your mentions to complain, but what personally bothers me more than the slow speed of development, which is completely understandable, is what has been getting prioritized.
8 years in without proper reply controls? That feels like something to figure out in the first year, or maybe two.
If this one thing was sorted out early into the project's life, things could look a lot different today.
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@thisismissem yea it would be terrible if, for example, a crucial security update ended up packaged with half-thought-out ui changes, if an update caused performance degradation that forced a popular instance to shut down, or if crucial safety tools were hard to access or nonfunctional b/c the project lead was strong-armed into having them in the first place & doesn't want them used. good thing that can't happen with a responsible and professional project such as mastodon
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@thisismissem And I know saying this isn't very helpful, better to focus on how to move forward.
But this really does bug me.
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@thisismissem it's great you're valuing these things but it doesn't seem that they're what's actually happening when the big guy is perpetually one mention of the word 'journalist' away from introducing a toast saying 'ALGORITHMIC FANFARES SUCCESSFULLY ENGAGED' that pops up whenever a new post appears on the tl & making it so all blocks must be counter-signed by a moderator before they can take effect
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@stefan Claire did actually start that a few years ago, but everyone complained we weren't doing other things so priorities shifted to keep people happy. GTS's brand new reply controls is actually based on a FEP Claire wrote
