I see a lot of the drama that is happening between people of color on the platform and the mastodon dev team.

Marco Rogers

I see a lot of the drama that is happening between people of color on the platform and the mastodon dev team. I feel like I need any to help, but I'm not exactly sure the best way to do that. I'm more wary of making things worse tbh.

But I feel like there are two important things that feel clear to me. I want to say it out loud and have people either correct me or help me understand better.

Marco Rogers

The first thing is really basic. The mastodon dev team is very small. Regardless of whatever decisions they are making about what to focus on or not focus on. They can't do a whole lot. I believe they have been up front about that to anybody who will listen. So I don't think it pays to expect them to be capable of meeting these large issues.

Marco Rogers

Could we have better moderation today if they had committed to working on it a year or more ago? Sure, maybe. But at this stage, it's going to take a lot of work to get there. And the core team is underfunded. To me that means asking them to engage with this issue isn't actually a good use of energy. Whether they are aligned with our requests or not, they just can't do what is needed.

Marco Rogers

The second thing is well worth more discussion. And I'm gonna take a hard stance on this. If people of color still find ourselves dependent on a small team of white devs to get what we want, that is a failure of the principles of the fediverse.

I understand why it still feels like we have to ask the mastodon team for things. I'm not dismissing the reality of where we are. But our goal should be actively move away from this dynamic. How do we do that?

Marco Rogers

The fediverse is a lot of work. And right now, it doesn't make anybody any money. In fact it costs a lot of money ab free labor.

Investing in the fediverse only makes sense if it *actually* gives us control of our own destiny.

I'm gonna repeat this a lot. Because it's going to take a while for people to unlearn what we usually do and instead create new dynamics.
https://social.polotek.net/@polotek/112480816034536846

Marco Rogers

I'm done fighting with white Europeans who are committed to willfully misunderstanding and downplaying racism. I honestly do not want to spend another second trying to get them to care enough to change their priorities.

Instead, I want to know how I can find and support people that are aligned with my values. I want to enable those people to work on a platform that I can use. And we don't need permission from the mastodon team to do so. They're not in charge.

yes, it's me, liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦

"The mastodon dev team is very small."

allegedly this is by design. am not the best person to speak on this, but my impression is that the lead developer loves to have a tight fist on things. that's why supposedly Mastodon Glitch (?) exists. they wouldn't accept the pull requests.

i would pay & raise money in a heartbeat if i knew that as a community member i'd have a say on development of the code base & management of .social. the way they're organized, neither is an option... 🧵

@polotek

Yisrael Dov :emacs: :nixos:

@polotek I grew up as a jew in a majority black city, also close to areas with active KKK, I have a lot of experience with prejudice

Timnit Gebru (she/her)

@polotek This is also where I am. We're having a moderation meeting this week to figure out what additional resources we want to put in.

Some Black people I want to support on here who've been doing the thankless and unpaid work of trying to make this pace better are people like @CaribenxMarciaX and @are0h.

yes, it's me, liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦

i would like to see a social media cooperative. how do you feel about that?

@polotek

yes, it's me, liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦

how y'all feel about a cooperative model for joining forces? cuz that seems to be the ideal biz & development structure for this.

@timnitGebru @polotek @CaribenxMarciaX @are0h

Tim Bray

@blogdiva @polotek There are two that I know of. https://CoSocial.ca (see https://blog.cosocial.ca) and https://social.coop/about

Daniel Farina

@polotek Is crux of the conflict that they don't want to make it easier to use stuff like akismet (which was always a fly in the ointment, as far as a mostly-but-not-entirely distributed and workable blog ecosystem worked circa 2010) with Mastodon upstream?

Put another way, some kind of distributed perfection above getting in a timely fix for those that have many abusers?

I have no prior knowledge, guessing from context of the posts here.

yes, it's me, liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦

oh, DUH! you're at cosocial. i'd love to hear everything about y'all. how it came to be, it's biz structure, it's server/hosting structure.

i feel like it's a good time to have some sort of video/tele unconference on this?

@timbray @polotek

Marco Rogers

@fdr I would encourage you to get up to speed on the context before making assumptions. Unfortunately that's tough to do today. It takes a lot of effort to dig in enough to be informed. This is some key context for the current debate though.
https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/112860037633719411

Emelia 👸🏻

@blogdiva @polotek fwiw, Eugen is no longer calling all the shots, @renchap is now making more of the engineering decisions, and having a small team is absolutely not by choice, but instead constrained by funding as noted in the 2022 annual report figures: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/10/annual-report-2022/

Basically you can't hire full-time engineers without money. Each full-time engineer based in Europe costs you about €80k/year on average; folks based in America have much higher salary requirements too.

Julian Fietkau

@blogdiva @polotek As a relative late-comer, my impression is that the Mastodon team has recently put a fair amount of their capacity into making the project more approachable. @andypiper and @renchap have both specifically focused on barriers to entry and new collaborator onboarding this year.

I don't want to tell others where to invest their effort, but I'm at least not the only one who thinks the vibe around the project has been improving: https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/112860534061070294

Tim Bray

@blogdiva @polotek Our tech stack is 100% boring/vanilla. Our co-op structure is off-the-shelf boring, taking mostly just the defaults for our legal jurisdiction. The only thing that’s innovative is the combo: co-op owned instance. Observation: Requiring membership approval and a $50 payment is *amazingly* effective at discouraging griefers.