Maiyannah BishopI continue to be amused by people who want to discuss changes to a social network on anything but that social network.
All of the people who would be affected by any proposed change to the social networking standards are _right here_ talking on this thing _right now_. Any alternative is just going to be a subset of those people at best. If you want to discuss changes I'm going to consider at all, discuss them here, or don't bother.
sungo@maiyannah But they might get involved in the conversation before there's a common front by the admins/devs! They might have an opinion before the admins/devs are ready to hand down an edict! *eye rolling so hard they stick*
@maiyannah I remember when a decision to create an admin-only instance and to use Discourse heavily happened a couple months ago. It was entirely about controlling the narrative. There was a distinct desire for a lack of transparency about the ongoing operations of instances.
Well, and making sure the messages didn't propagate to the GS side of the fediverse because god help us if the OLD TIMERS had thoughts.
Well, and making sure the messages didn't propagate to the GS side of the fediverse because god help us if the OLD TIMERS had thoughts.
@sungo By splitting the community like that they empower a few at the cost of the many. It's literally the oppression dynamic. I reject it.
@sungo A responsibility falls on any ethical project manager to reject attempts to try to empower small segments of the community in such a way. They need to be the safeguard against a few people imposing their will on the many.
@maiyannah I think that was the entire point. Huge instances didn't know what to do with gauging the needs of 100k users. So they cut them out of the discussion.
At this point, I firmly believe that admins of any type of instance, Mastodon or PA or GS or Hubzilla or wtf, need to cap their user count to something fairly low. Or lock down registration and manually vet every entrant (mostly because that's fucking annoying and won't scale). It's cool to say "I run a thing that has 100k users" but it is something else entirely to manage it, even with help.
At this point, I firmly believe that admins of any type of instance, Mastodon or PA or GS or Hubzilla or wtf, need to cap their user count to something fairly low. Or lock down registration and manually vet every entrant (mostly because that's fucking annoying and won't scale). It's cool to say "I run a thing that has 100k users" but it is something else entirely to manage it, even with help.
@sungo You either need to know how to deal with this - it's not an unsolvable problem after all - or yeah, you need to stay smaller.
But cutting people out of the development process of the software, whether it be by a hard blocking means or a soft blocking means, is how you end up with oppressive software in the truest sense. It's the tyranny of the minority.
But cutting people out of the development process of the software, whether it be by a hard blocking means or a soft blocking means, is how you end up with oppressive software in the truest sense. It's the tyranny of the minority.
@maiyannah Fast moving specialist software projects always become a steamroller of developer bias. God knows I've run a few. And when you've got a ticket queue that's 700 deep going back 6 months, who the fuck knows what's going on.
@sungo Sometimes I think the REASON Mastodon moves fast is because it slows down it would actually have to stop and address many longstanding bugbears like usergroups.
@maiyannah I've seen this a lot in quite a few projects. Momentum lies in cool new stuff or super easy bugs. Longstanding complicated issues and boring bugs get sidelined because they're not sexy. I had to completely rewrite a project at the last job because of it. Got so deep in the shiny that I coded us into an inflexible box. And yeah, "I", which you can totes take to mean that there was not enough communication with the other devs or customers.
@sungo There's a lot any software project's users are going to want out of it and you can't do everything - priorities have to be made. This is why it's even more important to include as many people as you can in those discussion - that way, a reasonable consensus can be made about what items are priorities and which are not.