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.
Nolan Lawson@maiyannah @sungo Just for context, I'm the one who spearheaded the admin-only instance (which is basically dead now BTW). My original goals were:
- move meta-talk off of the timeline; it was consuming all discussion
- try to get admins to at least talk to each other
- originally it was admin-only, but I relaxed this and even added a non-admin as an admin (insert Bertrand Russell reference) to avoid any appearance of elitist cabal
@nolan @maiyannah while I get that meta-talk was insane back then, consuming all discussion was actually important because folks were defining the culture of the system. Folks could always mute you all as I did from time to time. When the admins disappeared, the users lost their voice and their say in the culture you all were creating.
@sungo @maiyannah Discourse forum is open; do you see this as a better alternative w.r.t inclusiveness? I agree my idea of "admins only" instance was too secret cabal-y.
@maiyannah @sungo I dunno, I kinda feel like it's too ephemeral here, and lack of searchability makes it hard to keep a paper trail (dunno if postActiv's UI is more amenable to this). I doubt Twitter's devs use Twitter to discuss dev stuff, so to me it seems fine to use some other communication software for dev/community talk. Already a lot of it is on GitHub.
gled => Moved@nolan @maiyannah @sungo I kind of second Maiyannah there, implementing groups and using that would be much more efficient imho. We are admin on mastodon, and as an example, I'm allergic to discourse so i'll probably not be active there... Regarding dev questions, there's already GH...
covfefe@sungo @gled @nolan @maiyannah This one I really don't understand: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/1446#issuecomment-293142234
@covfefe @maiyannah @nolan @gled Oh man. I just noticed the cultural control angle of that ticket. Using one instance should be the same as using any other. So, if you make any non-normative changes, you're an outsider instance and not supported. That's cultural warfare expressed as UI/UX preferences.
@maiyannah @covfefe @sungo @nolan
The counter effect is that more and more admin are managing out of tree patches to cope with that.
I receive more questions as time pass by on how I patched here ( text search / 1024 chr limit / more search results, ... ), and publish on GH to facilitate the task for others.
@maiyannah @nolan @covfefe @gled Mastodon is AGPL too. https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/blob/master/LICENSE
@sungo @nolan @gled @covfefe Point being, they are turning anyone away who deviates even a little away from the One True Install, meanwhile I want postActiv to work on as many things as possible so I'm bodging it onto beaglebones and FreeBSD and letting people make ridiculous things out of it. The latter is the appeal of free software to me - and if you're limiting how people can use it, you're breaking the Four Freedoms, in my view.
@sungo @covfefe @nolan @maiyannah without people using freely and doing ridiculous things with your soft as a base, you cannot get awesome innovation, which is one of the strongest point for open source for me .
@gled @maiyannah @nolan @covfefe Some folks don't want innovation. They want to make their vision reality and only their vision. Open source creates a pool of free labor and if you can exclude those who don't hold to your vision, you can make your vision real much faster. It's a project of ego not innovation. And that's *fine* as long as you label it as such. God knows I don't accept contributions on a bunch of my projects because I don't give a fuck what other people want. But I broadcast that in the repo.
@sungo @covfefe @nolan @maiyannah as long as it's clear that it's a 'personal' project, I don't see the issue, someone can always fork and implement their vision... again, a plus for opensource ...
@maiyannah @covfefe @sungo @nolan that is one, and the main reason I stopped proposing PRs and now I just maintain the fork deployed here. :/
See: @@covfefe @sungo @gled @nolan @maiyannah I've been ranting about this for a while, you get what you pay for always always always. Open source will never be great because the user isn't in charge, the lead developer is.
@gled @covfefe @nolan @maiyannah @sungo the problem is when the user is not a customer (literally choosing to pay the salaries of the developers instead of a competitor) the software will never be made FOR the user.
Get rid of the bdfl and you just get rule by politics, like Debian.
@sungo @gled @covfefe @nolan @maiyannah
I'm not saying that because you pay the quality is good.
What I'm saying is that empathizing with our users is not a human trait. We all think we're good at it but really we're building empires, every last one.
But when our survival depends on users liking what we do, we manage to be just a bit better.
@sungo @nolan @gled @covfefe It's both a blessing and a curse but GNU social rekindled my passion for coding again. Having dealt with Twitter's bullshit frequently myself, finding GNU social was a liberating experience, and impactful enough I wanted to give back - hence the postActiv fork (though it's starting to deviate enough now that calling it a fork doesn't seem entirely accurate). So heree I am hacking on terrible PHP code with a bunch of cruft to make something free and open so others don't have to deal with that bullshit either.
If I had to frame it anyway, I'd frame it as selfishness versus selflessness. Mastodon started as an exercise in ego, thinking they could do it better. postActiv started as me wanting to contribute back better code so others could use it and I could help others with the problems they had.
If I had to frame it anyway, I'd frame it as selfishness versus selflessness. Mastodon started as an exercise in ego, thinking they could do it better. postActiv started as me wanting to contribute back better code so others could use it and I could help others with the problems they had.