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.
@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.