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.

@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*

@sungo Great minds think alike and all that:
https://plateia.org/notice/267391

@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.

@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 @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.

@nolan @sungo The entire community is right here.  Any external solution is not going to be the superset.  It's going to be a subset.  Thus, it is suboptimal.

@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.

@nolan @maiyannah So. Did you notice that you just used Twitter's dev process to describe a workable solution for a piece of software that everyone rants about being the alternative to Twitter, the thing to replace the bullshit that is monolitich secret corporate software?

@sungo @maiyannah My point was that if you're building a communication platform you don't have to use that platform for every kind of communication. E.g. I'm pretty sure Mozilla Thunderbird devs use IRC to chat and don't feel like they need to use email for everything. But your points elsewhere about dogfooding are well-taken. :)

@nolan @maiyannah But Thunderbird isn't an application for real-time chat. If you're a thunderbird dev and you're not using thunderbird to send email, you're doing it wrong. If you're an IRC dev and you're not using IRC, you're doing it wrong.  you are asking your users to find all your problems for you and, then, because you're not using it that way, you end up with responses like "that's not an issue I have. Ticket closed" which has happened. FFS, the "make columns wider" conversation went exactly like that. "I like the column size. Issue closed".

@sungo @maiyannah Kinda feels like we're talking about a few different things here, but I think the project devs use Mastodon plenty and that's not so much the issue. I happen to agree with Eugen about the column size thing but for the general issue you raise I think the situation could maybe be improved by a foundation/governance model which is a topic I've broached: https://discourse.joinmastodon.org/t/mastodon-project-governance/215

@nolan @maiyannah You know how you handle something like column sizing? You make it configurable and make the default something the devs think is ok. Then, if I as the user or admin want something terrible, I can have it but by default the system is how you think it should be. It's all about choice and user/admin freedom.

@sungo @maiyannah Sure but every additional feature makes it harder to maintain the project. I've run into this in literally every OSS project I've been involved in that reached a certain level of popularity. Every user has their pet/idiosyncratic feature request, and if you say yes to every one, then the project quickly looks like Homer's car with 100 bells and whistles and configuration options. Also folks are always free to fork and modify.

@nolan @maiyannah I totally understand that issue which is why, typically, one creates a plugin system for something like Mastodon. Then admins can add features or whatever without modifying the core code. You give the plugins enough hooks to do all sorts of craziness. 

As far as forking and modifying is concerned, back in the thread someplace is a ticket that expresses that using one mastodon instance should be the same as using all the others. That making changes to the core experience is unsupported and frowned upon. 

It's also kinda bullshit on a codebase like Mastodon because it moves so fast. I used to maintain a patchset to add features but the core breaking-changed every fucking day and every release required a complete rewrite. 

@sungo @nolan This is why StatusNet did a plugin/events system as one of its first things, and it is probably one of the wisest design decisions they made.