I am forever grateful to him for building & popularizing Mastodon, but I don't think @Gargron should be working on features at all right now.
Instead, he and the Mastodon non-profit (and a whole bunch of others) should be figuring out governance for collectively making decisions about Mastodon. Features in the Fediverse shouldn't be up to one guy, or even one company.
That's the whole point of the Fediverse. We do this together, or not at all.
I'm worried you're mixing up ActivityPub - the protocol - and Mastodon - a specific, albeit most popular, implementer of the protocol. The first feature listed on Mastodon's GitHub page is 'no vendor lock-in'.
It also seems you've missed one of the main principles of open source software - fork and develop as suits you. There are alternatives also.
Lastly, the Fediverse is not "we do this together or not at all" - it's we federate and suit our specific communities.
I did. And apologies, but that's why I'm confused 😕 Sorry.
@barryo no problem - your initial reply came across as quite "'splainy", but I know it's coming from good intentions. ❤️
Mastodon has such a dominant position in ActivityPub microblog implementations that it's important to consider the ramifications of not doing the work to get ahead of the governance problem. The reality is that better funded projects are coming, and highly likely to marginalize Mastodon & Eugen; my additionally worry is that they'll come with less altruistic principles. 😬
@blaine Sorry, still not getting the kernel of the point you're trying to make. Governance for Mastodon the software project? For a specific community hosted by an instance of the Mastodon software? For all communities? For the entire fediverse?
E.g. I'd probably take a different position on each of these:
a) s/w project -> core dev team to decide governance model
b) specific instance -> that community itself
c) all mastondon instances and/or fediverse -> not appropriate
blaine
Barry O'Donovan