• 3 Posts
  • 14 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: February 16th, 2024

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  • I didn’t cherry pick a statement. I included the part where they said the very first draft.

    I did fail to explain how its a power grab, but that’s was only because I thought it was a fairly obvious one-to-one point. I’ve also added another example. But lemme try again.

    1. Mastodon has a history of pushing features that affect interop with other implementations without seeking feedback from other implementations or outright ignoring the feedback they do receive.
    2. A member of the mastodon team wrote a FEP to formalize a setting related to search indexing. This was the right way to go about it. yey Mastodon was working with other implementations. But that FEP didn’t receive positive feedback and it seems like it was abandoned.
    3. Now mastodon is trying to standardize something using the ideas from that FEP, outside of the FEP process (which is the agreed upon way to collaborate between implementers).
    4. They’re warning on their site that they have deadlines and may not incorporate feedback if they can’t resolve it without breaking deadlines.
    5. They are under no obligation to incorporate it after their initial draft and, historically, mastodon is unwilling to update their work to incorporate other implementers’ feedback.

    A more collaborative way to do this would have been to seek feedback before making a grant proposal and making the grant proposal jointly with other projects so they weren’t the only ones getting paid for it.


  • Mastodon has a history of steamrolling other implementations.

    This means we might not always be able to incorporate all the feedback we get into the very first draft of everything we publish

    The site even warns that theyre on a deadline and may not incorporate feedback.

    EDIT: they also mention a “setting” that determines if a user/post is searchable. theyve presented a FEP to formalize this setting but nearly everyone else had issues with their proposal. as usual for mastodon, this looks like them sidestepping external feedback and just doing what they want




  • Then, there is TikTok algorithm which is a common critic of the app but is how you get a never-ending flow of content which isn’t uninteresting enough for you to turn the app off

    I think there needs to be some kind of discovery algorithm for new users with an empty feed (or even existing users who just wanna find something new) but a federated alternative doesn’t need something as powerful as the tiktok algorithm to be a decent replacement. It doesn’t need to surface a “never-ending flow of content” because it doesn’t have a financial incentive to keep you in the app endlessly.



  • Relying on the competence of unaffiliated developers is not a good way to run a business.

    This affects any site that’s posted on the fediverse, including small personal sites. Some of these small sites are for people who didn’t set the site up themselves and don’t know how or can’t block a user agent. Mastodon letting a bug like this languish when it affects the small independent parts of the web that mastodon is supposed to be in favor of is directly antithetical to its mission.




  • If you break that up you end up with only a few large and likely advertisement funded instances being able to survive.

    I’m not saying I don’t think instances should be able to use that model, only that I think that model should not be the dominant way of building a community on the fediverse. But I don’t see why a user would be less attached to a community just because its hosted on a different server from them, especially on the threadiverse which is topic based and where users are most likely going to engage in multiple topics.


  • Super disagree. A community at the protocol level can have just as much character as a community at the network level, but without most of the drawbacks. The “instance as community” idea was always a poor substitute for actual Groups. The community shouldn’t be a server that users are bound to; it should be a Group that has access controls and private memberships (if desired). The moderators get all the same benefits of maintaining a limited community with their own rules, but users aren’t beholden to petty drama via instance blocks or defederation.







  • for profit corporation being able to suck up your posts is probably what has many upset

    They can already do that without a bridge. And it doesn’t “suck up your posts”. It works just like any other instance. They have to search for you and follow you. Then they receive posts going forward, but they won’t get historical posts.

    I personally would block such a service

    Good! You can do that and that is a perfectly reasonable solution. That’s part of what has ppl upset on the other side of this argument. All of this arguing and vitriol is happening over a service that you can block like any other fediverse actor.