Via this Lemmy post I just bumped into this: An Open Letter Calling for the Resignation of Eugen Rochko (Gargron) from Mastodon Development.
Posting here because the broader discussion on the topic is very relevant and this is a brainstorming area where we can think them over. I hope we can - in a very constructive way - find ways to improve on some of the pain points that are brought up, and possible others that are as yet unnamed.
Also: Note that I do not endorse the open letter.
Yeah, SocialHub seems to be exactly the way to go about doing this. I completely agree that we want to have some baseline in terms of protocols like ActivityPub that projects that participate in the Fediverse use, and these need to be flexible enough to accommodate different use cases. Beyond that projects are free to run any way the authors want, but we can create social pressure to encourage project maintainers to not stray too far from what’s considered acceptable by the larger community.
Indeed. IMHO especially stressing the importance of being part of such a community as active participant should be highlighted. To many FOSS developers going at it in their own way individualistically means missing out on a win-win of broader collaboration, that is a requirement for their own project’s future.
Btw, specifically related to the topic of Mastodon vs. Fediverse, there’s talk about creating a community-driven fork of Mastodon based on Hometown. See: Discussion: Mastodon and the Fediverse (comment) by @wakest.
Agreed, I think the main advantage Fediverse has over commercial platforms is being open. Commercial platforms want to keep users on their site and make it difficult to share content between them because they’re in a zero sum competition for the users. On the other hand, Fediverse creates a positive sum scenario where everyone benefits from having more content on the network. So the focus absolutely has to be on growing Fediverse as a whole as opposed to individual sites.
Yes, but there’s a big problem in this. It is already hard to find contributors to a FOSS project. It is even harder to find people to volunteer on all the community work and chores that need to happen to foster good collaboration between different FOSS projects.
Some people don’t see this as a problem, with the argument that grassroots movements just go their own way completely organically and anarchistically. While this can be (and often is) a strength, this is less true for evolving the common technology foundation on which all of the ecosystem has to stand. (I created the Spiral Island analogy for that… there is a hurricane of bad tech trends to withstand),
Yeah, I think coordinated efforts tend to scale better than ad hoc grassroots ones. Having some sort of a central foundation that acts as a governance body for the Fediverse and helps coordinate between different projects would be very helpful.