When somebody starts a project that they put time and effort into because they have a particular vision for it then it is their right to run the project the way that makes sense for them. If their vision diverges from what a significant number of people want, then people should put in the effort to make their alternative vision a reality. They can even leverage all the hard work that was put into making the original project since Mastodon is open source software.
This sort of thing regularly happens in open source world. GNOME forks like Cinnamon and MATE are great examples of this. The original project started getting too bloated for a lot of people, and they got together to fork it and move things in the direction they wanted.
Another option is to make a separate project entirely. Pleroma is an example of an alternative to Mastodon that was made because people wanted to do things differently.
Personally, I agree with the reasoning in the reply to the issue on GitHub and I do think it’s valuable for the official client to prioritize the needs for new users. The underlying functionality for supporting local and global timelines is not being removed, and it’s possible to make an alternative client that leverages it. Tusky for Android is the client I’m using, and it supports this feature.
On the other hand, I am ideologically opposed to partnering up with entities like EUnomia, but this being a social media platform the posts are already public and I don’t think anybody should be using such a platform for anything they want to keep private in the first place. Ultimately, you’re trusting server admins for any instance and you have no idea how they use the data collected by the instance.
On the other hand, I am ideologically opposed to partnering up with entities like EUnomia, but this being a social media platform the posts are already public and I don’t think anybody should be using such a platform for anything they want to keep private in the first place. Ultimately, you’re trusting server admins for any instance and you have no idea how they use the data collected by the instance.
Does anyone have more details on the partnership? I’m trying to make heads and tails of some of the grievances in the letter and haven’t been able to track down much on that particular point.
Very well written response, btw – you captured a lot of things I’ve been thinking about far better than I could have 😝
Thanks, and I’d be curious to know more about that as well. On the surface, the whole EUnomia thing doesn’t sound good, but based on this explanation it sounds like it could be a legitimate use case. So, I’m reserving judgement until we find out a bit more.
There are some flavour forks of Mastodon. And some outright alternatives that still work in the same fediverse.
There was that Florence thing with the former mod/project leader that Eugen employed (I think for a couple months) but it doesn’t seem to go anywhere though. I guess they just don’t have enough actual devs.
I honestly wonder if Mastodon could even survive Eugen quitting.
Yeah, I can’t see anything positive coming out of Eugen quitting the project. I think Pleroma is probably the most featureful alternative right now that’s actively developed.
When somebody starts a project that they put time and effort into because they have a particular vision for it then it is their right to run the project the way that makes sense for them. If their vision diverges from what a significant number of people want, then people should put in the effort to make their alternative vision a reality. They can even leverage all the hard work that was put into making the original project since Mastodon is open source software.
This sort of thing regularly happens in open source world. GNOME forks like Cinnamon and MATE are great examples of this. The original project started getting too bloated for a lot of people, and they got together to fork it and move things in the direction they wanted.
Another option is to make a separate project entirely. Pleroma is an example of an alternative to Mastodon that was made because people wanted to do things differently.
Personally, I agree with the reasoning in the reply to the issue on GitHub and I do think it’s valuable for the official client to prioritize the needs for new users. The underlying functionality for supporting local and global timelines is not being removed, and it’s possible to make an alternative client that leverages it. Tusky for Android is the client I’m using, and it supports this feature.
On the other hand, I am ideologically opposed to partnering up with entities like EUnomia, but this being a social media platform the posts are already public and I don’t think anybody should be using such a platform for anything they want to keep private in the first place. Ultimately, you’re trusting server admins for any instance and you have no idea how they use the data collected by the instance.
Does anyone have more details on the partnership? I’m trying to make heads and tails of some of the grievances in the letter and haven’t been able to track down much on that particular point.
Very well written response, btw – you captured a lot of things I’ve been thinking about far better than I could have 😝
Thanks, and I’d be curious to know more about that as well. On the surface, the whole EUnomia thing doesn’t sound good, but based on this explanation it sounds like it could be a legitimate use case. So, I’m reserving judgement until we find out a bit more.
There are some flavour forks of Mastodon. And some outright alternatives that still work in the same fediverse.
There was that Florence thing with the former mod/project leader that Eugen employed (I think for a couple months) but it doesn’t seem to go anywhere though. I guess they just don’t have enough actual devs.
I honestly wonder if Mastodon could even survive Eugen quitting.
Yeah, I can’t see anything positive coming out of Eugen quitting the project. I think Pleroma is probably the most featureful alternative right now that’s actively developed.