deadsuperhero

deadsuperhero OP Mod , 11 days ago

This is a situation that I think will get better in time. There's some really promising efforts involving Fediverse Enhancement Proposals, where multiple projects collaborate on shared ways of doing things. Some of these behaviors are getting studied and standardized by the larger SocialCG entity, as well.

There's also a lot of promising development behind a Fediverse Testing Suite. If we can develop a platform-agnostic testing system for people to build against, it will potentially become the new development standard, rather than optimizing for Mastodon and nothing else.

deadsuperhero OP Mod , 11 days ago

Yeah, if you read the article, Hometown and Glitch actually get mentioned. The criticism is not about making a fork to do your own thing... but, instead, about trying to compete with Mastodon directly.

Doing that kind of fork (which is what people are calling for) requires a tremendous amount of coordination, effort, and commitment that cannot be done casually.

deadsuperhero OP Mod , 11 days ago

It actually does have that nowadays, it's just that the feature requires Elasticsearch to work, which is one extra piece of infra for admins to worry about.

deadsuperhero OP Mod , 11 days ago

Nextcloud is a fork of Owncloud. IMO, as a product Nextcloud is superior in every way.

deadsuperhero OP Mod , 10 days ago

Most of the backlash pertains to the board members appointed to the new nonprofit. One of the members is a lawyer that has defended crypto and AI companies, another is ex-Twitter angel investor Biz Stone.

Mastodon's community usually has some kind of vague beef about one thing or another when it comes to Eugen and the decisions he makes for the project, whether it's a new feature or a design change or that he didn't do something that other projects wanted to do.

deadsuperhero Mod , 23 days ago

Hell yeah, I'm all about this. Article gets rendered so poorly on Mastodon, and the behavior is inconsistent from one platform to the next.

deadsuperhero , 23 days ago

Sentry also did this by embracing the Business Source License. Technically, you can still get an MIT-licensed version, but it has to be more than two years old.

As a former employee that worked there during the days that Sentry really promoted itself being Open Source, it was disappointing to see. VC Funding and a growth obsession basically poisoned the well.

deadsuperhero , 23 days ago

While I think shareholders can be a driving factor, I see it way more often with VC-funded companies. The "2.5x year over year" growth mantra that places like YCombinator stipulate have disastrous effects on small tech companies. Often, these startups have an incentive to keep taking additional funding rounds, which appears to tighten the grip the VC has over them.

Try growing the next Microsoft or Google or Amazon out of that model. I'm not convinced that it's possible. At least if you bootstrap your own company, you don't have the same binding obligations...even if it takes way longer to get to a place that's self-sustaining.

deadsuperhero , 23 days ago

Honestly, this really resonated with me. Running an open source project on its own can be hard, running a popular one that gets used by tons of people and companies, while giving free labor, is extremely hard. Acting as free tech support to a large company, for nothing in return, is ass. Full stop.

I've seen some people make the statement that "maintainers owe you nothing", and I've seen people state that "your supporters owe you nothing."

While I believe there's nothing wrong in a person willingly running a project on their own terms, just as there's nothing wrong with refusing donations and doing the work out of some kind of passion... there's only so many hours in the day, and developers need to feed themselves and pay rent.

I think a lot of people would love to be able to work on open source full-time. I'd devote all of my energy and focus to it, if I could. But, that's a reality only for a privileged few, and many of them still have to make compromises. The CEO and founder of Mastodon, for example, makes a pittance compared to what a corporate junior developer makes.

deadsuperhero OP Mod , 26 days ago

Yes, we have an article in the works about it. 😁

deadsuperhero OP Mod , 1 month ago

I think there's a balance to be struck between "good defaults" and "customize to your heart's content."

Emissary is very much in line with some of my own pipe dreams regarding Fediverse / IndieWeb platforms, but it's still very young as a project. I think the best thing they could probably do is ship bundles of templates as different experiences, that are easy to install right out the gate.

Want a bog-standard microblogging system? Go for it. Want something more like Lemmy? No problem. Want to just build something yourself from scratch? Here's the docs.

I think what excites me about this is that it could be a tremendous development tool for people looking to mock up new ideas for apps and platforms, while sitting in top of ActivityPub and offering actual functionality. The Music project the lead dev is working on already looks great in less than two weeks of development, and aims to be compatible with Funkwhale.

deadsuperhero Mod , 1 month ago

Just tried it for the first time the other day. As an Akkoma user, it's awesome to see so many native features being supported!

It's now my main app! 😁

deadsuperhero OP Mod , 1 month ago

Video version available on PeerTube here: https://spectra.video/w/cgUdgFb1ZpcTEK8UydLu59

deadsuperhero OP Mod , 1 month ago

I dunno, federated communication systems have a very different utility than lemonade stands. 😅

deadsuperhero OP Mod , 1 month ago

They probably thought they'd reach a greater number of people. They're probably right.

deadsuperhero OP Mod , 1 month ago

Thing is, for federation to work, his team had to opt into it. The fact that his statuses and profile render natively in Mastodon and Akkoma are a pretty strong start.

I'd like to see Meta put their money where their mouths are, and finish the integration. I think we'll probably see that happen sooner rather than later.

deadsuperhero OP Mod , 1 month ago

I'd actually love to see something like this happen, as it seems to be something European governments and officials are embracing. To have something similar for the United States would be incredible.

I think at the moment, there's a real need for advocates, consultants, and vendors that can actually cater to government entities here. I would imagine there's probably some crazy data requirements needed for US Government Officials.

deadsuperhero OP Mod , 1 month ago

It feels like the fediverse is being gentrified

As someone who has repeatedly seen cities become gentrified (first Peoria, Illinois, then San Francisco, then Phoenix), I get what you're trying to say, but also don't think it's an appropriate metaphor.

The half that doesn’t federate with Meta will move on, like people priced out of their own neighborhoods by gentrification, and become the new “real fediverse” where people can go to live free from corporate interference.

Frankly, I think this is a bit melodramatic. The Anti-Threads part of the Fediverse will stay in their isolated bubble with little to no change, while the rest of the network continues to grow or change. It's not like operational costs are skyrocketing, or that hosting will become any more scarce or more difficult. It's not like the servers have to move to a different neighborhood. Gentrification is predicated on the finiteness of physical space and affordable places to live.

and become the new “real fediverse” where people can go to live free from corporate interference.

This is probably news to you, but there's not even a coherent, all-encompassing definition for what the Fediverse even is. The idea that there's a "real Fediverse" vs "Fake Fediverse" glosses over all kinds of history and nuance. The best anyone's gotten to defining it is by specifying protocols and interoperability, but even that doesn't quite cover it.

The Fediverse isn't just the parts you like, minus the parts you don't like.

deadsuperhero OP Mod , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

You’re also screamingly White

Just because I have privilege doesn't mean I haven't experienced harsh realities that are relevant to this context. The idea that a person's race automatically qualifies or disqualifies them to speak on a subject without context or nuance is just silly.

You're out here mad because a dude expressed that it's stupid to compare server hosting for commodity open source communication software to societal decay caused by landlords, real estate developers, and people with four times the local income all rushing into a place and pricing out the people who already lived there. Y'know, something that actually has a real and tangible material effect.

deadsuperhero OP Mod , 1 month ago

Nice goalpost shifting, but miss me with your inane rambling, projection, and misplaced sense of entitlement. Just block me and move on.

deadsuperhero OP Mod , 1 month ago

It's not that crazy, the Threads devs are already looking at specific FEPs for things like quote posting. If they really wanted to, they could implement Lemmy-compatible community groups.

deadsuperhero OP Mod , 2 months ago

Sadly, that's a little bit too chaotic for what we want to do. For this go-around, we're improvising with a modified WordPress plugin. Moving forward, we might do some custom development and integrate it with the ActivityPub-WordPress plugin to post out entries to the Fediverse.

deadsuperhero OP Mod , 2 months ago

Yeah. While I could take or leave Hubzilla's UI, this concept in particular was mind-blowing. The fact that it's like, 8 or 9 years old at this point, and the rest of the Fediverse barely supports it, is crazy to me.

deadsuperhero OP Mod , 2 months ago

No.

deadsuperhero OP Mod , 2 months ago

I think another way to look at it is that accounts are tightly coupled to instances, to the point of being a detriment. I've personally lost all of my data and had to start over from scratch 5 or 6 times due to servers suddenly going down over the years.

Groups are one way to abstract community functions up a level, and what's crazy is that Group Actors themselves could also have a similar thing. People have talked about merged cross-instance communities on Lemmy; this would be one way of enabling that.

deadsuperhero OP Mod , 2 months ago

You know, that's actually a really good point. Dansup tends to iterate on certain parts of his apps several times over, like how Pixelfed handles image uploads and filters prior to posting. It might be that just going with the simplest possible thing makes sense for right now, until a better approach can be devised.

deadsuperhero OP Mod , 2 months ago

He is a bit bombastic, and has a habit of biting off more than he can chew sometimes. I think these side-projects are ultimately useful, though, and probably help fend off boredom or burnout. Maybe he gets better at coding and design through doing that, I dunno.

Regardless, he's continues to do a lot of great development work.

deadsuperhero OP Mod , 2 months ago

So, one interesting aspect here is that you can log into it with your existing Mastodon or Pixelfed account. Loops and Sup both seem to be building on the idea that you can use existing Fediverse accounts to log in, meaning you don't necessarily need to create a new account and navigate a new platform all over again.

deadsuperhero OP Mod , 2 months ago

He's periodically shown updates on it. From talking to him, there are a number of challenges:

• Being blocked by other features, like a UI refactor
• Compatibility with other existing implementations (less of a problem now with the Group Federation FEP by @nutomic)
• Wanting to include Private Groups
• Bringing in moderation, assignment, and delegation tools for groups.
• Dealing with unrelated issues pertaining to the day-to-day maintenance
• Needing to break out new experiments in a branch to see how well an idea actually works

I think the biggest thing is that he probably does spread himself pretty thin at times, and is still learning how to rely on community pull requests and contributions. It can be a really hard thing to do, especially if you feel the need to provide the creative direction for how things ought to work.

deadsuperhero OP Mod , 2 months ago

You’re not wrong to feel irked by this. However, if that’s the case, the Fediverse may not be for you. You’re probably better off over some place else, like Reddit or Bluesky, where decisions are taken centrally, investor money is driving development, and there’s a manager to complain to.

Thanks for the laugh, I've been on the network for almost the entirety of its lifetime and witnessed every development and major change. I've even helped run a major project in the early days.

deadsuperhero OP Mod , 2 months ago

Perhaps you could enlighten me on what Fediverse software does take “privacy, user safety, or basic controls to handle when shit hits the bed” into consideration, because I can’t think of any; they all just expect every other server in the network not to be malicious.

Friendica, Hubzilla, Streams, tentatively Bonfire, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Akkoma. Off the top of my head.