@lxo @oblomov @Jirikiha @macacator @MyWoolyMastadon @john @engel @everton137

[benroyce@mastodon.social]

@lxo @oblomov @Jirikiha @macacator @MyWoolyMastadon @john @engel @everton137

i'm married

my wife could poison my soup at any time

i don't worry about it because i didn't marry a psychotic murderer

whenever you enter into a relationship, in any conceivable system, you place some kind of trust in another party

mastodon is absolutely capable of doing all sorts of vile nasty things

but they aren't going to do it

because they are decentralized social media

not elon musk in a eugen rochko mask

[lxo@snac.lx.oliva.nom.br]

I presume your wife has never poisoned anyone

mastodon has broken interoperability. intentionally. more than once.

they're not the same.

I'm not saying mastodon is like Xitter or F*k

far from it

(it could be bought by them, but I'm not even going there)

but there is a risk, that can be mitigated by not pretending they're angels, and rather realizing they face pressures and they may sometimes come up with rationalizations to break interoperability again.

they know they can because they're dominant, and they've shown they know it by having done it a number of times

users should mount pressure against their making such jerk moves, is what I'm saying

do you by any chance support their making such jerk moves? it fells like maybe you do

CC: @oblomov@sociale.network @Jirikiha@raphus.social @macacator@mastodon.social @MyWoolyMastadon@toot.community @john@vyrse.social @engel@mastodon.social @everton137@vivaldi.net

[benroyce@mastodon.social]

@lxo @oblomov @Jirikiha @macacator @MyWoolyMastadon @john @engel @everton137

i don't think they're angels

but i don't think they're demons

and your broken interop argument is suspect to me

new features require new interop. did mastodon prevent the old projects from writing code to work with new features? or did the old projects just kind of decline?

because this argument that interop has to be set in stone is nonsense

interop will always be changing for new features

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@benroyce @lxo @Jirikiha @macacator @MyWoolyMastadon @john @engel @everton137

You should really look at e.g. Friendica on how things can be done WAY‌ better than the way Mastodon has been handling interop since forever.

[benroyce@mastodon.social]

@oblomov @lxo @Jirikiha @macacator @MyWoolyMastadon @john @engel @everton137

zero argument, i don't know much about friendica. if what you're alluding to is better interop that's wonderful. so more people should flock to friendica

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@benroyce @lxo @Jirikiha @macacator @MyWoolyMastadon @john @engel @everton137 and that's the thing that you're missing here: they don't, which gives Mastodon overarching power within the Fediverse ecosystem, which they abuse with very little care for interoperability with the rest of the ecosystem. Even where there are signs of improvement, interoperability with other platforms remains an extremely low priority over other features, and this is not healthy for the ecosystem.

[benroyce@mastodon.social]

@oblomov @lxo @Jirikiha @macacator @MyWoolyMastadon @john @engel @everton137

i blame the ecosystem

if i build a new feature, and it's awesome, and people want it, fuck interop

everyone else should change their code to get in line with the new feature

this idea of "we have to do interop first" means nothing new can be built without buy in from everyone else. there's no governing body, so some project will drag it's heels. so just ignorant them and build it anyway

[lxo@snac.lx.oliva.nom.br]

that's a very naïve view of how interop influences perceptions and choices in a network or market with a dominant player

when the dominant player makes an incompatible change, everyone else is at fault for not keeping up

when someone else makes an incompatible change, nobody moves to it because it can't even talk to the dominant player where nearly all of their friends are

even when the dominant player drops an interop feature, some misguided people will find a way to blame the victims

incompatible features is not the way to evolve an interoperable network; it's the way to fragment it and kill it. the term in standards circles is Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish. you may have come across that before.

CC: @oblomov@sociale.network @Jirikiha@raphus.social @macacator@mastodon.social @MyWoolyMastadon@toot.community @john@vyrse.social @engel@mastodon.social @everton137@vivaldi.net

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@benroyce @lxo @Jirikiha @macacator @MyWoolyMastadon @john @engel @everton137 I'm sorry, but that's bullshit AND toxic. You can absolutely have progress AND interop. Whether you choose to do it the ethical way or not tells everything you need to know about the developers.

Every other project has to bend over backwards to be compatible with Mastodon, but Mastodon doesn't even do the bare minimum to be compatible with other platforms. This is basically the definition of abuse of power.

[benroyce@mastodon.social]

@oblomov @lxo @Jirikiha @macacator @MyWoolyMastadon @john @engel @everton137

you have no idea what you're talking about. there is no power, because there is no system

you act like this is hierarchy, where mastodon, any project, owes something. they don't owe anyone anything. they do whatever the fuck they want. it's a flat nonsystem

this is open source

yet you think you can ring some office in a structure, complain, and get results

there's no money

there's no boss

understand where you are

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@benroyce @lxo @Jirikiha @macacator @MyWoolyMastadon @john @engel @everton137

This is bullshit. Power dynamics exist in any context where two or more people or groups interact.

Open sources has nothing to do with it. What really matters are numbers, and you can assess the ethos of developers based on their attitude towards the rest of the ecosystem and whether or not it changes when they are the underdog or not.

Also, *especially* in Mastodon case, there absolutely IS money involved

1/n

[benroyce@mastodon.social]

@lxo @oblomov @Jirikiha @macacator @MyWoolyMastadon @john @engel @everton137

i just don't understand the inability to understand: nobody cares

we do whatever the fuck we want. we answer to no one

and yet you act like there is some sort of structure, obligations, checks and balances

nonsense

this is anarchy. this is open source. no one owes you anything

no company. no salary. no hierachy. just people doing *whatever the fuck they want*

all of your complaints mean nothing

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@benroyce @lxo @Jirikiha @macacator @MyWoolyMastadon @john @engel @everton137

Regarding the ethos, compare how Mastodon behaved when it was a newcomer with very few users vs how it behaves now. When it got started, the federation protocol was OStatus, which was massively underspecified (even worse than ActivityPub), so the only way to join the network was to do what the others were doing, especially the dominant (= most used) implementation at the time, Status.Net (GNU Social).

2/n

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@benroyce @lxo @Jirikiha @macacator @MyWoolyMastadon @john @engel @everton137

And Mastodon absolutely DID care about interop with Status.Net *at the time*. Then it grew in numbers, opted to switch to ActivityPub and gave Status.Net compatibility a big middle finder, because now *IT* was the dominant implementation in the Fediverse space, and decided it didn't need to worry about OStatus compatibility anymore, as it wouldn't lose users to it.

3/n

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@benroyce @lxo @Jirikiha @macacator @MyWoolyMastadon @john @engel @everton137

And they *still* don't care about interop with other Fediverse platforms that DO use ActivityPub. For example, Mastodon properly handles Note objects. The official excuse is that Mastodon is a microblogging platform, but it's a piss-poor excuse, since it CAN handle the EXACT SAME CONTENT if it's presented as a Note rather than an Image or Article.

4/n

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@benroyce @lxo @Jirikiha @macacator @MyWoolyMastadon @john @engel @everton137

Supporting other types would be TRIVIAL (look at the mediaType rather than the object type to see if you can handle it), but the devs don't care, so the OTHER‌ platforms had to bend over backwards and present Image and Article objects as if they were Notes (a violation of the standard) to make content visible to Mastodon users, even if a trivial change in Mastodon could have handled this.

5/n

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@benroyce @lxo @Jirikiha @macacator @MyWoolyMastadon @john @engel @everton137

But it's even worse actually: now that WordPress is joining the Fediverse, and that's 600M potential users dwarfing the Mastodon numbers, NOW Mastodon devs suddenly start thinking «hm mayb we should support incoming Article objects». Why only Article and why only now? Because of power dynamics.

6/n

[benroyce@mastodon.social]

@oblomov @lxo @Jirikiha @macacator @MyWoolyMastadon @john @engel @everton137

because it's 600M potential users!

who wouldn't

you have the weirdest position: old shit has to be supported

no it doesn't. you throw old shit out

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@benroyce @lxo @Jirikiha @macacator @MyWoolyMastadon @john @engel @everton137

The fact that Mastodon only cares about interop when it's the underdog shows the shitty ethos of its leadership and developers.

It is about about power AND it is about numbers AND —ESPECIALLY for Mastodon— it is about MONEY. Because if people move to other platforms Mastodon loses users, loses control, and its PAID developers lose their income stream from donations.

7/n

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@benroyce @lxo @Jirikiha @macacator @MyWoolyMastadon @john @engel @everton137

So you see minor Fediverse platforms working on improving interoperability, improving data and profile portability, giving users control to freely move between servers and platforms, and Mastodon NOT GIVING A SHIT and you still go to all these lengths to defend it, well, it says more about you than anything else.

8/8