The link is to a GitHub discussion, where gargron shuts down a discussion because he’s made a unilateral decision and then locks the thread to avoid debate.
On its own, it might not seem like much. Someone’s gotta make the decisions, right!? Except that this is a pretty dramatic shift for mastodon (leaning into search more) and the main ask was to provide two options rather than roll multiple things into one, which is pretty reasonable. Plus, why not get user feedback? Mastodon has plenty of users after all? Add to this that the main masto instance intends to federate with meta’s threads and gargron has signed an NDA, and the tin foil hat starts to come out.
Alone, not much of a big deal, but it’s an insight into why people find masto devs difficult (AFAIU).
EDIT: woah … downvotes straight off of the bat … which is fine … but honestly, I’m not sure why the downvoting … this was just an example of something some might find problematic … feel free to discuss.
The real problem is: People use mastodon and are not willing to use other fediverse-software…
But there are so many of them out:
- #friendica
- #firefish
- #misskey
- #calckey
- #pleroma
- #akoma and a plethiora more of them… you can have all the features here, which are you missing on mastodon… but people love to complain about missing features than trying another software… #mastodonisnotthefediverse
First … I totally agree.
Second, firefish and calckey are the same thing (calckey rebranded to firefish).
Third … it’s not just about software. I think that’s superficial reasoning. There’s a lot of patience, organisation and earned trust required before there’s an instance with admins choosing to run a particular platform with a good number of users on there. The success of mastodon ought not, IMO, be (entirely) attributed to dumb luck.
There’s been a lot of persistent and committed work from gargron and mastodon, and the truth that many “platform diversity” types (including myself) run into is it’s not the user’s fault … who’s going to maintain, run, promote and support a platform and its early instances with commitments to decent performance, scalability and maintenance into the future? Calckey/firefish, for example, have actually kinda struggled recently, despite really trying and having an attractive platform, because they haven’t been able to provide a stable and performant instance with even minor growth in users, nor a UI that works well on mobile. It’s an uphill battle, and I don’t think you can blame users for wanting some degree of trustworthiness from a platform before they jump in, however much of a chicken-egg problem it is.
mastodon wasn’t stable or performant in the beginning either. It attracted users because there weren’t other well known alternatives and those users were excited to build a new place where they felt comfortable. Gargron rode that excitement and enthusiasm until it didn’t serve him anymore, then he shut those ppl out
Who were the people or the types of people pushed out?
most of the early contributors from 2017-18. Many of them wrote blog posts about their experiences
i don’t agree.
Misskey all the way! MFM is way more fun than plain markdown
It certainly is! Given that’s it’s just in the front end it cocos be easily incorporated into lemmy. Not sure the devs would be down though because of performance issues.
The link is to a GitHub discussion, where gargron shuts down a discussion because he’s made a unilateral decision and then locks the thread to avoid debate.
a PR is not the place for discussions. Discussion is the place for Feature Discussions so I totally get his motivation to lock that part:
I’m locking this before this devolves into another search feature debate. Your feedback has been noted.
a PR is not the place for that discussion.
You’re right, but gargron would do the same thing on an issue. He’s done it before; it’s how he handles disagreement.
He is a bit problematic. It always seems to go that way with him too. People were averse to quote toots, and most of his userbase are Twitter refugees that left early because of things like doxxing. But Gargron just toots “nah, I’m happy to add quote toots”. He probably lacks something in the way of caring about what people were attracted to in the first place. Maybe he’s just lumbering thoughtlessly in general - the whole extinct elephant theme in itself.
I said it elsewhere, but it may be the case that mastodon was lucky to be at the right place and right time, but he thinks it’s success is entirely due to his decisions and beliefs. If so, IMO, there’s not much hope, as that kind of confidence can only be dislodged by failure.
he thinks it’s success is entirely due to his decisions and beliefs
Hate to be the one to draw a parallel, but this is the same mindset Spez has and why he justifies the choices he made with Reddit.
He wasn’t happy to add quote toots, though. There’s a whole Mastodon mythology built up around quotes.
Then the Elon account boom ended, and suddenly he was happy to do it.
Hes happy to do whatever gives him positive attention.
I don’t see anything wrong in the linked github link?
Feature was added in accordance with project specification, then the thread was closed.
Was excited for mastodon, plemora and misskey. But now I think the future is nostr for micro and macro blogging.
