@rysiek posted this very interesting article addressing the confusion people and the media often make between Mastodon, the largest ActivityPub software in terms of usage, and the Fediverse, and the consequences it bears for all of us Fedizens.
A better way
I want to be clear I am not arguing here for freezing Mastodon development and never implementing any new features. I also agree that the signup process needs to be better and more streamlined than it had been before, and that plenty of UI/UX changes need be implemented. But all this can and should be done in a way that improves resilience of the Fediverse, instead of undermining it.
I think that one simple, concrete step we could take here at the SocialHub is to reach out to, and invite our fellows from Friendi.ca and other pioneer Fedizens to participate in the conversation as a first-class citizen. We did not reach out to projects so far, because we were focusing on attracting people on their own initiative. But itās now time to look up and around, and take that step to become more hospitable.
What do you think of this, and @rysiekās proposals?
Iāve always said that any proposal for AP, Fediverse, etc needs to have buy-in from the developers of the biggest fediverse players (e.g. Mastodon, Pixelfed, Peertube, etc) in order for it to gain traction. Without getting buy-in from the very people who are already implementing AP with great success, proposals around anything in the Fediverse will just sit and never get implemented.
That said, Iām very much in favor of getting those developers involved and made āfirst-class citizensā with fediverse proposals.
For any proposal try to get consent of the big players, and if you donāt get it the proposal is a no-go.
Forge ahead with standardization, turning proposals into specs that make sense for the general dev ecosystem to adhere to. And as more projects do, they implicitly provide ever stronger incentives for big players to fall in line with those or become the odd one out.
The sweet spot between 1) and 2) I guess
If 2) happens insufficiently, then 1) is the only path left and new players will āfollow the leaderā in post-facto interoperability.
Iād go with 1. In fact, getting consensus from at least a minimum number of big players should be baked into the FEP process, imo.
It would be similar to the W3C process for browsers. Every proposal needs consensus from all major browsers before a proposal can become an official spec.
Just to add to the list of people to invite: Mastodon App Developers. Thatās one of the groups that was also addressed in @rysiek 's proposal as having a todo (change default instance).
I guess I do not understand what āAppā means. The Software category has some useful tags: server, client and library ā which are a bit underused.
Maybe an āAppā is an extension to some specific software? @nightpool I suppose you get the vocabulary and could reach out to Mastodon App developers?
My thinking on this is that the rest of the Fediverse needs to do better http://hamishcampbell.com/?s=mastodon donāt try and hold back mastodon, try and push forward, mastodon is going to do exactly what they want to do, the is little any of us can do to change this path, they are increasingly in a world of Favourite - Wikipedia anyone who does not toady will be pushed away, so itās a long ago irrelevant fight.
We need to focus on not making a complete mess of āourā openweb reboot, this is challenge we can focues on
Am I mistaken, or did the Mastodon team provide the first and only admin of the SocialHub besides me? Iād like that this us-them silliness cease at once: Mastodon is part of the Fediverse, its developers are part of this community, and I bet they are as eager as anyone else to make the decentralized social web a common success.
There is an issue with the monoculture problem, but I do not think, nor does @rysiek from what I gather from the OP, that people are not willing to address it.
