I am more or less burning out on advocacy for improving fediverse open standards and a healthy community that builds them, but since I posted this already in a response to a discussion between @dansup and @cjs, quoting here:
A federated protocol where everyone creates ad-hoc extensions for their own projects means we’ll soon have a spaghetti-code #Fediverse that no one fully understands and gets harder and harder to interoperate with and less attractive to build new apps for.
The tech debt is already very large, and most documentation is lacking. The “Tragedy of the Commons” of fedi is that it is not a project in and of itself, so nobody maintains it, only uses it as a dependency in their own project.
What I didn’t mention in the toot due to the char limit, is that with too much tech debt a project will grind to a halt and die. Or restart from scratch, which in our case probably means people jumping to a new technology. I notice that already with a huge uptick in Matrix protocol popularity for all kinds of social app use cases.
In the linked thread there’s also a call for:
- An improved standards track that devs can be involved in, in parallel to their projects.
- A more formal organization that underlies this community (I had Fedi Foundation in mind for that).
- Monetary incentives via funding to encourage people to do non-project-related community work (i.e. the chores).