Mike Macgirvin recounts the depressing history behind Mastodon's rendering of `article` vs `note`

liaizon, 13 days ago

@wakest hope you dont mind that I reposted this @mikedev

maegul, 12 days ago (edited 9 days ago)

The way Macgirvin has summarised this else where is that mastodon’s lead dev wasn’t mature and competent enough to make good engineering decisions for the fediverse at large. That his platform became the dominant one is likely earned but also likely attributable to the fact that Gargron (masto BDFL) was young and keen enough to go all in at the right time…

Which means, at this stage, dominance and immature mistakes and flaws are likely to go together (sounds familiar huh). Which means that for the fediverse to grow it has to go beyond mastodon. It just won’t happen until masto is ousted as the clear dominant platform. And in reality, I don’t see that happening any time soon the way things are going.

symfonystation, 12 days ago

@wakest Mastodon may have started down the enshitification route and heading toward being forked.

Zagorath, 13 days ago

I didn’t know this problem existed, but now I’m incensed by it.

mozz, 13 days ago

Friends don't let friends use vague protocols

ActivityPub is popular because it solves a vital problem, which is fine. But the protocol itself as a protocol, in my unfair opinion, is way too loose and basically results in little single-app fiefdoms that communicate outside their borders poorly if at all. I don't know what the solution is, but it definitely is a problem that didn't need to exist in its current severe form.

hperrin, 13 days ago

Yep. Reading the spec gave me the impression that the authors wanted to create something that can do literally everything, not realizing that that makes it impossible to “fully” implement the spec.

Does your application correctly render when I dislike the fact that a user removed a file from a group? That’s something you can represent in ActivityPub.

ShittyKopper, 10 days ago

I would absolutely boost this to the microblog-verse if Lemmy federation with Misskey wasn’t broken

mozz, 13 days ago (edited 11 days ago)

You can make a protocol that allows for not-yet-defined behavior, or has parts that are prescribed to work in a certain way if you're choosing to implement some certain behavior although you're not required to. The 7-layer OSI model and SMTP-email headers are two good examples. Even grafting encrypted or multimedia email on top worked, more or less, reasonably well and was still interoperable for the most part. They could have used that type of thing as a starting point, instead of doing the equivalent of "well we don't want to constrain what types of networking applications you might want to implement, so we're just gonna specify the from and to addresses. You do your checksumming and MTU management the way YOUR application wants to do it."

I mean I'm not gonna sit too much in judgement of someone who created something which is working and producing good things but it's hard not to be wistful about how much better it could be if the spec was specific enough that the different apps could substantively talk to one another.

_ed, 13 days ago

Yeah it’s detrimental that approaches used in other apps don’t render in mastodon. It weakens the potential of the fediverse, and for those that understand fedi = mastodon. Who knows how it will react to proposals for groups etc.

morrowind, 13 days ago

I wonder in enough platforms outside of mastodon decided to follow the spec instead of whatever mastodon does, maybe we could peer pressure it back into normalcy?

maegul, 12 days ago

Not until mastodon is no longer the dominant platform. Which is a fair way off.

To illustrate, in the linked thread, a mastodon dev says the following:

I am not very knowledgable about ActivityPub so I cant discuss the specifics, but we would like to improve how non-Note objects are processed/displayed in Mastodon.

Mastodon lives in a very mastodon specific world. And that’s because the vast majority of activity on mastodon is between mastodon instances, and when it isn’t it’s with a platform working fairly hard to be compatible with mastodon, as the OP quote demonstrates.

Their branding, history and momentum can’t be politely reversed. It has to be forced. It’s useful to appreciate the history of mastodon’s BDFL/CEO here (he calls himself both BTW). This has been his job since graduating from University. This is his whole professional life. He started while in university and has been paid by donations and granted basically since.

Which means he has no reason to do things or see things differently. No other experiences and complete domination of the fediverse. I wouldn’t be interested in other people’s opinions either unless they’d also demonstrated equal commitment and influence over the fediverse, and even then I’d probably be full of myself too.

With real irony, the fediverse has in large part been centralised around one young tech bro’s “vision” and resultant ego. He deserves it IMO. It’s the culture of all those who see the problems that isn’t up to the challenge of organising appropriately in response that’s the problem.

In many ways, an interesting aspect of the fediverse, I think, is it’s a test of what the current open source dev culture and dynamic is capable of when it comes to cultural and social change. Social media platforms are squarely within what devs know how to do. And there is certainly a lot of productivity to be proud of (I mean look at this, we’re doing this all right now on open/free platforms FFS!). But organisationally and culturally, I think there are real flaws.

IMO, there’s a lack of awareness of the need to conceptualise and materialise broad goals and values and the hats requires to enforce and incentivise them, as well as then acting in a way that best pursues those stated goals, especially at a communal/organisational level.

In other words, too much NIH and forking and “I’m the lead dev of this project” and not enough “for the fediverse”. I think you can see the hyper-capitalise biases of the current tech world bending things a bit too much.

laemeur, 13 days ago

@wakest I remember being quite frustrated about this as well. Does anyone know off the top of their heads what happens to a federated Article when it hits Mastodon? Does it get converted to a Note, or does it remain an Article object with its content stripped and replaced with title text and link?