maegul,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

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