I think the author is a bit late to the game. There are like 20 different forks of Mastodon to address exactly that, which some developers have already migrated to. Additionally there are Misskey, Pleroma with their respective forks. Some of them are pretty active.
You’re right. I implied that with the “additionally”. I don’t like Ruby on Rails and all the resource usage of Mastodon anyways. I’d like something more efficient and with less frameworks involved.
To get feedback! I often send out drafts to newsletter subscribers and post them on Mastodon and in the !thenexusofprivacy community … I got a lot of good feedback on this one which is incorporated in the revised version.
The statement in the article had a footnote that provided a link to a 2022 Verge article in which Rochko said on the “BDFL model”:
That’s what I would prefer to stick with, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think there’s better ways to involve other people and have better communication.
Moreover his behaviour in maintaining Mastodon is very much inline with this model. It wasn’t name calling, it is literally what he is and happy to be described as.
This “Jon” guy has been writing these fucking long ass screeds about all this for at least a year now.
Maybe if this motherfucker stopped writing and took some time to learn to code and then contribute to the codebase themselves, they might have more luck. As it stands, all they do is grandstand about the way things should be without even trying to understand the technical side.
Seriously, the pages and pages and pages written by non-technical people about “how things ought to be” when they aren’t willing to put in the legwork to figure out how any of the technical side fucking works or how to get the technical side to fit “how things ought to be” its just fucking blowing smoke out their ass.
I get that Mastodon has problems, but complaining about the problems while doing nothing yourself to improve the issues feels just so worthless.
Contribute to the code base or shut the fuck up about your demands.
His Bio does include 'software engineer', and he's worked at Microsoft before from here. I get the sense that the problem that people have with Mastodon is that they've subbed the PRs, but they've not been approved. For example, there's apparently a 12k line PR for Groups that the main guy isn't keen on.
It can be tricky getting your own code into other people's projects - the maintainers need to have a lack of ego that can be difficult to achieve. Generally, developers react better to code, than to ideas about code, but you want to convince them to look at future code, and not waste your time creating it, by floating the idea first, so you can end up in an impossible situation. Subbing big PRs only for them to be dismissed by a maintainer is what causes people to rage-quit the project altogether (for Lemmy, see Tesseract UI, and the 'bulletintree' guy)
You’re not wrong, but I think you’re missing the bigger picture.
The problems and associated solutions aren’t just about being a heroic lead dev. They’re organisational now. And so “grandstanding” has its place, especially when it comes to informing people about why they should consider organising together. You may be sick of their articles but many haven’t read any of them and I’m not sure there are others out there trying to solve these problems at a system level.
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