I wish we could define requirements for a decent replacement of #Mastodon (the software), and then find a way to fund a couple of people to work full time on creating that.
Perhaps starting with an in-depth review of existing options, to not reimplement the wheel from scratch.
I'd gladly chip in on a monthly basis for that kind of an effort.
Also, I am half-hoping half-expecting that somebody will point to exactly this kind of effort in the replies. :blobcateyes:
Context of all of the above is the new sus af board members of Mastodon's new US-based non-profit: https://kolektiva.social/
Seriously, go read that thread.
I want to make it clear though: yes, I am disappointed by this, but I do not believe it's helpful to panic, start flamewars, get into spats, or call people names.
Instead, it's better to put that energy and time into building alternatives. The more feature-complete fedi instance software is out there, the healthier the whole network is.
The wonderful thing about fedi is that moving between instances (and between different software projects that power them) does not necessarily mean losing contact with your network.
As opposed to walled gardens, here we can in fact "vote with our feet".
@rysiek there are major limitations to this, though: many people like their community (the instance their account is on) and moving a whole community to a different server is generally not possible, which means that admins are mostly stuck on whatever software (usually Mastodon) they started with.
And most comunities are on Mastodon at the moment, meaning their is major inertia against moving to other platforms.
@rysiek Thanks for pointing to this thread and WTF. We really do need a strong Mastodon alternative. GTS has been on my watch list for a long time, along with https://github.com/jointakahe/takahe . Really wanted Takahe to make it since it’s the only one that supports multiple domains. Development has really slowed for it however.
One thing that I'd dearly like to see is a separation between equivalents of MUA and MTA. In e-mail, your mail client actually operates on emails and not some abstraction level placed on top of emails by the MTA. This lack of separation contributes to whole fedi sending around only Create Note messages, because people cannot create any other messages. It also prevents people from viewing APub objects of nonpublic posts, because Mastodon doesn't expose an API where it would proxy a query to a remote server for you, but once again places its own abstractions over it.
I think this wish has something to do with the way Mastodon is developed, and would be more likely to come true in a world you describe. (I've seen Mastodon PRs assume ~unchallenged that Mastodon will interact with Mastodon only (or things that will try to emulate Mastodon exactly).)
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