Fork it! It's time for a Mastodon hard fork
Fork it! It's time for a Mastodon hard fork
An opportunity to improve safety, the Mastodon ecosystem, and fediverse software development
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/11571975
Fork it! It's time for a Mastodon hard fork
If you want a super secure platform for private communication use Matrix for fucks sake, this is a media aggregator and social network.
Use the appropriate tools for the appropriate use-cases.
Everything on Mastodon gets publicly posted. Like, what even is this?
Security and accessibility are always at odds with each other.
You don't increase security and safety and also increase accessibility. No, by increasing security, you have decreased accessibility.
Security and accessibility are a balance. If it's easily accessible, it's not secure, if it's secure, it's not easily accessible.
One thing that might be nice is if there could be a standard for user IDs that would allow multiple systems to work seamlessly together.
You could have Mastodon continue to focus solely on being a completely open media aggregator and social network, but also have some other completely independent and secure private messaging system that uses the same user ID system. Then if you want to send a private message to someone who's made a Mastodon post you can use that and it "just works."
Creating a universal user ID system that would work across all of this is challenging, of course.
Matrix? For sure you mean XMPP/Jabber. Matrix is a slut metadata-wise.
i wish i had an army of alts so i could downvote your comment to hell, im fucking just reposting.
s/you/one/ I don't think it's really about YOU in particular, just "you" the author or "one that is saying things like this."
Another example, "Give a Man a Fish, and You Feed Him for a Day. Teach a Man To Fish, and You Feed Him for a Lifetime" isn't about "you" it's about the concept of "an individual (that might be the reader)." This phrasing seems to be more agreeable with some people and possibly there's different tolerances geographically.
I've tried to use "one" in place of "you" to remove this ambiguity but it's at times uncomfortable to type lol
I say DON'T fork it. Heres the thing nobody in communities wants to come to grips with.......security is not the way to grow a very new platform. "Normie" users will not give one shit if you are super secured with 87 point encrypted authentication. Super secure? Don't mean shit.
You know what normie users DO care about? Marketing. They want one concise marketing vision. They want one baseball brand. One football brand. One basketball brand. One twitter. One facebook. One instagram.
Now. There are times that those dominant platforms can be disrupted. If oh.....I don't know.......some dipshit decided to spend 44 BILLION dollars and spend the next 2 years changing it from the dominant name in microblogging, to a right wing facist supporting echochamber where differing ideas are stiffled, blocked, and shut down.
That would create the need for a secondary dominant microblogging platform that allows for freedom of ideas to be posted and not deleted due to political stance.
Enter Mastadon. It fills that void nicely. It's still small as the majority of the userbase of twitter has no idea Mastodon exists. However it's undeniable they are losing massive numbers of users. Not because they don't like the twitter concept, but because they don't like what it's become.
With more marketing, mastodon COULD be the new dominant twitter, thus rendering that 44Billion dollar purchase even MORE stupid than it already is, if 90% of their userbase leaves.
But where you'll lose them is if they have to make a choice. Mastodon 1 and Mastodon 2??? Well twitter was just twitter......this must not be twitter.
And just like that, you've confused and lost the new user. Forget the fediverse. Forget instances. Forget security. Forget federation. The normie user doesn't know and doesn't care about ANY of that. Instead just say "its one mastodon. It's like twitter without facism"
Boom! User influx. This is already happening in spite of lack of marketing and the fediverse existing. Thats how badly people want a twitter clone. If someone else makes another non-fediverse clone, with no facism, and big money marketing, mastodon won't grow to its full potential.
But for gods sakes! Don't shoot yourself in the foot to spite yourself.
They want one baseball brand. One football brand. One basketball brand. One twitter. One facebook. One instagram.
Why's everything need to be so complicated, anyway? Can't we just have on sportsballgame and one twitgramface?
Ironically, the thing that would allow people to use one "twitgramface" account across all the various platforms is federation. But the only way I can imagine it being seamless enough for normies is native browser integration for ActivityPub, perhaps with a new URL scheme like
apub://.... Basically, save a Fediverse account in your browser, and when you open a foreign-instance link someone sends you, you'll see a prompt:
How do you want to open this link (
apub:)?You can browse this content via your instance and interact with it with one of your saved Fediverse accounts, or choose an app you have installed:
@[email protected] ︿ @[email protected] @[email protected] Voyager (vger.app Web App) Tootle (Local App) ☐ Remember my choice for feddit.nl
☐ Remember my choice across all instancesAccept Reject
ⓘ Why am I seeing this? ︿
This content is on feddit.nl, which is an ActivityPub instance that 3 of your saved Fediverse accounts federate with. To use your account, open this link via your instance, or select Decline to use feddit.nl's default web interface.
So far, only browser extensions can do this, and not very well at that. Of course, all ActivityPub instances and clients would need to adopt this URL scheme whenever a link is shared between users, and the downside is that Reddit, Instagram, Twitter etc. will never recognize
apub:links. Do you think something like this can ever happen?And you will notice that in the vast majority of the world, the joke about the ball game happens/happened. America is very american football centric. Germany is all about football. England has cricket. Etc, etc.
You jest, but yes, since our lives are complicated enough as is, we want our hobbies to be as straightforward and easy to communicate/communalize as possible.
Don't people today still choose between Gmail and Outlook?
They do, and I like how seamlessly
mailto:links on websites work with web and local apps: your browser will give you a choice and either will work because email servers network with one another (obviously). Perhaps we could do this with linking to content across the Fediverse, with a custom URL scheme such asapub:@[email protected]. I explore this in my other comment at apub:post/20744080/[email protected].
It's shitty because it's popular.
It's not Mastodon's shittiness, it's people's shittiness.
It's the shit's shittiness. It's a shitception!
I have my own shopping list of Mastodon features that i watched languish in PRs on GitHub. I like Rochko, but he completely failed to meet the moment of Twitter's explosion and make the massive flood of excitement about Mastodon into the real permanent gains that were up for grabs.
Most of my wish list have nothing to do with safety because I'm a straight cis white guy and so my experience of Mastodon is that its userbase is painfully anodyne.
But the point stands that a hard fork with a focus on development velocity is long overdue.
Most of my wish list have nothing to do with safety because I'm a straight cis white guy and so my experience of Mastodon is that its userbase is painfully anodyne.
This sounds so backwards to me. Do you know how you could create an environment for a less painfully anodyne userbase?
CW: dog looking at camera
GL. The best thing about the fediverse is the creation of new and exciting projects that will come and go.
This is unhinged. Someone building the mainline of an interoperable communication service should absolutely be helping others making software trying to interoperate with it. Complaints can be made about Rochko rejecting PRs, but complaining that other people's time is going towards a thing they don't want is insane.
"So they reached out to us and we had conversations about what they want to do, how they can do it, and we had more detailed conversations about how to do X, how to do Y protocol-wise. We helped them resolve some issues when they launched their first test of the federation because we want to see them succeed with this plan, so we help them debug and troubleshoot some of the stuff that they're doing. Basically, we're talking with each other about whatever issues come up."
But from the perspective of hundreds of instances have signed the anti-Meta FediPact, and hundreds more are blocking Threads without signing the pact, any resources devoted to to improving the Threads/Mastodon integration are wasted.
Even ignoring the ideological reasons to not want facebook integration: There are only so many hours in the day and so many dollars in the donation bucket. If an open source project is dedicating a disproportionate percentage of that on a feature that a significant part of the community actively do not want: That is exactly WHY you fork a project.
And once we consider the ideological and safety related reasons to not want facebook and giant corporate interests involved?
I have a lot of issue with the people who decide the answer is harassment and hate. But if enough development and organizational energy want to fork this? Fuckin' A.
The Facebook scare is absolute ridiculous. Threads integration can mainstream the fediverse. Basically everyone on Mastodon doesn't want anything to do with Meta, There's no way Threads would suck up a good enough amount of Mastodon's target audience for an extinguish to do enough damage.
What does a hard fork get this author that blocking meta’s domains from their account not get them?
Thanks for sharing the article.
I searched for "misskey" but couldn't find anything. Akkoma and GoToSocial are mentioned though.
misskey (and the subsequent forks) are better anyway; i still don't understand why mastodon refuses to add basic features like quote posting
they should also focus on an extensible moderation system like bsky
Last time (about a year ago) I looked into Misskey it was lacking some really basic features that even Misskey users were warning me about. Don't remember what they were, but I think lacking hashtags was one of them? What's the usability state of Misskey today?
Iceshrimp (one of the forks) is very usable
I wrote a counter-point to this a while back: https://wedistribute.org/2024/05/forking-mastodon/
I'm not saying "don't do it", but realize that the amount of commitment required to make a hard fork even moderately successful is vast.
It's telling that the biggest project in the space is barely able to pay more than a handful of people to work on it, and it still develops at a snail's pace. Notably, those are the people who deeply understand the system and its internals. While it's not impossible, you have to be realistic about how much further a group can get when they don't have the insight or technical chops required to take development further.
Wow some people are really into it
Hell yeah.
The problem is Mastodon's shittiness will be spread across the Fediverse regardless of what other forks you make.
If I were to make a new platform, I would not federate with any Mastodon servers.
It's bad enough when they come around here.
The problem is Mastodon’s shittiness will be spread across the Fediverse regardless of what other forks you make.
Making a good point for Bluesky's rejection of sharing AP federation, incidentally.