Can we agree at least that Soapbox is a much better frontend (as in, it is more suited as a Twitter-alternative, more user-friendly and relies on UX/UI that is more familiar to the general audience) than whatever crap is the default FE from Pleroma?
Alex is also the first one to push for Quoted objects. None of the Pleroma devs wanted, the Mastodon devs even less. Now that Mastodon is reaching some semblance of mainstream, I am seeing every day someone writing about how QT is the one feature they miss from Twitter. For everyone that responds with "Soapbox has it, you should take a look", there will be at least 3 others saying "Soapbox is developed by a TERF, stay away from it".
Not really? Soapbox in my experience is a bloated javascript mess that breaks loading half the time because it triggers my adblocker.
Pleroma-FE is honestly pretty decent compared to the other UIs out there, but I recognize that this is a matter of taste. It's simple, it's efficient, it knows what it wants to look like and it doesn't look like someone took a mobile interface and blew it up for a wider viewport/slapdashed mouse support onto it. That alone makes it better than 90% of the social media sites out there. I personally do prefer it over Masto-FE, but I've never been one for the Tweetdeck style interface.
As for quoted objects; Mastodon doesn't want it because Gargron (no comment, that's just the kinda project Mastodon is, feel free to imagine a rant on BDFLs though). Pleromas current chief developer is from what I can tell awaiting a spec change to be implemented before doing anything with it (which... fair enough, Mastodon just repurposes the spec for its own use and it's aggravating as hell) and has been critical of the proposed spec change because it's poor in semantics. Misskey from what I can tell supports it out of the box and it's support for it predates Soapbox-BEs implementation.
Quoted objects are technically somewhat complex if you don't want them to inherit certain issues that are both endemic to using AP as a protocol and the issues with the Twitter specific implementation.
Considering Gleasons general tedency to just copy Twitter stuff without forethought makes me probably not wrong in assuming that Gleason didn't bother thinking this through and it most likely has all those issues.
Ariadne at Treehouse (who was in fact an early Pleroma developer) has quote-toots in Mastodon in live testing, with an eye to compatibility with the Misskey and Akkoma implementations, and she's done many years on the social sides of the issues with QTs and social software in general so I expect it won't suck. (I'm on a glitch-soc instance and my admin wants to add the Treehouse implementation as soon as it's done.)
so the Fediverse is interpreting Website Boy as damage and routing around him
Your argument is based mostly based on an engineer perspective, perhaps you could benefit from looking at the product perspective a bit?
Take the ~2M people that are leaving Twitter this week and show them (a) Mastodon, (b) Pleroma with the default FE and (c) Soapbox/Rebased. How do you think the split would go?
Whatever issues are there on Soapbox, they could be fixed if the developers had the proper support, while you can give all the support in the world to Mastodon and we will never have QT.
Probably Mastodon. When people are outside of their wheelhouse (and technology wise most people are), they pick what everyone else is moving to. Mastodon is the media darling of the fediverse, for better and for worse.
The press has been hyping up Mastodon since 2016 on tech sites and even the general press only ever talks about Mastodon. Pleroma, Misskey and all the various offshoots are practical footnotes in terms of userbases (the only one with real usage is really Glitch-soc which is a Mastodon fork that exists to circumvent Gargrons BDFL tendencies). It sucks but that's how it is.
As for the issues on Soapbox; this argument also works for Pleroma. With proper support, Pleroma was, and arguably still is (although now moreso because everyone else is even sloppier), be the best software to use the fediverse with. It even supports different frontends, including Soapbox if you really wanted it.
I agree that Mastodon is a technical dead end for some features like QTs because Gargron is a BDFL who just doesn't want those features and imposes that on the project, but it's absurd to suggest that Soapbox is the best answer, when it's largely just a spite driven fork of Pleroma that is mostly picked for ideological reasons when admins aren't simply clueless about the projects history and offers basically no feature benefits. I encourage devs to put their time into Pleroma instead; more people benefit from that, especially considering Rebased just imports all changes from it's upstream anyway.
> I encourage devs to put their time into Pleroma instead; more people benefit from that, especially considering Rebased just imports all changes from it's upstream anyway.
For the end user, none of that matters much in comparison with the ability of just making a quote-tweet. You and Alex can continue having your fights; as an user and as someone running a commercial provider for AP software all I really want is to have software that can be used by people in a way that they want and that respects their freedoms. My feeling as an outsider is that the Mastodon devs are too stuck in their own ideology and the Pleroma devs are too focused on their own (techno-libertarian) audience. Alex seems to be the only one that, in his words, "just want to bring the normies to the Fediverse".
Alex is also the first one to push for Quoted objects. None of the Pleroma devs wanted, the Mastodon devs even less. Now that Mastodon is reaching some semblance of mainstream, I am seeing every day someone writing about how QT is the one feature they miss from Twitter. For everyone that responds with "Soapbox has it, you should take a look", there will be at least 3 others saying "Soapbox is developed by a TERF, stay away from it".