> You realize that heirarchy is exactly how you enforce rules, correct? You can't enforce rules without heirarchy.
That's not necessarily true, is it? All participants of an instance or group could practice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_democracy to form and enforce a set of rules without hierarchies. Not saying that's what happened here though...
Sure, but I don't think just only having direct democracy is sufficient, especially in an anarchist society.
The only nation state currently that somewhat has a form of direct democracy (Major emphasis on somewhat)- Switzerland- still has absurd hierarchies, some even more so than other countries, where entire cantons can decide who can or cannot move somewhere.
I listened to https://www.heterodorx.com/podcast/episode-69-fediverse-foll... and I wonder what makes you say he's "an alt-right dude". He's a free speech advocate, but at the same time he thinks that the one of the great things about the fediverse is that instances can block each other to shut off speech that they don't find acceptable. He's a vegan that classifies himself as a libtard.
Working with Gab & Truth Social is kinda the indicator of alt-right-ness I'd say no? :)
I agree that he got some _correct_ views- mostly anyone does; but I read the guy posts over the years, it's widely known on the fediverse that he's pushing alt-right stuff.
He's also loves to use many of the slang they use.
It's his behaviour on the Fediverse & related spaces that made me (and many others) think/know he is alt-right.
> would it be possible for them to look for a second "pleroma/akkoma" server
Soapbox[1] is probably the most mature alternative to Mastodon, but the general consensus seems to be that it can't be used because most users of Mastodon don't align with the Soapbox creator's view on politics.
I am running it as of yesterday and it shows a _lot_ of promise. I took it entirely the other way (test instance on a Pi with SQLite) and it is just purring along, although I haven’t yet put any significant load on it (that will likely happen once 0.6 is released and there is better client support).
> but the general consensus seems to be that it can't be used because most users of Mastodon don't align with the Soapbox creator's view on politics
This is vague and wasn't immediately obvious to me. What I found online is that there's some kerfuffle over him saying he's not supporting trans rights at the expense of biological women's rights. Did I misunderstand the position or did I capture it accurately?
please help me understand, why is that "stand" supposed to influence your or my decision to use or not use their software? its not like WE HAVE TO SUBSCRIBE to their views before installation like those terms and conditions?
are we saying a "developer who says bad things about trans people has made bad software and should be avoided like the plague"
I guess the idea is that by giving them success you're allowing them to broadcast their opinion to more and more people. At least that's my read on it.
Given how big a part trans people have played in the creation of ActivityPub, I get why you would want to avoid people like this in the scene.
what has "software"do do with views of creators? i find this unsettling that people are choosing between projects not based on merits, is one faster, less resource hungry, in a safer language, is compatible with standards, is easy to use or manage or update, can be modified or not, can be piped with other software or not but no. people are concerned about "views of one developer/team".....
so what has "Soapbox creator's view on politics." got to do with "Soapbox[1] is probably the most mature alternative to Mastodon". you are saying both things in one sentence yourself.
if soapbox is mature alternative, use it. why should there be a "general consensus" to avoid it?
Soapbox isn't any more mature than Pleroma or Akkoma in terms of software.
It's a hostile fork of Pleroma that regularly merges upstream patches from Pleroma. The lead developer, Alex Gleason, got kicked off of the Pleroma project when he called other contributors names for reverting a patch he made that introduced code smell[0]. Said patch was controversial at the time of introduction, but got bludgeoned into being merged because Gleason was by far the most active contributor. It was removed with consensus when other developers became more active, although from what I can tell, Gleason didn't bother to participate in that discussion.
Soapbox is his "taking the ball and going home" answer.
If you want a non-technical reason to avoid it/consider it immature; Gleason cried "cancel culture" when removed from the Pleroma project, even though it pretty much has nothing to do with it. He's a demagogue who used his getting removed from the project to further advocate for his own political beliefs (which is being a TERF). This in particular means that the overwhelming majority of Soapbox instances tend to be maintained by the people that think that Pleroma is maintained by the people Gleason dislikes[1], to the point where some instances automatically defederate from instances using Soapbox's frontend[2].
[0]: Pleroma uses a RESTful API for routing. Gleason wanted to add a bunch of alternative endpoints for no other reason than "this is what users are familiar with on Twitter and my frontend for Pleroma wants to rely on those". The patches were reverted eventually on the simple reason that they're cruft.
[1]: Which is extremely funny considering an early criticism of the Pleroma project was that due to it being easy to host, it wound up hosting a lot of instances that would fit this bill. Now most of those migrated to using Soapbox.
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".
Being a 'TERF' probably means one has a healthy stance on censorship and free speech, and an ability to cut past the bullshit and see and say things for how they really are. So that just sounds like a point in favour to me.
How did we end up conflating viewpoints with positions onfree speech?
Disliking trans people does not mean supporting free speech. Now I'm expecting you to rattle off some examples of trans people expressing views contrary to free speech.
That's true, but TERFS have as well. So what's the point?
A piece of social networking software that gets popular does bring a certain audience/reach to its creator. So "The software is good but I don't want the views of its creator to reach a broader audience" is a valid stance as far as I'm concerned.
The name didn't seem to be prominently reported until the Twitter exodus lately. I was surprised he's my countryman, I think I would have remembered had he come up in the earlier Mastodon discussions on HN. I always assumed it's a mostly American thing.
> The name didn't seem to be prominently reported until the Twitter exodus lately
But that kind of proves my point now doesn't it? When "his" platform became popular he got featured on the national press. I can totally see that some people do not want to offer that kind of platform to someone with whom they disagree politically.
GNU is a doomed project, and you've correctly identified on of the reasons. The number of people using Emacs rounds to zero, and is trending in the wrong direction.
Emacs is still getting periodic releases and it's getting better every time. I can not think of any other project that is over 40 years old and that could be around 40 years from now. It has become an institution. It will outlive RMS.
Anyone rejecting Emacs because of RMS but ends up using (e.g) VS Code is either ignorant, hypocrite or simply trying to find a post-hoc rationalization for their choice of tool.
My remark was about social networking software.
Besides that, and luckily, any journalist worth its salt can instantly classify rms as someone you don't want to feature on mainstream media. With new folks it's not as easy.
That is still a senseless distinction. His code is licensed AGPL3. Anyone is free to use it and modify it as they see fit. I don't need to agree with Alex on anything to recognize that his software is better than any of the current alternatives. I could set up a Soapbox instance to make a "BBQ pit masters and meat-eaters community" instance, and Alex (vegan activist) would have absolute zero recourse against it.
> instantly classify rms as someone you don't want to feature on mainstream media.
Why? RMS may be an idiot on a huge number of topics, that does not invalidate what he has to say about the issues of closed software, or how Big Tech has co-opted Free Software by using "the cloud" to exploit users, and so on. If anything, any decent journalist should be able to bring to mainstream media and should be able to make the distinction about which part of RMS is important to listen.
Depends on the context. The OP, IMO, was being passive-aggressive, almost incredulous.
As I said, every time anything comes up about Asahi, it is guaranteed that at least two threads will occur. This and comment about the vTuber. At this point - 2 years after the project began - it adds little value to the conversation, to the extent that the project lead, who was previously very active here, doesn’t contribute anymore.
That's not necessarily true, is it? All participants of an instance or group could practice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_democracy to form and enforce a set of rules without hierarchies. Not saying that's what happened here though...