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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.

It’s shitty because it’s popular.

It’s not Mastodon’s shittiness, it’s people’s shittiness.

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.

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.

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

Thanks for sharing the article.

I searched for “misskey” but couldn’t find anything. Akkoma and GoToSocial are mentioned though.

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.

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Hell yeah.

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