Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !lemmyvision
Overall seems like a pretty balanced board. Al Shafei and Bezuidenhout have backgrounds aligned with the type of Mastodon I want to see. The lawyer guy dabbles in crypto law, but also did tons of pro bono work for Mastodon. Seems to me like he’s just passionate about emerging tech. Biz Stone is also an interesting inclusion. He’s obviously well connected to the VC space but has been pretty critical of Elon Twitter.
Lol, what makes you think it's dying? The MAU numbers are similar to mastodon, and a lot of the science community has shifted there (for ease of use compared to masto).
I have trouble believing that last bit. My Mastodon feed is always extremely full of scientists and Mastodon has almost 3x the active users that BlueSky does.
truth is that everything is scattered. And different alternative social media platforms or ecosystems ... fighting and competing looks a bit silly once you zoom out a little. Both fediverse and BlueSky are sitting around 1 million monthly active users ... which is nothing compared to the likes of twitter and threads and IG etc.
It would be physically impossible to say that "all of the scientists are actually on BlueSky/Mastodon". By any reasonable approximation, they're all on Twitter/Threads, with some experimenting with alternative social media. And those few are likely on both because they're still interested in getting their messages out there.
I agree, however in the same spirit of email I would be pissed if Gmail blocked AOL or Yahoo suddenly someday "coz reasons" -- I prefer to stick to the 'federate all the things' plan -- let the baddies fail because they suck
Bluesky is growing rapidly while ActivityPub growth is stagnating. I expect BS to grow beyond AP this year. People I used to follow on Mastodon have moved over to Bluesky, so I had to create an account there.
Personally, I like the ability to follow people who don't necessarily know how to install Linux. I'm glad techies seem to slowly move towards ActivityPub related services, but the general public doesn't seem all that interested. Plus, federation between services is the whole point of the fediverse!
Yeah, getting projects off the ground is hard work. These aren't really Mastodon specific problems, it's just another version of the whole "I have an app idea" meme that coders joke about.
In light of the announcement of Mastodon’s US-based 501c3 Non-Profit, and the reveal of that organization’s board members, there has been backlash from members of the Mastodon community. Some people are even saying that this is the last straw, it’s time for a hard fork of the project!
I feel like there's context missing. What's the objection to the board of the nonprofit?
The announcement also establishes an interesting board of directors: Esra’a Al Shafei of Majal.org, Karien Bezuidenhout from The Shuttleworth Foundation, Amir Ghavi of Fried Frank, Felix Hlatky of SOLARYS, and former Twitter cofounder Biz Stone.
There are two links in the article to content that talks about forking, but it's from people who seem to be arguing about the dev team, not the board of a nonprofit set up to handle contributions.
Most of the backlash pertains to the board members appointed to the new nonprofit. One of the members is a lawyer that has defended crypto and AI companies, another is ex-Twitter angel investor Biz Stone.
Mastodon's community usually has some kind of vague beef about one thing or another when it comes to Eugen and the decisions he makes for the project, whether it's a new feature or a design change or that he didn't do something that other projects wanted to do.
I would be making a huge mistake if I didn’t bring this up. A significant portion of the Nostr community loves Bitcoin, and many clients implement NIP-57 to hook into the Bitcoin Lightning Network.
@deadsuperhero There are several forks of Mastodon that have been around for years and work well (not only #Hometown) like #Ecko, #Glitchsoc, etc. for years.
They have many more functions such as editable character limit,
editable poll options, local posts, changeable favicon, markdown formatting - and if that's not enough, there is plenty of other software in the Fediverse for micro- and macroblogging
Yeah, if you read the article, Hometown and Glitch actually get mentioned. The criticism is not about making a fork to do your own thing... but, instead, about trying to compete with Mastodon directly.
Doing that kind of fork (which is what people are calling for) requires a tremendous amount of coordination, effort, and commitment that cannot be done casually.
Akkoma and Pleroma are two popular "Mastodon style" Fediverse apps, I think born out of exactly this type of complaint about Mastodon, which you could get involved with if you wanted to be involved with better software without it being a one-man show.
I think it's made needlessly difficult by how sloppy a protocol ActivityPub is, such that different Fediverse apps can't really interoperate with each other except at a pretty rudimentary level, so you kind of have to pick one of the leading ones and imitate it, in order to be a citizen in its community and not have to build your own little community from scratch. But that's a problem without a real easy solution, I think.
This is a situation that I think will get better in time. There's some really promising efforts involving Fediverse Enhancement Proposals, where multiple projects collaborate on shared ways of doing things. Some of these behaviors are getting studied and standardized by the larger SocialCG entity, as well.
There's also a lot of promising development behind a Fediverse Testing Suite. If we can develop a platform-agnostic testing system for people to build against, it will potentially become the new development standard, rather than optimizing for Mastodon and nothing else.
If we can develop a platform-agnostic testing system for people to build against, it will potentially become the new development standard, rather than optimizing for Mastodon and nothing else
Well, unless interoperating exclusively/mostly with mastodon is still substantially incentivised because of its size. Hopefully mastodon comply with the testing suite’s standard, but I can see that being a slow process, and I can also see grey areas persisting.
I don't really see the point in forking a project like Mastodon unless you are already deeply involved with its development. It doesn't do enough that you couldn't rewrite it better (as in in a way you understand better and with lessons from the original taken into account) in the time it would take you to fully understand all the details of the existing code base.
It actually does have that nowadays, it's just that the feature requires Elasticsearch to work, which is one extra piece of infra for admins to worry about.
It absolutely is. Yet, as Sean said, it's also yet another bit of software to run and maintain, and ES is known to be a bit of an effort to keep going well.
Admins having only finite amounts of time and/or resources, might make the very understandable decision to leave it out.
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