There are two problems that are coming for Mastodon of which apparently an awful lot of people are unaware. These problems are coming for Mastodon not because of anything specific to Mastodon: they come to all growing social media platforms. But for some reason most people haven't noticed them, per se.
The first problem is that scale has social effects. Most technical people know that scale has technological effects. Same thing's true on the social side, too.
@siderea @Gargron this is amazing — thank you.
To my followers, because I’m going to boost my reply — The thread is a tremendous introduction asking us to consider what it would mean to intentionally *Engineer* social media spaces. What doing that might entail as a scientific process. How this has been done in other fields. What we should do it, and what happens if we don’t. And who we could seek out, with experience of entire related fields, who could help.
@benjohn Absolutely this. People tend to say "You can't solve social problems with technology", and while there's a core of truth in situations like this it's more wrong than right.
What I've found frustrating so far about so much of Fedi is how little thoughtful design there is. There's a lot of kneejerk changes and taking the easiest-to-implement path, leaving an awful lot of debt on the route from here to "good". So, I'm a lot more pessimistic than I want to be about a designed future.
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@benjohn The "thoughtful" element being particular tough, as social systems are not simple, they need a proper systems approach, strategically thinking ahead "if this is done, how will people react, get around it, where will that lead?", and an understanding that even then not everything will be foreseeable, and keeping future flexibility open. The discussion up-thread of learning from other systems is key here - make the most of others' mistakes, don't repeat them!
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@mapto @benjohn I very much have an outsider's view, but I think the Masto devs lack organisational capability.
They have a million users, a stupidly high fraction of which are highly technical, yet talk about being bottlenecked on a single paid dev. How are they not leveraging that user base?! I have seen projects make much better progress off a much smaller set of interested parties.
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There are basic hurdles to a community. What I've not seen: Bugs marked "Suitable for newbies". What I have seen: People posting on Fedi going "How do I get the core devs to take a look at my CL?"
The discussion on bugs is not "This is a great idea, if only we had the developer bandwidth.", it's usually "As someone who has internalised the backend architecture, I don't see why end-users find this confusing."
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@mapto @benjohn The code base isn't that big. Lines of code isn't a great comparison, but a rough comparison puts it at the size of 0.99-series Linux kernels, so it should feel pretty accessible.
Unfortunately, it's an almost comment-free undocumented architectural mess (or was when I last looked).
It's a contributor-repellent system. I had a go. I bounced off.
So, when people talk about how little dev bandwidth they have, I think "And why is that?".
Rant over. :)
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@sgf @benjohn we don't need to care about mastodon. Just make sure that one of the many ActivityPub servers is maintainable. BTW I recently learned that my instance qoto.org is forked from Mastodon and I'm soo happy my instance owner does a great job in terms of feature improvements. I love @freemo . I wish there were more people like him in this world
@mapto @benjohn Oh, I very much want to not care about mainline Masto, but it gets most of the users and it gets most of the attention. Getting to the point where we really can not care about Masto, as a wider community, will take time and effort and better systems thinking and strategy than I can muster.
Leaves me a bit downhearted, really. Not that we shouldn't try to make things better.
@mapto @sgf This seems like the kind of thing nations are very well positioned to fund, and it's very relevant to deliberation and healthy democracy. I think the EU has grants for work of this nature; I know some adjacent software prototyping has been funded.
Although academics often don't get involved in direct intervention with code, there's also no particular reason why they shouldn't, that I see? It could allow a much greater extent of discovery and experiment.
IMHO, it seems like something that _could_ find funding from various sources.