um… did my bio get deleted?
Mastodon implemented a new feature in a way that would break (in a really jarring privacy-violating-to-some-extent way) until everyone else copied their implementation exactly.
You ever notice how Gargron refers to the fediverse as “the Mastodon network?”
He’s been doing things this way since 2017 at least. At this point, any longtime observer really has no other choice but to consider the behavior deliberate.
Then when I see people asking questions of his code or how to do things he usually jumps down their throats - or completely ignores them.
And honestly the biggest thing that irked me was that I didn’t feel he gave credit to the hundreds - thousands of other people who work to make the fediverse work.
Anyone who’s ever touched the Mastodon dev process knows that Gargron is much the same, FWIW, minus getting angry in public. These days I just have to shake my head at all the bright-eyed bushy-tailed noobs updating issues on the Mastodon repo, because those of us who’ve been around since the start know exactly how far that’s gonna go in nearly all cases - and in the cases it does go anywhere, it’ll be because Gargron implemented something similar with zero discussion and no credit where credit is due.
But yeah, follow Dansup long enough and you are guaranteed to see some regrettable behavior on main.
And the main reason Bluesky can have that is because it’s not actually decentralized.
The furry engineer who writes cryptography posts is working on this. Turns out it is not so simple in practice.
https://soatok.blog/category/technology/open-source/fediverse-e2ee-project/
If any dev should be getting roasted, it’s Gargron, for his many bad decisions over the years.
This is in part because he’s in public trainwreck mode fairly often.
Congrats, you’ve arrived at the right place!
Source: I subscribed to a ton of Lemmy communities to quit Reddit, and the selfhosting ones are so active they routinely push other communities down below the fold unless I sort by new.
btw if you haven’t got into Proxmox yet, have a look at it.
I’ve run a couple single-user Pleroma and Akkoma instances for 1 to 3 years each, one of them with a lot of follows in both directions and plenty of multimedia, and it worked fine on hardware 6 generations old on a crappy Comcast plan proxied thru a $4/mo VPS.
Other platform software (Mastodon especially) consumes vastly more compute resources than the Pleroma family. I haven’t tried self-hosting Lemmy yet. YMMV.
Mastodon is also an ultra-heavyweight in terms of compute resources it consumes per daily active user served. This is one reason (among multiple) that I would never run Mastodon as an ActivityPub microblogging instance.
Asianometry is a good Youtube channel, great way to spend 20 min at a time learning something.
The problem lies with Gargron doing what Gargron does, implementing whatever the f he wants for “the Mastodon network” and not giving a crap how it affects the health of the overall fediverse.
Hell, this isn’t even the first time there’s been drama over Mastodon’s advisory post scopes, not by a long shot. I kinda wish I’d saved receipts from the last couple times, some highly experienced devs have chimed in in the past.