Mastodon Engineering has announced a new network-wide effort to create a framework for service providers offering a variety of capabilities.

Earlier this month, the Mastodon project announced a new initiative funded by NGI Search: Fediverse Discovery Providers! The goal is to build a resource framework for different kinds of services that can work with potentially any instance or platform.

  • 0x1C3B00DA@fedia.io
    85·
    3 months ago

    Mastodon has a history of steamrolling other implementations.

    This means we might not always be able to incorporate all the feedback we get into the very first draft of everything we publish

    The site even warns that theyre on a deadline and may not incorporate feedback.

    EDIT: they also mention a “setting” that determines if a user/post is searchable. theyve presented a FEP to formalize this setting but nearly everyone else had issues with their proposal. as usual for mastodon, this looks like them sidestepping external feedback and just doing what they want

      • 0x1C3B00DA@fedia.io
        111·
        3 months ago

        I didn’t cherry pick a statement. I included the part where they said the very first draft.

        I did fail to explain how its a power grab, but that’s was only because I thought it was a fairly obvious one-to-one point. I’ve also added another example. But lemme try again.

        1. Mastodon has a history of pushing features that affect interop with other implementations without seeking feedback from other implementations or outright ignoring the feedback they do receive.
        2. A member of the mastodon team wrote a FEP to formalize a setting related to search indexing. This was the right way to go about it. yey Mastodon was working with other implementations. But that FEP didn’t receive positive feedback and it seems like it was abandoned.
        3. Now mastodon is trying to standardize something using the ideas from that FEP, outside of the FEP process (which is the agreed upon way to collaborate between implementers).
        4. They’re warning on their site that they have deadlines and may not incorporate feedback if they can’t resolve it without breaking deadlines.
        5. They are under no obligation to incorporate it after their initial draft and, historically, mastodon is unwilling to update their work to incorporate other implementers’ feedback.

        A more collaborative way to do this would have been to seek feedback before making a grant proposal and making the grant proposal jointly with other projects so they weren’t the only ones getting paid for it.

          • 0x1C3B00DA@fedia.io
            1·
            3 months ago

            That’s not a contradiction, it’s maybe an incomplete argument. And I was relying on my previous sentence that mastodon has a history of steamrolling other implementations to imply that they would do it again and were already warning about that. But none of this even matters; I’ve made a follow up comment that lays it out more explicitly.