Fork It

Okay, taking some of my fediverse meta talk to my blog. We’ll see how it feels.

Currently, in my corner of the fediverse, there are a number of conversations going on around the meta-topic of What To Do About Mastodon, Part XVII Redux, brought about by the Saturday blog post announcing the formation of a US-based non-profit to accept tax-deductible donations on behalf of the German parent company of Mastodon, and the appointment of a couple of questionable choices to said non-profit’s board of directors. That’s the nominal incitement of this round, anyway, though it is just a sub-variant of The Dictator Has Made Another Bad Decision, which drives most of the cycle of this topic. As it’s never addressed in a way that results in not having The Dictator role be a thing, it’s likely to keep cycling.

But that’s not what I want to talk about. I’d rather address some of the confusion, irritation, and disdain I’ve seen over the last couple of days in regard to various efforts announced, alluded to, and otherwise, each of which is claiming to take action to try and Do Something About Mastodon.

Some folks see nothing wrong with Mastodon, its direction, or its leadership. They think that anything that distracts from improving mainline Mastodon makes it harder for Mastodon to achieve the things they want.

Some folks want to see Mastodon continue to grow and change but according to a different vision than Eugen’s, or glitch-soc’s, or Hometown’s.

Some folks want to build things that take lessons learned from the last seven-plus years of Mastodon and try and build an alternative that addresses some of the places where Mastodon has failed to be what they wanted it to be.

Some folks give not a shit about Mastodon and its future development aside from the outsized weight it has had in the evolution of the underlying fediverse protocols and their interoperability with other fediverse servers. They are already doing Not Mastodon and would mostly like Mastodon to Please Stop Being So Mastodon All The Time, by my read anyway.

All of these things are fine and good and can and should co-exist.

If you don’t see the value of one or more of the efforts, you may not be part of the intended audience for the project. That’s fine! Not every project to build software for the fediverse needs to address an audience of the sum total of the users of the fediverse, nor of the residents of this rocky planet we all call home. It’s okay for folks to build to the needs they see in their community. It’s okay to not be part of that community.

Community is a word that gets tossed around the fediverse in lots of contexts from lots of angles. Whenever I encounter it, I try to remember to expand it to “the community to which I’m currently referring which is itself a community member of the larger fediverse communities, many of which overlap to varying degrees but none of which are a single community in any real sense whatsoever any more than subscribers to the same monopolist electricity provider are somehow a community” but that’s super verbose to expand every time. Nonetheless, it is an expansion that deserves some front-of-mind time whenever engaging with the concept of community in regards to our favorite federated voidspace’s residents en masse. There are an uncountable number of communities cohabitating to various degrees in the fediverse, and no one I know is a member of all of them. It’s cool. It’s natural.

The current situation is just the outward expression of various members of various communities announcing that they see a need for their community to take action – action that makes sense for the needs of their community as the folks talking see them – and looking to find folks who are similarly interested in addressing the need they see in the way they intend. That’s pretty righteous, honestly, and a testament to the overall platform the fediverse presents to the world-at-large – this is a place where you can connect with other folks who want to make it a better place in the ways you’d like to see it done. Radical. Folks would be silly to not avail themselves of that opportunity when it was applicable to their needs and wants.

It’s all good. Fork it. Fork that. Greenfield a few other things. Collaborate and remix and reimagine. Do so with an eye toward the informed consent of the other residents of the fediverse and your comrades, with kindness for your neighbors and their spaces, and you should find a welcome space for your project. A space like this is hard. Be soft, with yourself and each other.