Not my content, but relevant.
Telling someone to resign from their own project is rather silly, and revealing of a grandiose sensibility. Free software developers can typically work on whatever projects they want to, and are usually not subordinates taking orders from superiors. They should listen to the concerns of users, but ultimately follow their own conscience.
That said, the points about Eunomia and contradictory sponsorship claims are valid. As far as I can tell Eunomia is an EU NGO gravy train hitching on the coat tails of a moral panic around “fake news”. That panic is already past its sell by date, and I don’t expect Eunomia to have any substantial consequences.
I’m glad to see there’s actually very few signatures, and I hope Eugen ignores it. What a bunch of entitled brats - if they don’t like what’s going on, they can fork the project. Or they can write their own IOS app with all the goodies they want on it.
The letter’s kind of all over the place, too… more like trying to smear dirt and it’s not terribly focused.
Maybe the signatories and the originator should be contacted with a note stating “Why do you think this hasn’t gone anywhere?”
I mean, really, how insulting to Eugen.
I agree. The only issue I really disagree on is that he doesn’t want to add groups to Mastodon which is a pretty important feature of social networking sites.
I’m old enough that I remember when the same sort of smear tactics were deployed by certain companies against anyone writing popular open source projects.
When somebody starts a project that they put time and effort into because they have a particular vision for it then it is their right to run the project the way that makes sense for them. If their vision diverges from what a significant number of people want, then people should put in the effort to make their alternative vision a reality. They can even leverage all the hard work that was put into making the original project since Mastodon is open source software.
This sort of thing regularly happens in open source world. GNOME forks like Cinnamon and MATE are great examples of this. The original project started getting too bloated for a lot of people, and they got together to fork it and move things in the direction they wanted.
Another option is to make a separate project entirely. Pleroma is an example of an alternative to Mastodon that was made because people wanted to do things differently.
Personally, I agree with the reasoning in the reply to the issue on GitHub and I do think it’s valuable for the official client to prioritize the needs for new users. The underlying functionality for supporting local and global timelines is not being removed, and it’s possible to make an alternative client that leverages it. Tusky for Android is the client I’m using, and it supports this feature.
On the other hand, I am ideologically opposed to partnering up with entities like EUnomia, but this being a social media platform the posts are already public and I don’t think anybody should be using such a platform for anything they want to keep private in the first place. Ultimately, you’re trusting server admins for any instance and you have no idea how they use the data collected by the instance.
After reading Eugen’s response, I think he is in the right here.
Got a link to it? I’d love to read it.
I think this is a reference to this, which is a response to the iOS app issue and not the open-letter itself.
“Forks and alternatives would have more visibility control than Mastodon, leading to privacy issues.” Does anyone care to expand upon this as a problem? FOSS means forks are an option but I’m missing where the privacy issues come from.
Does the iOS app have no timelines at all? Not the local one, not the federated one?
It seems to only have the subscribed time-line and at least according to the explanation given this is mainly to avoid being kicked off the Apple app-store.
I can kind of follow some of the other concerns being raised, but at least this one is really mostly Apple who is to blame with their overly prudish and otherwise questionable policing of their app store (and of course them preventing other means to install apps on the device you own).
But to be honest, I really don’t understand why people who raise these kind of concerns are using a Apple device in the first place… seem like a huge cognitive dissonance at play there.
Side question, does anyone read those timelines? There’s like hundreds of posts an hour all in different languages, and even the local timeline would be a full time job to keep up with.
Yes, but I also deliberately chose an instance that aligned with my interests. As for static on the federated timeline, sure, there’s a lot going on. But I’ll take that over the platform trying to play nanny any day. Mute and block exist for a reason.
While I was using it… I read them…
Federated timeline use to be the messy one. I chose instance because of the collective so I was interested in the internal posts mostly.
the local timeline would be a full time job to keep up with.
It’s definitely not something I try to keep up with, but it’s a nice scroll from time to time to discover things.
Also does anyone else find it strange they would do a native iOS app before android? Not only is the apple store more locked down and iOS more restrictive against open source, but also far less people use it worldwide.
I assume its because ios users donate more money to the Mastodon project compared to android users.
Edit: or maybe because Apple users are overrepresented among Mastodon donors.
I received comment of a person that the sponsors they referenced were not listed in https://joinmastodon.org/sponsors.
The fact is that they are listed, but some of then are only as little square logos without a name and just the link around the image pointing to the website.
Wow! I never realised they had gotten so many sponsors now. I wonder why they do sponsor Mastodon for the most part honestly.
Duplicated comment.
Oh indeed. Must be using the app.
One of the interesting grievances listed is the intentional removal of the local/federated timelines in the official mastodon app. I was a bit disappointed to see that they weren’t in the app as well.
The stuff I’ve seen on the local and federated timelines would likely make Apple deny the app. I stopped even looking at them, it was a nonstop porn stream at times.
