A lot of people have talked about the possibility of forking #Mastodon to get the many improvements their communities need. Making such an effort successful is another discussion entirely.
@hello I'm not sure we need to really discourage people from forking. Best case scenario, the fork ends up viable (with the various misskey forks being perhaps an example although that one is too fast moving to perhaps be an example of anything). Normal case scenario the fork dies out (for one of various reasons but most likely because maintaining software is a lot of work), and in most cases the world hasn't lost much. Having said this I agree with pretty much everything in the article.
@soaproot My goal isn’t to discourage anyone from running a fork, so much as it’s an insight into what you’re signing up for.
For me, a big concern involves trying to run a fork that actively competes with Mastodon, to the point of trying to replace it. This is what I see when people make calls for a hard fork, and it concerns me because it’s never a call to support an existing fork or another piece of software.
What it communicates to me is that someone is more interested in being the SABDFL, rather than being one of the contributors supporting an existing project.
@soaproot TL;DR: I’m not saying “don’t do it”, I’m saying “okay, but there’s some big headaches and you need to make peace with a number of things”.
Committed developers, deep knowledge of the code, community outreach, a coherent product vision, and having a designer all go a long way towards making this successful. Making it easy for communities to switch over is important, too.
"Committed developers, deep knowledge of the code, community outreach, a coherent product vision, and having a designer all go a long way towards making this successful. Making it easy for communities to switch over is important, too."
@deadsuperhero Those are all good points, can I quote them? I'm updating my article, and will also include a quote from and link to your article in the section on "It's not as easy as it sounds"> "For me, a big concern involves trying to run a fork that actively competes with Mastodon, to the point of trying to replace it. This is what I see when people make calls for a hard fork"
That might say more about what you're seeing than what people are saying. The way I phrased it was
"It's worth highlighting that a new hard fork complements the official Mastodon fork, which is likely to remain a better alternative for large, Threads-friendly instances like mastodon.social."
@jdp23 You are more than welcome to quote and link!
And yeah, I may have been projecting some of my own discomforts a bit. The last few calls for a hard fork, to me, have felt less like “let’s build our own thing together!” and more like a call to abandon Mastodon in favor of this amazing hypothetical fork where some other person is the SABDFL.
I think there is very much a need for an alternative to Mastodon. I’m not sure it’s necessarily Mastodon itself.
@hashraydamon Yeah, I wrote about them in the piece. There’s a difference between doing a fork to pursue your own interests and features, and doing a fork to compete with the original project.
The first is easy, the second one is extremely difficult.
Add comment