@aschmitz regarding (2), the fact that nobody makes money off of mastodon doesn't mean that there isn't labour exploitation OR that the system as a whole doesn't "profit" (in a growth/power sense) from the fact that people don't have any other options. i think that's a dangerous situation because in a way it's making the success of mastodon dependent on this continued lack in other communities.

@aschmitz I think ideally mastodon would focus on ways to build, integrate with, and serve communities in other spaces instead of trying to act as a surrogate for them. that means measuring "success" not in growth/users/posts but in the strength and versatility of the resulting community.

@aschmitz right now i think social media has a tendency to actively make communities weaker because community drama fuels social media growth and that's bad.

in contrast, a social media in a facilitator role is okay with (and actively wants to create) a situation where it is not used all the time because there are other options. this is not the mentality of modern social media right now.

@onethousandtwentyfour Can you expand on what that facilitator role would look like? It seems like you're saying it should create competitors for itself, which doesn't seem to serve any real purpose other than having alternatives. (Which is fine, but not a *goal* as far as I can tell.) Or is this a "you should integrate with other existing things where existing communities are"? (The main problem here is that most - though not all - other things seem to be hostile to integrations they don't control, and I'm not sure how, say, Mastodon could work around that other than having open and documented protocols for integration, which is about 50/50 on.)

@aschmitz my recent posts kind of hint at this but i think a big part (or at least, starting place) is allowing for finer subcommunity distinctions within mastodon and also increasing the versatility of posts, what they can look like, and how they can be used. and this is entirely a critique of Mastodonʼs implementation and not ActivityPub as a protocol because ActivityPub i think is designed fairly well for this sort of thing.

@aschmitz and i think if you compare mastodon and current AP implementations with some of the hypotheticals that have been proposed you can kind of see the difference there.

itʼs not so much that Mastodon should/shouldnʼt encourage competition so much as competition shouldnʼt be *relevant* because the focus isnʼt on growth but on strength of services and strength of community.

@onethousandtwentyfour @aschmitz practically, this basically means prioritizing being self sustaining over growth, right?

Like with dreamwidth, for example, the goal was essentially to meet a specific communities needs long term, so all the features of dw reflect that communities needs, but make dw a terrible “generic” platform. The whole point is that it’s NOT for everyone. I’m not on it but I believe Metafilter has a similar model also

@Satsuma @aschmitz mm, i think i disagree with even prioritizing being self­‑sustaining

if something better than masto comes along, thatʼs a good thing, and masto should facilitate the transition to the new system rather than oppose it in self­‑interest imo

@onethousandtwentyfour @aschmitz hm yeah thats fair

@onethousandtwentyfour @Satsuma That doesn't seem to be a good way to critique anything that's currently "best", right? Like, maybe Mastodon would! At the very least, I can imagine a lot of server operators would. But as far as we know, it hasn't happened yet, so we can't yet know. Yes, migration paths are good. The existing APIs aren't bad (Salmon keys are the only thing I know aren't accessible), but a better migration path depends on a thing to migrate *to*.

@aschmitz @onethousandtwentyfour currently you cant even migrate your account between mastodon servers, let alone different activitypub implementations?

@Satsuma @onethousandtwentyfour That's... maybe a problem? You can export and import followed users, which is about as good as APub will get at the moment, but it's a fair point that there's room for improvement. My question is more whether it's worth creating a new protocol to solve that (*relatively* rare, although I'm sure it comes up daily) issue, or whether we still have more notes to take on what to improve before moving on.

@aschmitz @onethousandtwentyfour wait take notes before moving on to what?

We can just, change activity pub to add migration? I dont think anyone here is advocating for ditching activitypub entirely

@Satsuma I think @onethousandtwentyfour is advocating a migration path from Mastodon to The Next Thing, and I'm not sure The Next Thing is a real thing yet, or honestly worth building just yet. Sure, I'm fine tweaking things (or building something else, if there's a good reason!).

(Migration would be a massive change though. It "exists" in Mastodon, and accounts get flagged that way, but handling the follower relationships moving would require a lot of new authorization logic that APub quietly avoids ever defining. For similar reasons, you can't fetch followers-only posts from history, although there might also be good policy reasons for that.)

@aschmitz @onethousandtwentyfour i took that very much in the context of migrating from mastodon to other, better activitypub implementations, not throwing the whole protocol out the window

Also building a migration path between currently existing activitypub servers would definitely make it easier to build a migration path to *non* activitypub servers, so it’s still a benefit either way?

@Satsuma @aschmitz iʼm not advocating one way or the other (iʼm rather impartial on Where The Fediverse Should Be Headed since iʼm not involved in development anymore), but iʼm saying that an emphasis on self-preservation *isnʼt* impartial, and is in fact explicitly advocating *against* change. while that might not cause problems for us now, it will in the future (when/if such alternatives emerge, and almost certainly during the course of their development)

@Satsuma @aschmitz or in other words, i think it is entirely possible to operate an open-source project *without* using futurity as a fundamental organizing principle, and instead focusing on the actual needs of users in the present (which may, but do not *necessarily*, include “ensuring this project continues being developed”, and may in fact instead look more like “maintaining this project through a transition period while constructing alternatives”)

@onethousandtwentyfour @Satsuma Yeah, I'm all for considering alternatives, but for small projects (and personally Mastodon still feels small, although obviously it has several competitors, forks, etc. of various sizes) I'm not sure "building your own alternative" is something that's practical at the same time as improving things for the current users. (Maybe, but it's very much a full-time job at that point.)

Anyway, I think it's reasonable to consider what will come next. I would not want any project I use to "fight against" a future thing. But I also run my own server in case it does. (I'm well aware that not everyone *can*, it's more a statement about what I value and where I put effort.)

@Satsuma @aschmitz i DONʼT get the impression from Eugen that the current stance of the Mastodon Project is “we are going to keep developing this project because that is where our users think our energies should be prioritized”. i think the mood is more “we are going to keep developing the project because we want it to keep existing, regardless of what anyone else thinks,” placing usersʼ needs/desires secondary to the project itself, which IMO is backwards

@Satsuma @aschmitz (ftr i DO think that most people would rather see energies spent on new features in mastodon than developing new softwares from scratch. but i donʼt think that desire, even if present, is currently really a part of the calculations of those in power at all)

@onethousandtwentyfour @Satsuma That may be fair - I haven't paid any real attention to upstream's priorities in months or more. I wouldn't like that, of course, but if it's where upstream is, then I guess so be it.

I think in practice "let's improve what we have" may be indistinguishable from "let's ensure people don't migrate to alternatives" except in intent at this point. Obviously insular features would break that, but things like "let's add polls" or whatever don't seem heavily on one side or the other there.

I should go to sleep, so I might respond later, but I think I've mostly said my piece and gotten an understanding of what @onethousandtwentyfour meant. Thanks for the discussion, both of you.

@Satsuma @onethousandtwentyfour And yes, I'm not arguing against a way to migrate accounts. I badly *want* APub to have an authentication mechanism for things like that, and Salmon is like 90% of the way there, just not *officially* documented directly in APub (although most things use it, I think?), so it's not a huge stretch.

(I don't love Salmon, but it's already implemented here, which is an advantage.)

@aschmitz @Satsuma to the contrary, i think the best services will always have an eye to the future and be trying to pave the way for something better :P

Mastodon was a hacked-together proof-of-concept largely developed in one person's spare time that just happened to get popular, and the idea that we should keep funneling our energy into that perpetually is actively keeping us from replacing it with something nicer and designed with the knowledge we have now

@onethousandtwentyfour @Satsuma Is it? I mean, sure, we could rewrite everything now just for kicks, or we can find a local maximum from what exists. Are we done learning lessons from Mastodon to the point where we should just pour energy into the next thing?

(From my perspective, being ready for the next thing mostly involves a data model that isn't terrible, and developers who are willing to adapt. Trying to predict the next thing in detail seems impossible.)

@onethousandtwentyfour @aschmitz as opposed to like, with Mastodon Gargron has specifically consistently stated that the goal is to replace twitter, which means it needs to be designed for literally everyone who’s currently on twitter, which is a goal thats only possible by prioritizing getting new users over optimizing for the current community. Because the more optimized it is, the more niche it is & the less broad appeal it will have