Post 9iiDLKoE6HDCD2eIzo by msh@coales.co
(DIR) More posts by msh@coales.co
(DIR) Post #9ihpPwRvhMPbCusrbc by alana@the.giant.horse
2019-05-11T15:39:54Z
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still thinking about open source contributions that aren’t code and really focusing on design. in my time at the LF — which does serve a need, but only because: capitalism — i often felt like folks were almost TOO “deep in” to see little things that i felt were obvious.everyone shouting “well if we don’t establish a shared governance committee to ensure future interoperability of the underlying frameworks.…!” and i’m like “ok wild idea here but what if the apps weren’t hard to use and ugly”
(DIR) Post #9ihpPwjIemJ44n0jgG by 361.xj9@social.sunshinegardens.org
2019-05-11T16:13:39.105240Z
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@alana > governance optimistic merging works better http://hintjens.com/blog:106
(DIR) Post #9ihzNDW6miiGoWB5xw by alana@the.giant.horse
2019-05-11T15:42:03Z
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it often feels like open source people are living on another planet. the linux foundation has a 50% figured-out reality: they have realized it is helpful to have a logo, and perhaps 2 accent colors.
(DIR) Post #9ihzNDmlmm2ZeByOw4 by alana@the.giant.horse
2019-05-11T15:45:34Z
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https://openlogos.org/ is an example that made me really happy. if you’re a graphic design student, teacher or hobbyist, why not make every one of your projects address an open source project that has no visual identity?
(DIR) Post #9ii8TjB0t2E6KVUSIq by alana@the.giant.horse
2019-05-11T17:45:41Z
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i totally get that many many open source software projects are spun out from internal corporate projects, where there was a need for a name and little else. then, when they are transitioned to become OSS, they get some visual treatment.might be interesting to see if homegrown OSS projects who experiment with “friendliness-first”, “UX-first” compete better with corporate OSS, who do that work last
(DIR) Post #9ii8TjKwI8AMpI8Nm4 by alana@the.giant.horse
2019-05-11T17:48:18Z
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why did mastodon take off so much more than (for example) friendica did? was it timing? did specific types of evangelists do specific things? could one factor have been its comparatively strong visual identity and messaging?
(DIR) Post #9ii8TjYPU2wRV4R8ls by bob@soc.freedombone.net
2019-05-11T18:10:39.328022Z
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@alana I think it was a combination of factors, including timing.Some ads were placed on Twitter around about March 2017 and they appeared to get the attention of mainstream tech journos. The mainstream journos trying it out and writing"Mastodon is dead" or "this will never work" type articles then kicked off a lot of interest in the project.If Mastodon had been released a year earlier the journos might not have been so interested, but by 2017 the badness of sites like Twitter was beginning to be more obvious to more users. Another factor which I think was important was that Mastodon had been branded as being "like Twitter but without the Nazis". Whether that was really the case though is debatable, but it was a slogan with resonance.The reason why the Friendica and Hubzilla systems didn't gain nearly so many users despite having more features and better privacy controls is that they're much more complex. Grokking Mastodon was already a stretch for the mainstream journos even though it looked and behaved quite similarly to Tweetdeck. Something like Hubzilla by comparison is a mind-blowing paradigm shift entirely outside of their usual Sillicon Valley or Web 2.0 mode of thinking.
(DIR) Post #9ii8Tjq8Q97UO2jIOm by alana@the.giant.horse
2019-05-11T19:03:40Z
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@bob all that tracks for me. good take.one thing i often wonder about this dynamic (when a relative latecomer gains the largest OSS community/“ecosystem”) is: why not improve friendica or hubzilla? is it not a somewhat capitalist-thinking move to build one’s own thing instead of improving the existing thing? or, do the creators truly have a strongly differing vision, enough to justify “splitting the market” of prospective fediversians?
(DIR) Post #9ii8TkKGc7DrtUpMMi by alana@the.giant.horse
2019-05-11T19:05:24Z
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@bob i suppose my more pointed take would be:do developers of activitypub-based community platforms want activitypub to succeed? do they want the bulk of social media users to abandon surveillance-capitalist sites? or do they want to build a successful product, above those other concerns
(DIR) Post #9ii8TkcLWtgUnZHnXs by bob@soc.freedombone.net
2019-05-11T19:16:52.876831Z
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@alana They might not be highly invested in ActivityPub. If a different protocol arrived which had advantages and was simple to implement and an open standard made by an organization like W3C then I expect it would be used in preference.Do the developers of Mastodon and Pleroma and Pixelfed want to succeed? Yes I expect so, although success does not necessarily mean becoming billionaires or entirely replacing Twitter. Perhaps Twitter just becomes like MySpace is now: still around but mostly ignored.
(DIR) Post #9ii8TkokmlbpQ35hsu by cwebber@octodon.social
2019-05-11T19:23:58Z
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@bob @alana I think even those of us who want activitypub to succeed want it to succeed because it's a means to an end, not an end itself :)
(DIR) Post #9ii8TlC9NmKAac2OLw by msh@coales.co
2019-05-11T19:47:06Z
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Yeah what @cwebber said.The developers of projects that implement ActivityPub are doing so to enhance the appeal of their project and make the project succeed, not to make the protocol more popular. The protocol is just the means. The end goal is to foster deeper interactions between platforms and hosts--to make the World Wide Web actually like the web it was intended to be.If we all just worked on one AP project there would be no diversity and the end goal wouldn't be met.@bob @alana
(DIR) Post #9iiAAkF2u1As2US72e by alana@the.giant.horse
2019-05-11T20:06:09Z
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@msh @cwebber @bob i get the diff between protocols and clients etc; my poorly-worded point was more that without an over-arching shared goal or centralization around a uniquely important shared component, development can become more competitive than cooperative, reducing efficiency; reducing the likelihood of addressing a large group of users
(DIR) Post #9iiD8axSkPCCWutWiG by HarneyBA@pleroma.site
2019-05-11T20:39:26.756621Z
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@alana well Vice & some other big tech blog did have a "hey guys look at this twitter clone haha" article that was newer than 5 years old
(DIR) Post #9iiDCd1L1MqE5Kd9Si by vulcao@jorts.horse
2019-05-11T16:07:30Z
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@alana FOSS nerds prefer things that are hard to use out of some sense of superiority they feel when they finally figure it out and in the same breath bemoan that no one uses FOSS and everyone prefers the closed source privately funded alternative that hired one UI/UX person and a graphic designer.
(DIR) Post #9iiDCdFs9KT2oPQl7I by endomain@hackers.town
2019-05-11T16:12:53Z
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@vulcao @alana They also have people like me who genuinely have no idea what people find hard or easy. What folks like me gotta remember is that we're lucky enough to be extraordinarily fluent with computers, but this makes it nearly impossible to have sympathy with people who do not. As such, we should rely on folks who have a more balanced perspective rather than expecting everyone in the world to rewrite their lives to be digital natives. Anything less is classist at best.
(DIR) Post #9iiDCdU3IboHWO45Dc by crispy@cybre.space
2019-05-11T20:20:39Z
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@endomain @vulcao @alana Well said. For perspective, I know many younger devs in their teens - 30s who are domain specialists: good at writing machine learning models or doing frontend websites, but know almost no bash/Make/Linux. Give them a repo with a Makefile as the way to build something, or anything with bash scripts that require tweaking and they're immediately defeated.
(DIR) Post #9iiDLKoE6HDCD2eIzo by msh@coales.co
2019-05-11T20:41:40Z
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@alana @cwebber @bob "...centralization around a uniquely important shared component..."Centralization to forward the goals of federation.Ya gotta be cruel to be kind, in the right measure 😂 I think I get what you're saying though. Sabotaging interoperability in pursuit of market share the way IE did then and the way Chrome does now has caused great damage to the web.I hope this doesn't become a problem with ActivityPub (I hope Gargron keeps that in mind especially)
(DIR) Post #9iiDZ3QZWMwKM77vm4 by SanfordianPhil@radical.town
2019-05-11T17:52:04Z
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@alana I can only answer for why I liked it enough to stay 1. A community that was already here2. A large enough influx of people that I didn't have to fight my way into being accepted as we were all new3. Community standards that were much more friendly to my mental health (CWs so I could choose not to engage with topics I didn't want to or couldn't, a friendly atmosphere, nazis chased off for the most part)
(DIR) Post #9iiDZ3gAaNPt8UQO5Q by alana@the.giant.horse
2019-05-11T17:58:25Z
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@SanfordianPhil the community part is really the ticket, imho. internal corporate projects — even corporate OSS — pay their first users to build, use, and maintain them. those people “get good” and carry that skill with them. when the project is open sourced, they are the first class of power users.comparatively, homegrown OSS can theoretically build diverse communities of users and developers from release 0.9 !! [redacted BDFL* rant]* “benevolent dictator for life”
(DIR) Post #9iiDju70UqAseK9JDM by Guinevere@mastodon.astral-gate.network
2019-05-11T15:46:27Z
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@alanaWhy does everyone prefer the pretty thing? I don't get it?????*The pretty thing one-click installs*
(DIR) Post #9iiECCtYFtCZ0oLqOe by HarneyBA@pleroma.site
2019-05-11T20:51:18.318771Z
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@alana "they realized it is helpful to have a logo"/g/ confirmed smarter than the linux foundation
(DIR) Post #9iiXdJfp3ikmz1ZOoi by maiyannah@community.highlandarrow.com
2019-05-11T20:22:03+00:00
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@bob @alana@the.giant.horse If we consider something made by the W3C to be legitimate, we already have problems.
(DIR) Post #9iiXdJxC18eFqthGtM by bob@soc.freedombone.net
2019-05-11T20:59:34.064576Z
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@maiyannah @alana Substitute W3C with a preferred standards organization or RFC
(DIR) Post #9iiXdK8BMHRGOyq31M by maiyannah@community.highlandarrow.com
2019-05-12T00:23:58+00:00
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@bob @alana@the.giant.horse I have dealt with a great number of different professional standards associations in my time, having worn a lot of hats, and while some are better than others none of them are really satisfactory.