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Notices by Eliza (Pleroma edition) (elizafox@pleroma.elizafox.space)
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I have been on the Fediverse a good long while. Probably coming up on two years. I remember when Mastodon didn't have CW's. I remember when it didn't have private posts. I remember when Mastodon was made for tech bros, not for minorities. We were a peripherial demographic once upon a time, not the main demographic.
I am agender. I am trans. I am autistic. I'm other things, but those are the biggest three things that define who/what I am. I outlined some other things I am and am not above, so this gives context to my experience. (Before you open your mouth and say or think it, no, I did not come from Tumblr, and in fact, I don't even like Tumblr culture. I actually hate it because it's like the worst parts of the Fediverse concentrated into one place. And no, my gender is not autism.)
The Fediverse has not always been a safe place for me. I have been trolled, harassed, and I've even had outright lies told about me by someone from my past. Which for some reason people actually believe, even though the person in question is a well-known liar and dogpiler. Some of the slip-ups are my fault. I gave the wrong impression or tooted late-nite or under the influence of alcohol when I shouldn't have. Others were not warranted.
I was once told by Alda of witches.town (now gone) that I should jump into traffic. This was shortly before a friend of mine did just that. A friend of mine who left that instance because of that.
I have been dogpiled for not being the right kind of leftist. I've had people try to troll me. I've had times where I've had to step away, for something I thought wouldn't be a hot take. I do not feel safe expressing many sensible and well-intentioned views on the Fediverse, or discussing certain societal problems.
I feel like the fact I participate in the political process and that I'm left of the Berniecrats (and being someone who prefers to work at the ballot box and not with a Molotov cocktail) gets me largely ignored by the Masto political crowd. I'm just not the right kind of leftist. And it's not like the ancaps are gonna like me either. I don't know what it is about the Fediverse, but it attracts political radicals of the intolerant kind.
So yeah, I would not say Masto has been safe for me. I've seen it all. A major part of this is being an admin, and being on the front lines of this stuff, but I am sure ordinary users see it too.
So why do I stay?
Because it's still miles ahead of everything else.
I felt even less safe on Twitter. I definitely do not feel camaraderie or safety on somewhere like Tumblr. I barely venture outside a couple IRC channels. When you're someone like me, you will always be a square peg in a round hole, struggling through life, fucking things up cause you're human, and that includes the flaws.
I still have fun here. But I won't pretend it's been a smooth ride. And I won't abide people claiming it will always be a smooth ride for them either. I know people who've been run off here for transgressions way less bad than mine.
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I wasn't gonna say anything but
Without technical brains to work on the codebase, a fork means nothing, because code is how you fork a project.
Social aspects are vital yes, and many forks die because the social PR and capital aren't there
But you need code too, and without that, forkoff has no prayer to succeed
Yes, project structure is necessary, and yes, Mastodon should really be under the auspices of a foundation for copyright purposes if nothing else
But you can do technical stuff whilst you are doing organisational stuff
You don't have to wait for the paperwork to have a working project structure, and once the paperwork's in, you just assign relevant copyrights to the foundation (with contributor permission, but that's what a CLA is for) and continue operating as normal
What do I know? I've only done this before.
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Someday, mst3k will run on Pleroma if things do not change in Mastodon.
We can't achieve our mission at the Interlinked Foundation with Mastodon. We don't have the resources to run Mastodon instances for other people when we can barely run our own. That's one thing we want to do. And with mst3k taking up so much room, we barely have enough space to run our /back office/ stuff that keeps the organisation together.
We can run 5 Pleroma instances in the space of /one/ Mastodon instance. We can run /40/ if you count the resources to run ElasticSearch properly (sure, you can ghetto rig it, and abuse systemd to restart it when it crashes, but that's stupid and you're a terrible sysadmin if you do this who should stay as far away from any machines I'm responsible for as possible). We can't run ES at mst3k because it would break the bank.
And frankly, we have to (and will continue to) say no to users who want to run Mastodon, because it'll take up too much space. That's just realpolitik. It isn't so much a desire as it is "small non-profit whom 75% of the budget is already in hosting." You know what hosting costs are? Administrative overhead. You know what that means? It's money that's not going towards our mission. It's being dumped into more memory and CPU.
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Oh you know what else I can do? I can make 5,000 character posts. Not 500, 5,000. Sure, that makes it more of a "blogging service" than "microblogging" service, but you know what, I don't care.
And you know what I'm gonna do? Make a long post, because I fucken /can/.
Sure, people might not like this long post, but you know what, maybe Gargron should collapse long posts by default like users have asked for. But of course, "what is input validation" even? What is "listening to your users" even?
Now onto my point:
Without users, your vision doesn't mean shit. Your ideas are nothing more than just that: ideas. As Pleroma improves, Mastodon will be left behind in the dust, simply because Gargron refused to listen to his users and their ideas, with his self-admitted bias against ideas he didn't come up with. Simple things, like it's too resource-hungry, it's too slow, nothing is configurable, etc. Gargron decides everything with Mastodon. Not so with Pleroma. The Pleroma using community decides.
When the community decides what goes into Pleroma, both the community /and/ Pleroma win. When Gargron decides what goes into Mastodon, only Gargron wins.
Just think about that.
As more and more people try out Pleroma, more and more people are going to work on it. It's only going to get better. Mastodon will stagnate as soon as Gargron runs out of ideas, because he doesn't really want to listen to others. It's "his" social media. He only cares about taking on Twitter on his terms. It's an ego trip for him, plain and simple. You are as much of a product as you were for Twitter, except you serve the ego of a man instead of a company's bottom line.
Eliza (Pleroma edition)
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