Continuing the discussion from The relationship between animation and music:
I’ve been using the fediverse fairly consistently since before Mastodon existed, so I’ve been around for numerous waves of immigration from corporate platforms. I’ve definitely noticed that the space gets a bit more combative for a while after each one. I think @Roberta nails the reason for that.
Along similar lines - and I definitely noticed this after Eternal November - many people come with a set of preconceptions about how governance works, and how to change it. They’re used to being subject to the absolute dictatorship of platform landlords, who generally don’t care what the community of people using their platform need or want. So unless it helps those landlords with growth or profitability, the only way to get anything changed is to relentlessly brigade them, and publicly shame them if they don’t capitulate quickly.
Many platform immigrants to the verse seem to bring these assumptions with them. So when a new wave of immigration begins, maintainers of fediverse software and services have to brace themselves for another few months of being ruthlessly brigaded, and publicly shamed. It must be quite upsetting, and exhausting for them.
I know I do. I’m involved in fediverse.party, and I do a lot of volunteer onboarding during these immigration waves. So I end up getting a lot of grief for “fedisplaining”, when I try to explain the fundamental differences between platform governance and network governance. In the hopes that people will stop harassing the volunteers who maintain key fediverse projects, and find more friendly and constructive ways to express their needs.
I think Dansup in particular cops of lot of flack, being the maintainer of one of the 3 most-mentioned fediverse apps (PixelFed), and a number of other projects (FediDB, fediverse.info). So I totally understand him being a bit touchy about criticism at the moment.
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My personal outsider perspective is that a lot of that mismatch of expectations is originating from different knowledge and technical skills. Ppl are expecting things to work from one corner and ppl are expecting you figure things out from another corner and there is very little common ground between these two ways of thinking. I feel I’ve seen something similar in the FOSS community. For the computer enthusiasts the fact that there are about kazillion different highly configurable linux distributions out there is very positive thing - you can choose the system most suitable for your needs and moods and then modify it even further.
For a person who knows nothing about the operating systems and just wants to get rid of the windows, linux is a hellscape where nothing really works, you have to sudo everything and you are expected to reverse engineer the drivers of your audio interface to write some music. For them it’s just weird that linux community has not been able to come together around one distribution that would have full software suite and extensive driver basis supported by all of this time and energy linux ppl have in their hands. I would argue that most ppl do not have that time and energy so after few attempts they go back to windows.
I reconcile there is no common ground between these two worlds and it’s almost impossible even to explain a linux person that what they do is the opposite for what the wan’t to achieve with the FOSS movement. I feel fediverse is in similar situation. Linux is the best advertisement for windows at the moment and fediverse is the best advertisement for threads, twitter, facebook, bluesky and youtube.
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Yeah, I think that long-timers really don’t understand just how confusing things are for new people. On Mastodon for example everybody’s internalized the “if you click a link and it takes you to another, just cut-and-paste the URL to the search box” trick, and of course you don’t see all the conversation because of how federation works so you have to remember to check the original post, etc etc. In A faux “Eternal September” turns into flatness I wrote
“Accuracy aside, the analogy to Eternal September highlights the gatekeeping and disdainful attitude many (although certainly not all) long-time Mastodonians had for newcomers. In The Year September Never Ended in net.wars (1997), Wendy Grossman had noted that “AOLers weren’t (necessarily) stupid; they were software-disadvantaged.” The same is true for newcomers to Mastodon. Mastodon’s official mobile apps are medicore, and Mastodon’s web UI has some very rough edges and counter-intuitive functionality – even for somebody like me who’s been using it for years.
Ernie Smith’s No More Eternal Septembers discusses the gatekeeping aspects of the term in more detail.
It’s complex, because it’s certainly true that newcomers bring some unhelpful habits from old social media – for example not putting alt-text on images. It would be great to find ways to help them realize that’s not how we want to do things here. But long-timers have some problematic habits too, and not just the gatekeeping. In Erin Kissane’s Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn’t, an informal survey of why people bounced from Mastodon, the #1 item on the list was “got yelled at, felt bad”. And Don’t tell people “it’s easy” goes into detail on one specific bad habit.
More positively, though, federated music platforms haven’t yet experienced this mass influx, so have a chance to avoid these problems!
Specifically in terms of maintainers taking heat, I don’t think that’s where most of the criticism comes from. Instead, it’s from long-timers. Looking at Dan, for example, the person who highlighted that he still hasn’t done the necessary recovery from the security bug has been active here since 2017 if not longer; the people I see regularly highlighting his history of anti-Blackness are long-timers; and most of the people who signed onto the letter urging NLNet to pull their funding for Loops have been around for a while. Of course Dan gets a lot of appreciation from old-timers too; many don’t know about this history, others know about some of it and see his contributions as more important (and even the open letter highlighted his many contributions).
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For the record, I haven’t thoroughly investigated every piece of scuttlebutt that’s ever been spread about Dansup. But some of the claims in the NlNet letter are trivial to debunk. The most obvious example being;
“dansup seems presently uninterested in open-sourcing Loops, promising that it will become OSS when stable.”
It’s not unusual to do initial development in private, then start publishing code when some degree of stability is reached. Source code for Loops - both the app and server components - is now available under AGPLv3. So given that some of the antipathy against Dansup is transparently bad faith, you’ll forgive me for being sceptical.
EDIT: Back in March, the developers working on adding ActivityPub to Ghost talked about their reasons for not providing documentation for self-hosters yet. They “build in public”, publishing code as they go, but they only release documentation when prototyping on new features is done. Dansup’s dump-over-the-wall approach to releasing code is not uncommon, But for the same reasons. Especially when the developer is copping a lot of flack and trying to reduce vectors for harrassment.
Other examples of ruthless brigading, based on hyperbole or blatant disinformation about fediverse developers, include what happened to the FediLab developers, and the vitriol directed at Ryan for including BlueSky accounts in BridgyFed. The most shocking to me so far was the treatment of the Content Nation developer, who was a newbie trying to learn how to use federation.
For anyone who interprets the use of the phrase “Eternal November” as gatekeeping, a little history …
“Eternal September” names a pattern of intentional culture shift, in response to growing interest and participation in open internet discussion spaces. In 1993, instead of focusing all their onboarding efforts on the month of September, USENET and email admins, mods and community leaders realised they needed to be doing it all year round.
Similarly, “Eternal November” reminds us of the time when this dynamic came to the fediverse. When the periodic waves of new arrivals from DataFarming platforms became a pretty much constant influx, and we had to update our onboarding strategy to adapt.
Here’s a quote from a 2020 article about Eternal September ;
“Some of the larger providers, such as America Online have not received a very warm welcome to the network (note the formation of the alt.aol-sucks newsgroup.) This reaction does not necessarily stem from elitism, but from a genuine fear that as more and more users appear, Usenet will fall apart. Indeed, this is a valid concern. The current system is not designed for the commercial-oriented direction the Internet is now taking.”
This is remarkably similar to how the Anti-Meta Fediverse Pact treats the people using Threads, and mass defederations of other platforms, including Minds. Whereas those of us who talk about Eternal November tend to be the ones arguing against this kind of gatekeeping.
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With Dan, my point was that I don’t agree with your original framing of “so when a new wave of immigration begins, maintainers of fediverse software and services have to brace themselves for another few months of being ruthlessly brigaded, and publicly shamed.” The critiques of Dan – and Ryan, and Content Nation – came from long-timers, not newcomers.
In terms of Threads, there certainly was some unfortunate (and often racialized) disdain for Instagram users in terms of people’s reactions – classic gatekeeping. The Anti-Meta FediPact though was much more in terms of opposing Threads because of who runs it. Here’s the reasons Vanta Black gave for it in Why? …
they won’t moderate effectively, there is precedent with facebook being a toxic cesspit of hate
they have a long track record of pure evil and we have no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt
to protect the existing communities of marginalized people on the fediverse, many of whom rely on it to survive
So I see it more as analogous to fedi’s response to Gab. Of course as Wendy Grossman points out the original “Eternal September” discussions also included “resentment of any hint of commercializing the Internet” so that’s somewhat analogous, but in general fedi has been fairly welcoming to Flipboard, Ghost, Wordpress joining; Threads is (quite rightly in my book) seen differently.
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