this post was submitted on 08 May 2024
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The Trouble with Forking Mastodon (wedistribute.org)
submitted 6 months ago by deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
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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.

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[–] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 28 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Akkoma and Pleroma are two popular "Mastodon style" Fediverse apps, I think born out of exactly this type of complaint about Mastodon, which you could get involved with if you wanted to be involved with better software without it being a one-man show.

I think it's made needlessly difficult by how sloppy a protocol ActivityPub is, such that different Fediverse apps can't really interoperate with each other except at a pretty rudimentary level, so you kind of have to pick one of the leading ones and imitate it, in order to be a citizen in its community and not have to build your own little community from scratch. But that's a problem without a real easy solution, I think.

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml 23 points 6 months ago (2 children)

This is a situation that I think will get better in time. There's some really promising efforts involving Fediverse Enhancement Proposals, where multiple projects collaborate on shared ways of doing things. Some of these behaviors are getting studied and standardized by the larger SocialCG entity, as well.

There's also a lot of promising development behind a Fediverse Testing Suite. If we can develop a platform-agnostic testing system for people to build against, it will potentially become the new development standard, rather than optimizing for Mastodon and nothing else.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 4 points 6 months ago

If we can develop a platform-agnostic testing system for people to build against, it will potentially become the new development standard, rather than optimizing for Mastodon and nothing else

Well, unless interoperating exclusively/mostly with mastodon is still substantially incentivised because of its size. Hopefully mastodon comply with the testing suite’s standard, but I can see that being a slow process, and I can also see grey areas persisting.

[–] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 2 points 6 months ago

Yeah agreed. In particular I really like that feditest exists even if I haven't done anything to check it out / learn about it for myself yet.

[–] taladar@sh.itjust.works 19 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I don't really see the point in forking a project like Mastodon unless you are already deeply involved with its development. It doesn't do enough that you couldn't rewrite it better (as in in a way you understand better and with lessons from the original taken into account) in the time it would take you to fully understand all the details of the existing code base.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 2 points 6 months ago

Yea agreed. It’s not the forking that matters though IMO, it’s the commitment to a true and stable alternative, whatever the best way to that is.

[–] RobotToaster@mander.xyz 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Mastodon lacks a lot of basic features, like full text search.

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml 11 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It actually does have that nowadays, it's just that the feature requires Elasticsearch to work, which is one extra piece of infra for admins to worry about.

[–] taladar@sh.itjust.works 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It is about as common as using a database server for content though to use something like ES, Solr or similar software for search.

[–] dnzm@feddit.nl 1 points 6 months ago

It absolutely is. Yet, as Sean said, it's also yet another bit of software to run and maintain, and ES is known to be a bit of an effort to keep going well.

Admins having only finite amounts of time and/or resources, might make the very understandable decision to leave it out.

[–] fubarx@lemmy.ml 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

The article didn't really explain what was so controversial about Mastodon? Last I heard, they created a U.S. non-profit. Did I miss something?

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml 8 points 6 months ago

Most of the backlash pertains to the board members appointed to the new nonprofit. One of the members is a lawyer that has defended crypto and AI companies, another is ex-Twitter angel investor Biz Stone.

Mastodon's community usually has some kind of vague beef about one thing or another when it comes to Eugen and the decisions he makes for the project, whether it's a new feature or a design change or that he didn't do something that other projects wanted to do.

[–] caos@metalhead.club 6 points 6 months ago (2 children)

@deadsuperhero There are several forks of Mastodon that have been around for years and work well (not only #Hometown) like #Ecko, #Glitchsoc, etc. for years.

https://joinfediverse.wiki/What_is_Mastodon%3F#What_are_Mastodon_forks_and_why_use_them?

They have many more functions such as editable character limit,
editable poll options, local posts, changeable favicon, markdown formatting - and if that's not enough, there is plenty of other software in the Fediverse for micro- and macroblogging

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml 6 points 6 months ago

Yeah, if you read the article, Hometown and Glitch actually get mentioned. The criticism is not about making a fork to do your own thing... but, instead, about trying to compete with Mastodon directly.

Doing that kind of fork (which is what people are calling for) requires a tremendous amount of coordination, effort, and commitment that cannot be done casually.

[–] damon@lemmy.world 2 points 6 months ago

Those aren’t the kind of forks that this article is addressing

[–] delirious_owl@discuss.online 4 points 6 months ago (3 children)

What did nextcloud fork?

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 8 points 6 months ago

The original project was called Owncloud and was made largely by the same people, but they split over a disagreement in management.

[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 6 points 6 months ago

Owncloud

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml 6 points 6 months ago

Nextcloud is a fork of Owncloud. IMO, as a product Nextcloud is superior in every way.