I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say you’re both wrong. Here me out.
As other commenters have said, there should never be any expectation of privacy on the fediverse. DMs here and private items are not actually private, they’re quite literally blasted out to anyone who listens. I feel like I have to say that a lot. I actually like how Lemmy handles it, it warns you that it’s unencrypted and that it recommends Matrix (and you can put your matrix handle on your profile).
However. I’m also disillusioned by Dansup. He made a great project with Pixelfed. It got off the ground and has a great following. However, I’ve read through the code, I’ve tried to spin it up, hell even tried to help contribute - but it’s a spaghetti’d mess of unmaintainable code. What irks me is rather than dive in and fix the code, help those who honestly want to spin up his projects, he starts a completely separate project (off the same spaghetti’d base that barely scales), and goes on a whole PR junket talking about it. Then when I see people asking questions of his code or how to do things he usually jumps down their throats - or completely ignores them.
And honestly the biggest thing that irked me was that I didn’t feel he gave credit to the hundreds - thousands of other people who work to make the fediverse work. Pixelfed is a great experience - but it’s one of many all working together, and the developers are a huge chunk, but you have the infrastructure, us admins hosting, those out there vocalizing it, those trying to start communities, it’s an ecosystem, and I just felt like he ignored the fediverse and instead pushed Pixelfed.
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 1 week ago
What parts of the codebase did you look at and not like how they were implemented?
Why is it a problem if he makes server software and then publicizes it? Like can you show a couple of examples of authors of some other software who are giving credit to the hundreds - thousands of other people, and how they are giving credit? What are they doing differently than Dansup?
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 1 week ago
A great example is his handling of Laravel, scaling, and Docker. It’s pretty clear that he doesn’t have a huge understanding of Docker - or at least hasn’t managed docker images at scale. A huge thing there that I ran into constantly is that the Pixelfed containers both are 1) Stateful and worse than that 2) depend on each other’s volumes. This means that the Pixelfed containers must share the same host as it’s workers. He put a lot of time and effort into building scripts that would simplify the setup for a docker compose file, but never thought horizontally - scaling these containers out on a cluster or separating workers off away from the web-api nodes at all.
I spent 3 weeks trying to de-tangle that all and got nowhere. I’ve been watching the guys over at glitch-fed ( a fork of pixelfed ), and from what I see they’re trying to do the same thing. I wish them godspeed. Until then, I can’t recommend Pixelfed as it just can’t horizontally scale. Sure you can throw a more expensive machine at the problem, but that’s not a fix.
As for the last, I don’t have any examples - and I think that’s because no one else has gone on a press junket like he has. The owners of Mastodon started a foundation a while back, I think that’s the most official news I’ve heard out of them. I think that’s what bothered me - for the vast majority of people that was their first chance to hear about the open web. Instead of saying “We have a thing called the fediverse. I’ll spare you the details but you can choose Pixelfed, Mastodon, even Wordpress or many others, and they all work together”. Instead all I heard anywhere was Pixelfed. Feel free to call BS there, maybe he did somewhere and I just missed it.
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 1 week ago
“Doesn’t scale because the containers are set up wrong” is different from “unmaintainable code” though. What of the code was bad? I’ve looked at a bunch of fedi projects and Pixelfed didn’t strike me as either particularly good or particularly bad.
?
I mean, that is sort of what I expected. Mastodon doesn’t publicize Wordpress. Lemmy doesn’t publicize mbin. They all, mostly, mention a little bit of the context that they can interoperate with other federated services, but it doesn’t strike me as weird or malicious that someone would write a project and then promote that project. That sounds normal.
Actually, both Mastodon and Lemmy chose to implement sort of their own versions of ActivityPub, and that actually does strike me as selfish behavior. It means that mostly they are their own independent platforms that run “on top of” ActivityPub instead of enabling full interoperation with the other stuff. Doing it that way was hard to avoid, because the design of ActivityPub to me isn’t great, but this situation is actually a perfect example of that: Mastodon implemented a new feature in a way that would break (in a really jarring privacy-violating-to-some-extent way) until everyone else copied their implementation exactly. I’m not aware of Pixelfed doing anything like that. Mastodon and Lemmy can both get away with presenting themselves as “the fediverse” and forcing everyone else into copying one implementation or the other if they want things to actually work, and they both show very little interest in making it easy. If you want to pick out sins of various fedi projects to start to point out that are disrespecting the other projects in the space, something like that is where I would start.
Microw@lemm.ee 1 week ago
Everyone I ever talked to told me “well yes we have to implement our own version of ActivityPub because AP is under-defined”. In most cases it is defined what AP does, but not how. Therefore individual programers go in and figure out on their own how a certain thing they are building for their platform should be structured in AP.
Now, every project could simply go “I will copy the way Pixelfed implements it”. But why should PF have that priviledge?
ThorrJo@lemmy.sdf.org 1 week ago
You ever notice how Gargron refers to the fediverse as “the Mastodon network?”
He’s been doing things this way since 2017 at least. At this point, any longtime observer really has no other choice but to consider the behavior deliberate.
rikudou@lemmings.world 1 week ago
Using Laravel as a framework should be the first red flag, I yet have to meet a Laravel dev who understands architecture (and I interviewed quite a bit of them). That framework is several anti-patterns bundled into a nice package.
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 1 week ago
I mean, I completely agree but last time I said that people flamed me over it. If it was still 2013 then I’d look more into it, but today it’s such a monolithic architecture