Comment on The Trouble with Forking Mastodon
mark@programming.dev 6 months ago
As an engineer who’s worked on very large codebases over two decades, I’ve realized that this is so much easier said then done.
If people want to fork Mastodon, great. But they’ll quickly realize that what they make think are straight-forward “improvements” will lead to them having to address bigger architectural issues.
Many design decisions that were made when building Mastodon may not be ideal, but they address a lot of very complex decentralization and federation issues. In software, there is no perfect scenario. Each decision is a trade-off and will have downsides. You just have to decide which of them you’re comfortable with living with.
Thank you for these insights!
Yeah, aside from developer muscle, an effort like this requires deep knowledge of the existing system. Or, failing that, a commitment to learning it.
It’s also not something that can be done as a side project, if it hopes to compete with the main project to the point of replacing it. Something like that requires an ungodly amount of effort and dedication. Someone would have to commit years of their life to solely working on that.
grrgyle@slrpnk.net 6 months ago
This was a huge learning in my journey. Realising that every technical decision is a matter of tradeoffs - that there is no perfect pattern/framework/library/implementation/architecture/whatever.
Once the obviously bad choices have been eliminated.