The Trouble with Forking Mastodon

Comments

• 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.

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  • grrgyle@slrpnk.net ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    There’s no such thing as perfect software.

    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.

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  • deadsuperhero@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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• aasatru@kbin.earth ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  If anything, this proves that forking Mastodon is a great idea. Not because any useful software would come out of it, but it would distract some of the annoying armchair managers out there.

  The biggest problem with Mastodon isn't the lack of feature X or the presence of feature Y; it's those exact assholes, draining the energy and enthusiasm from anything that crosses their path while scaring away anyone looking for a meaningful conversation.

  I hate to break it to you, but if you genuinely think you've figured it all out, chances are you're a fucking moron.

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  • CMLVI@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    This is my thought as well. The whole point of this system is that if you feel like you have better choices and ability, you are well within your rights to spin up your own instance and manage it, and make your own choices. Just follow the standards, and you should be able to integrate with existing platforms. They are free to defederate, but that’s their call to do so. It’s always been a tradeoff, and one of the big things with Reddit is that, even to a point now, it’s Reddit or nothing. With federated sites, leaving a platform isn’t starting completely over like it is leaving Reddit.

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• Blaze@reddthat.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It’s interesting to see how challenging it is to fork Mastodon while Misskey must have 10 active forks at the moment

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  • deadsuperhero@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Misskey is a little bit odd, in the sense that there’s constantly new forks in various stages of development. New forks emerge just as quickly as old ones die off.

    It may be that the frontend and backend both being written in one language helps make the system easier to hack on. I can’t say for sure. What’s weird is that some of these forks go in really odd directions, like rewriting the whole backend in a different programming language.

    The other thing is that, despite their proliferation, the effort is somewhat fragmented into all of these little projects. I’m not sure how viable any of these forks are in the long term.

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• Alice@hilariouschaos.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  How many pensis do you see ?

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