Service expectations carrying over from corporate platforms
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Continuing the discussion from The relationship between animation and music:
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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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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.
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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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.
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, and Don't tell people "it's easy" goes into
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](https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt, 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 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).
