Can Mastodon be trusted to implement such a feature when it seems to be doing it reluctantly?

I'm very sad to read this.

A personal response here "wearing my heart on my sleeve" and in a defensive, but forward-looking, manner.

We're in the (yes, admittedly, extended) process of being more transparent and open, in our processes and feature development. Part of that has been our voluntary annual reports; monthly engineering blog series; showing up to meet folks at Fediforum and FOSDEM etc; and the announced change of org and governance structure to a non-profit foundation in the EU. A huge part is also working with other fedi projects to discuss ideas and proposals like this one, so that they are not sudden surprises and so that we can demonstrate our thought processes and values. That's perhaps not always what you might have seen from the project in the past.

We absolutely have been consulting with different communities - including those you've identified - although I'm not about to share individual identities without their express permission. My perspective - and as many of you will know, I come from a very different social media background, but with an ongoing open source and community-driven mindset - we learned a lot from those conversations. Having changed our collective position on this feature, we've taken the time to think about things, and we're not "doing it reluctantly", we're enthusiastic about the opportunity to use what we've learned.

There's really an incredible number of things to juggle as we move Mastodon forward. I've been working with open source (and closed source) projects for ~20 years and this is at the top end of the range of challenges I've had, with a small team on a widely-deployed, highly used, interoperable open platform. We cannot always do things as fast as everyone would like, and sometimes we also have to make choices that disappoint some folks: implementing every possible or proposed feature or change would cause technical debt to balloon and the function of the platform to be hidden by different bells and whistles.

Can you trust Mastodon to implement the proposed FEP? Did we need to propose an FEP, or should we have gone ahead and built something that others never had a chance to comment on or make suggestions towards? In the end, we have to make choices, or nothing moves forward. So, we're sharing our work, and then we have to make some decisions, and build things. I can't make you trust us, but I can tell you what we're doing, and you can make your own choices.

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Now, with that set of directional and philosophical statements made, the purpose of this thread is to discuss the technical content of the FEP proposal, rather than if/when the feature is implemented in Mastodon or other Fediverse software. There may be a better place to hold conversations about direction of individual projects in the ecosystem. We'll respond to FEP related comments above when we're able (not everyone is available at all times).