your five year reminder that MOURNING MASTODON was a response to techbros PAYING EUGEN MONEY so he wouldn't have to listen to queer people anymore
it was a response to CHANGING MATERIAL ECONOMIC CONDITIONS REGARDING MASTODON DEVELOPMENT not simply about “culture shock” or whatever lmao
recognizing that queer people were the reason Mastodon's featureset was (and is) what it is, we hoped to formalize power structures which had previously been informal so that Eugen couldn’t do shit like “get rid of unlisted privacy setting” without oversight
@maloki led that charge and you can see her recent posts for more on how it went; i won’t try to summarize it here
HOWEVER in the time since then, we have also had new projects spring up in the form of GlitchSoc and Hometown; please please support these as they are the future of Mastodon development
also, if you want to get to work on a queer trans fork, @ me
(for clarity: GlitchSoc is already a queer trans fork; i mean a slightly harder queer trans fork which is friends with GlitchSoc and Hometown but isn’t as concerned with upstream compatibility)
@Lady I'm pretty sure glitch.social is a very queer trans form... :D
@maloki definitely; i think it's in a difficult situation though because claire really wants to maintain upstream compatibility and that limits what you can do
i respect it a lot, but also don't care as much about staying with upstream, and i think that gives us more options…
in particular i think the actual development experience/workflow right now is kind of hostile and difficult to onboard new people into (the mastodon codebase is a mess…) but you can't fix that without breaking compatibility with upstream mastodon
@Lady super valid.
maybe specify hard fork?
@Lady i never knew this
@aescling yeah i don't think i ever stated it explicitly because we were walking a delicate balance and didn't want to be like “the trans shadow cabinet is being outbid” lol
but i wrote the piece in response to conversations with shel (who was in that discord channel) about eugen just like. not listening to them anymore
@aescling also i'm more of a marxist now than i was then
@Lady ngl i never picked up on (or, at least, remembered) that part. (i remember the idea that the queers were getting pushed out from development concerns though)
in the early months of development there was a SPECIAL DISCORD CHANNEL that if you paid enough on Eugen’s Patreon you could get access to in order to advocate new features. prior to April 2017 this channel was significantly queer. after April 2017 Eugen found other funding sources in the form of white techbros.
THAT’S WHAT IT’S ABOUT