Gonna be kicking myself for years that we didn't get anywhere with the governance problem before all *gestures at everything, especially thinking of the flipboard client just now* this, happened.
@gaditb who is your “we”
@Lady The collective effort of everyone who wanted it improved. (I BARELY helped that effort, if at all.)
And the failure is that Gargron is still uncomplicatedly BDFL of the main project that is conceptually defining the space.
@gaditb hm, but what if i think the lack of definition and organization regarding specific “we”s is what ultimately prevented us from building solidarity across those differences and putting a better system in place
@Lady Well, I wouldn't disagree with that, really. And certainly at least, to whatever extent I DID disagree with any of that, wouldn't be disagreeing from a place of any particular expertise, experience, or deep thinking.
(I think the unbacked quibbles I might have would be that even if any "we" had tried been more organized, there also wasn't really any specific thoughts put in the air about what specific system, either,
and also quibbling with phrasing it as "solidarity" -- I feel like you can build strategic political power with solidarity, but I'm not sure you can build governance with it.)
re:①, i think the specific thoughts need to decend from material conditions which can only be analysed from the standpoint of a certain class. one of the big flaws in mastodon design from the beginning has been the assumption that all users are equivalent and have interchangeable needs, and i think step one should have been identifying actual classes of user, figuring out what their actual needs are, and then negotiating from there a system which can serve them
re:②, in my experience i think getting political power is the harder problem. there definitely were people thinking and talking about governance structures but none of them ever went anywhere because there was no power to execute on them
