I recently learned of some drama that was sweeping Mastodon (and still is). The tl;dr version is that the SerenityOS project wrote some alternative web engine, ladybird, that recently became a more independent project. The Mastoqeers (great term btw, basically sums up the group) are malding really hard apparently due to the fact that the project lead/maintainers don’t want political shilling in their project/code contributions. To quote from the project’s contribution guidelines:
This is a purely technical project. As such, it is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics or religious beliefs. Any changes that appear ideologically motivated will be rejected.
This in its own right is a entirely fair desire for a project. The focus is writing software, not parading some political point. This concept unfortunately is impossible for the average Mastodon user to understand and it is the reason why many really really don’t like interacting with its users. For instance, take some words straight from the man who made SerenityOS:
I find this quote very ironic but also quite vindicating. Mastodon was originally one of those “alternative” platforms that claimed it was better than the alternative at the time, X formerly twitter. It was a small project back in 2016, but nearly 8 years later it is quite big, yet it seemingly has gotten worse than twitter as far as the community is concerned. Drama like this happens every couple of months, and if you don’t side with the mastoqueer variant of the story, you will basically be booted off the network. There is this very pandering culture that exists around the LGBTQ+ community that unironically controls how discourse plays out on these platforms. You cannot criticize this group or have good faith discussion around them, because you’ll be stepping on the toes of somebody. Its a very awful place to be if you are just looking for a half decent time.
The irony in this is that I would not call twitter “optimistic”, in fact, twitter is borderline insufferable. It goes to show how the community of mastodon has shaped how others view it; How its community is holding it back preventing it from being a viable alternative to top-level social media. It basically is the same as twitter, but worse. The tl;dr is: If you don’t align with these people in every way, you will be kicked out. There are no second chances, there is no redemption. Thus why it cant ever be viable. On the other hand it seems like misskey and pleroma are gaining more users by the day, and overall the communities around these instances are thriving. Best of all, they don’t have all of this pointless drama surrounding them. How ironic.
I also don’t really feel like linking most of the discussion, but you can easily find it if you take a look at profiles of fairly known ““developers”” within this sphere (mainly fosstodon.org and treehouse.systems users).
