Earlier this month, the Mastodon project announced a new initiative funded by NGI Search: Fediverse Discovery Providers! The goal is to build a resource framework for different kinds of services that can work with potentially any instance or platform.

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[–] SmokeInFog@midwest.social 26 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Why are you interpreting this as a power grab?

[–] 0x1C3B00DA@fedia.io 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Mastodon has a history of steamrolling other implementations.

This means we might not always be able to incorporate all the feedback we get into the very first draft of everything we publish

The site even warns that theyre on a deadline and may not incorporate feedback.

EDIT: they also mention a "setting" that determines if a user/post is searchable. theyve presented a FEP to formalize this setting but nearly everyone else had issues with their proposal. as usual for mastodon, this looks like them sidestepping external feedback and just doing what they want

[–] DarkThoughts@fedia.io 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

*into the first release. Not just cherry picking statements but also failing to explain how that is a power grab.

[–] 0x1C3B00DA@fedia.io 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I didn't cherry pick a statement. I included the part where they said the very first draft.

I did fail to explain how its a power grab, but that's was only because I thought it was a fairly obvious one-to-one point. I've also added another example. But lemme try again.

Mastodon has a history of pushing features that affect interop with other implementations without seeking feedback from other implementations or outright ignoring the feedback they do receive.
A member of the mastodon team wrote a FEP to formalize a setting related to search indexing. This was the right way to go about it. yey Mastodon was working with other implementations. But that FEP didn't receive positive feedback and it seems like it was abandoned.
Now mastodon is trying to standardize something using the ideas from that FEP, outside of the FEP process (which is the agreed upon way to collaborate between implementers).
They're warning on their site that they have deadlines and may not incorporate feedback if they can't resolve it without breaking deadlines.
They are under no obligation to incorporate it after their initial draft and, historically, mastodon is unwilling to update their work to incorporate other implementers' feedback.

A more collaborative way to do this would have been to seek feedback before making a grant proposal and making the grant proposal jointly with other projects so they weren't the only ones getting paid for it.

[–] DarkThoughts@fedia.io 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I didn't cherry pick a statement. I included the part where they said the very first draft.

You quoted the whole part, but only addressed the first half of it, contradicting the second one in the process. Saying they may not be able to incorporate feedback into the first release is a very different statement than saying they may not be able to incorporate feedback at all.

[–] 0x1C3B00DA@fedia.io 1 points 1 month ago

That's not a contradiction, it's maybe an incomplete argument. And I was relying on my previous sentence that mastodon has a history of steamrolling other implementations to imply that they would do it again and were already warning about that. But none of this even matters; I've made a follow up comment that lays it out more explicitly.

[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al -3 points 1 month ago

It's adding centralisation where there's no need for any. In the same way that BlueSky cosplays as decentralized, this is what this effectively tries to move towards. In that whoever runs the relays/indexers is in control.