Most of the backlash pertains to the board members appointed to the new nonprofit. One of the members is a lawyer that has defended crypto and AI companies, another is ex-Twitter angel investor Biz Stone.

Mastodon's community usually has some kind of vague beef about one thing or another when it comes to Eugen and the decisions he makes for the project, whether it's a new feature or a design change or that he didn't do something that other projects wanted to do.

Nextcloud is a fork of Owncloud. IMO, as a product Nextcloud is superior in every way.

It actually does have that nowadays, it's just that the feature requires Elasticsearch to work, which is one extra piece of infra for admins to worry about.

Yeah, if you read the article, Hometown and Glitch actually get mentioned. The criticism is not about making a fork to do your own thing... but, instead, about trying to compete with Mastodon directly.

Doing that kind of fork (which is what people are calling for) requires a tremendous amount of coordination, effort, and commitment that cannot be done casually.

This is a situation that I think will get better in time. There's some really promising efforts involving Fediverse Enhancement Proposals, where multiple projects collaborate on shared ways of doing things. Some of these behaviors are getting studied and standardized by the larger SocialCG entity, as well.

There's also a lot of promising development behind a Fediverse Testing Suite. If we can develop a platform-agnostic testing system for people to build against, it will potentially become the new development standard, rather than optimizing for Mastodon and nothing else.

Honestly, this really resonated with me. Running an open source project on its own can be hard, running a popular one that gets used by tons of people and companies, while giving free labor, is extremely hard. Acting as free tech support to a large company, for nothing in return, is ass. Full stop.

I've seen some people make the statement that "maintainers owe you nothing", and I've seen people state that "your supporters owe you nothing."

While I believe there's nothing wrong in a person willingly running a project on their own terms, just as there's nothing wrong with refusing donations and doing the work out of some kind of passion... there's only so many hours in the day, and developers need to feed themselves and pay rent.

I think a lot of people would love to be able to work on open source full-time. I'd devote all of my energy and focus to it, if I could. But, that's a reality only for a privileged few, and many of them still have to make compromises. The CEO and founder of Mastodon, for example, makes a pittance compared to what a corporate junior developer makes.

Sentry also did this by embracing the Business Source License. Technically, you can still get an MIT-licensed version, but it has to be more than two years old.

As a former employee that worked there during the days that Sentry really promoted itself being Open Source, it was disappointing to see. VC Funding and a growth obsession basically poisoned the well.

Hell yeah, I'm all about this. Article gets rendered so poorly on Mastodon, and the behavior is inconsistent from one platform to the next.

Yes, we have an article in the works about it. 😁

I think there's a balance to be struck between "good defaults" and "customize to your heart's content."

Emissary is very much in line with some of my own pipe dreams regarding Fediverse / IndieWeb platforms, but it's still very young as a project. I think the best thing they could probably do is ship bundles of templates as different experiences, that are easy to install right out the gate.

Want a bog-standard microblogging system? Go for it. Want something more like Lemmy? No problem. Want to just build something yourself from scratch? Here's the docs.

I think what excites me about this is that it could be a tremendous development tool for people looking to mock up new ideas for apps and platforms, while sitting in top of ActivityPub and offering actual functionality. The Music project the lead dev is working on already looks great in less than two weeks of development, and aims to be compatible with Funkwhale.

Just tried it for the first time the other day. As an Akkoma user, it's awesome to see so many native features being supported!

It's now my main app! 😁

Video version available on PeerTube here: https://spectra.video/w/cgUdgFb1ZpcTEK8UydLu59