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Soapbox isn't any more mature than Pleroma or Akkoma in terms of software. It's a hostile fork of Pleroma that regularly merges upstream patches from Pleroma.

Soapbox isn't any more mature than Pleroma or Akkoma in terms of software. It's a hostile fork of Pleroma that regularly merges upstream patches from Pleroma. The lead developer, Alex Gleason, got kicked off of the Pleroma project when he called other contributors names for reverting a patch he made that introduced code smell[0]. Said patch was controversial at the time of introduction, but got bludgeoned into being merged because Gleason was by far the most active contributor. It was removed with consensus when other developers became more active, although from what I can tell, Gleason didn't bother to participate in that discussion. Soapbox is his "taking the ball and going home" answer. If you want a non-technical reason to avoid it/consider it immature; Gleason cried "cancel culture" when removed from the Pleroma project, even though it pretty much has nothing to do with it. He's a demagogue who used his getting removed from the project to further advocate for his own political beliefs (which is being a TERF). This in particular means that the overwhelming majority of Soapbox instances tend to be maintained by the people that think that Pleroma is maintained by the people Gleason dislikes[1], to the point where some instances automatically defederate from instances using Soapbox's frontend[2]. [0]: Pleroma uses a RESTful API for routing. Gleason wanted to add a bunch of alternative endpoints for no other reason than "this is what users are familiar with on Twitter and my frontend for Pleroma wants to rely on those". The patches were reverted eventually on the simple reason that they're cruft. [1]: Which is extremely funny considering an early criticism of the Pleroma project was that due to it being easy to host, it wound up hosting a lot of instances that would fit this bill. Now most of those migrated to using Soapbox. [2] Funny for the exact same reason as [1].

rglullis 4y ago
Can we agree at least that Soapbox is a much better frontend (as in, it is more suited as a Twitter-alternative, more user-friendly and relies on UX/UI that is more familiar to the general audience) than whatever crap is the default FE from Pleroma? Alex is also the first one to push for Quoted objects. None of the Pleroma devs wanted, the Mastodon devs even less. Now that Mastodon is reaching some semblance of mainstream, I am seeing every day someone writing about how QT is the one feature they miss from Twitter. For everyone that responds with "Soapbox has it, you should take a look", there will be at least 3 others saying "Soapbox is developed by a TERF, stay away from it".
- noirscape 4y ago
  Not really? Soapbox in my experience is a bloated javascript mess that breaks loading half the time because it triggers my adblocker. Pleroma-FE is honestly pretty decent compared to the other UIs out there, but I recognize that this is a matter of taste. It's simple, it's efficient, it knows what it wants to look like and it doesn't look like someone took a mobile interface and blew it up for a wider viewport/slapdashed mouse support onto it. That alone makes it better than 90% of the social media sites out there. I personally do prefer it over Masto-FE, but I've never been one for the Tweetdeck style interface. As for quoted objects; Mastodon doesn't want it because Gargron (no comment, that's just the kinda project Mastodon is, feel free to imagine a rant on BDFLs though). Pleromas current chief developer is from what I can tell awaiting a spec change to be implemented before doing anything with it (which... fair enough, Mastodon just repurposes the spec for its own use and it's aggravating as hell) and has been critical of the proposed spec change because it's poor in semantics. Misskey from what I can tell supports it out of the box and it's support for it predates Soapbox-BEs implementation. Quoted objects are technically somewhat complex if you don't want them to inherit certain issues that are both endemic to using AP as a protocol and the issues with the Twitter specific implementation. Considering Gleasons general tedency to just copy Twitter stuff without forethought makes me probably not wrong in assuming that Gleason didn't bother thinking this through and it most likely has all those issues.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    Your argument is based mostly based on an engineer perspective, perhaps you could benefit from looking at the product perspective a bit? Take the ~2M people that are leaving Twitter this week and show them (a) Mastodon, (b) Pleroma with the default FE and (c) Soapbox/Rebased. How do you think the split would go? Whatever issues are there on Soapbox, they could be fixed if the developers had the proper support, while you can give all the support in the world to Mastodon and we will never have QT.
    - noirscape 4y ago
      Probably Mastodon. When people are outside of their wheelhouse (and technology wise most people are), they pick what everyone else is moving to. Mastodon is the media darling of the fediverse, for better and for worse. The press has been hyping up Mastodon since 2016 on tech sites and even the general press only ever talks about Mastodon. Pleroma, Misskey and all the various offshoots are practical footnotes in terms of userbases (the only one with real usage is really Glitch-soc which is a Mastodon fork that exists to circumvent Gargrons BDFL tendencies). It sucks but that's how it is. As for the issues on Soapbox; this argument also works for Pleroma. With proper support, Pleroma was, and arguably still is (although now moreso because everyone else is even sloppier), be the best software to use the fediverse with. It even supports different frontends, including Soapbox if you really wanted it. I agree that Mastodon is a technical dead end for some features like QTs because Gargron is a BDFL who just doesn't want those features and imposes that on the project, but it's absurd to suggest that Soapbox is the best answer, when it's largely just a spite driven fork of Pleroma that is mostly picked for ideological reasons when admins aren't simply clueless about the projects history and offers basically no feature benefits. I encourage devs to put their time into Pleroma instead; more people benefit from that, especially considering Rebased just imports all changes from it's upstream anyway.
concho 4y ago
Being a 'TERF' probably means one has a healthy stance on censorship and free speech, and an ability to cut past the bullshit and see and say things for how they really are. So that just sounds like a point in favour to me.
- iudqnolq 4y ago
  How did we end up conflating viewpoints with positions onfree speech? Disliking trans people does not mean supporting free speech. Now I'm expecting you to rattle off some examples of trans people expressing views contrary to free speech. That's true, but TERFS have as well. So what's the point?
jumpup 4y ago
There are usually two (or more) sides to the story. Here's the developer's own take: https://blog.alexgleason.me/pleroma-is-dead/ https://blog.alexgleason.me/pleroma-is-dead/ https://www.heterodorx.com/podcast/episode-69-fediverse-follies-with-alex-gleason/ https://www.heterodorx.com/podcast/episode-69-fediverse-foll...
- davidgerard 4y ago
  I'm most amazed Gleason thought that made him look other than terrible.

rglullis 4y ago

Can we agree at least that Soapbox is a much better frontend (as in, it is more suited as a Twitter-alternative, more user-friendly and relies on UX/UI that is more familiar to the general audience) than whatever crap is the default FE from Pleroma? Alex is also the first one to push for Quoted objects. None of the Pleroma devs wanted, the Mastodon devs even less. Now that Mastodon is reaching some semblance of mainstream, I am seeing every day someone writing about how QT is the one feature they miss from Twitter. For everyone that responds with "Soapbox has it, you should take a look", there will be at least 3 others saying "Soapbox is developed by a TERF, stay away from it".

noirscape 4y ago
Not really? Soapbox in my experience is a bloated javascript mess that breaks loading half the time because it triggers my adblocker. Pleroma-FE is honestly pretty decent compared to the other UIs out there, but I recognize that this is a matter of taste. It's simple, it's efficient, it knows what it wants to look like and it doesn't look like someone took a mobile interface and blew it up for a wider viewport/slapdashed mouse support onto it. That alone makes it better than 90% of the social media sites out there. I personally do prefer it over Masto-FE, but I've never been one for the Tweetdeck style interface. As for quoted objects; Mastodon doesn't want it because Gargron (no comment, that's just the kinda project Mastodon is, feel free to imagine a rant on BDFLs though). Pleromas current chief developer is from what I can tell awaiting a spec change to be implemented before doing anything with it (which... fair enough, Mastodon just repurposes the spec for its own use and it's aggravating as hell) and has been critical of the proposed spec change because it's poor in semantics. Misskey from what I can tell supports it out of the box and it's support for it predates Soapbox-BEs implementation. Quoted objects are technically somewhat complex if you don't want them to inherit certain issues that are both endemic to using AP as a protocol and the issues with the Twitter specific implementation. Considering Gleasons general tedency to just copy Twitter stuff without forethought makes me probably not wrong in assuming that Gleason didn't bother thinking this through and it most likely has all those issues.
- rglullis 4y ago
  Your argument is based mostly based on an engineer perspective, perhaps you could benefit from looking at the product perspective a bit? Take the ~2M people that are leaving Twitter this week and show them (a) Mastodon, (b) Pleroma with the default FE and (c) Soapbox/Rebased. How do you think the split would go? Whatever issues are there on Soapbox, they could be fixed if the developers had the proper support, while you can give all the support in the world to Mastodon and we will never have QT.
  - noirscape 4y ago
    Probably Mastodon. When people are outside of their wheelhouse (and technology wise most people are), they pick what everyone else is moving to. Mastodon is the media darling of the fediverse, for better and for worse. The press has been hyping up Mastodon since 2016 on tech sites and even the general press only ever talks about Mastodon. Pleroma, Misskey and all the various offshoots are practical footnotes in terms of userbases (the only one with real usage is really Glitch-soc which is a Mastodon fork that exists to circumvent Gargrons BDFL tendencies). It sucks but that's how it is. As for the issues on Soapbox; this argument also works for Pleroma. With proper support, Pleroma was, and arguably still is (although now moreso because everyone else is even sloppier), be the best software to use the fediverse with. It even supports different frontends, including Soapbox if you really wanted it. I agree that Mastodon is a technical dead end for some features like QTs because Gargron is a BDFL who just doesn't want those features and imposes that on the project, but it's absurd to suggest that Soapbox is the best answer, when it's largely just a spite driven fork of Pleroma that is mostly picked for ideological reasons when admins aren't simply clueless about the projects history and offers basically no feature benefits. I encourage devs to put their time into Pleroma instead; more people benefit from that, especially considering Rebased just imports all changes from it's upstream anyway.

concho 4y ago

Being a 'TERF' probably means one has a healthy stance on censorship and free speech, and an ability to cut past the bullshit and see and say things for how they really are. So that just sounds like a point in favour to me.

iudqnolq 4y ago
How did we end up conflating viewpoints with positions onfree speech? Disliking trans people does not mean supporting free speech. Now I'm expecting you to rattle off some examples of trans people expressing views contrary to free speech. That's true, but TERFS have as well. So what's the point?

jumpup 4y ago

There are usually two (or more) sides to the story. Here's the developer's own take: https://blog.alexgleason.me/pleroma-is-dead/ https://blog.alexgleason.me/pleroma-is-dead/ https://www.heterodorx.com/podcast/episode-69-fediverse-follies-with-alex-gleason/ https://www.heterodorx.com/podcast/episode-69-fediverse-foll...

davidgerard 4y ago
I'm most amazed Gleason thought that made him look other than terrible.