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Does anyone think Mastodon can or will go through similar fork-and-spin-off storms as Bitcoin? I feel Mastodon is at a pretty okay stage in terms of general com

Does anyone think Mastodon can or will go through similar fork-and-spin-off storms as Bitcoin? I feel Mastodon is at a pretty okay stage in terms of general completeness right now, but all those devs won't just switch into maintenance mode, I assume? Seeing the various (also angry) reactions to this PR, it starts to smell a bit like someone may want to fork off into a more barebones edition. I made an analytics tool for it, just in case brands decide to use it more, but now I am starting to get worried this could very well end up as yet another multi-fork-what-is-available-here-and-whats-not kind of headache.

zokier 4y ago
ActivityPub is designed to be interoperable, and even today mastodon is far from the only implementation. So forking is not really so big deal here.
- anonporridge 4y ago
  The concern would be forking of the ActivityPub protocol itself, no?
  - sp332 4y ago
    As one of the comments points out: Posts authored from outside Mastodon can already include more formatting, and that has been the case for years
  - noirscape 4y ago
    Doubtful. AP is terrible but also generic enough that I don't think anyone will ever abandon it. It's in that sweet spot of being bad enough that anyone who has experience with it can sum up a whole myriad of issues with it, but at the same time, you're going to be hard-pressed to find a different solution that will meet everyones goals. It's terrible but it works "well enough".
    - djbusby 4y ago
      ActivityPub is a worse is better kind of thing.
anonporridge 4y ago
Fork wars seem likely for any open and distributed network project. Although the value of a network is directly proportional to the number of people on it, so one fork tends to dominate and subsume resources from the others until they become a husk hobbling along. This chaos isn't necessarily bad, it's just the nature of a network that has no centralized, controlling authority to settle disputes. It's one of the tradeoffs you take when deciding to avoid centralization. It's still early enough that fork wars in Mastadon seem likely, and would take years to settle. When the first bitcoin fork happened, bitcoin cash, happened in 2017, it peaked at a value of about 25% of the main chain. Today it's value is about 0.5% of the main chain and it is effectively irrelevant.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  But what would the forkers gain? Bitcoin doesn’t seem interesting as a precedent because there’s no financial gain in forking Mastodon. The currency of the fediverse is user content. If you can’t or don’t interoperate, you lose all of the content.
- Zak 4y ago
  There are multiple forks of Mastodon already being run on live servers, often ad-hoc forks with minor tweaks. If you define fork narrowly enough, even changing the character limit might count, and quite a few servers do that. Most forks do not break interoperability, which is very different from Bitcoin forks. Beyond that, Mastodon interoperates with other software that speaks ActivityPub like Pixelfed and Friendica.

zokier 4y ago

ActivityPub is designed to be interoperable, and even today mastodon is far from the only implementation. So forking is not really so big deal here.

anonporridge 4y ago
The concern would be forking of the ActivityPub protocol itself, no?
- sp332 4y ago
  As one of the comments points out: Posts authored from outside Mastodon can already include more formatting, and that has been the case for years
- noirscape 4y ago
  Doubtful. AP is terrible but also generic enough that I don't think anyone will ever abandon it. It's in that sweet spot of being bad enough that anyone who has experience with it can sum up a whole myriad of issues with it, but at the same time, you're going to be hard-pressed to find a different solution that will meet everyones goals. It's terrible but it works "well enough".
  - djbusby 4y ago
    ActivityPub is a worse is better kind of thing.

anonporridge 4y ago

Fork wars seem likely for any open and distributed network project. Although the value of a network is directly proportional to the number of people on it, so one fork tends to dominate and subsume resources from the others until they become a husk hobbling along. This chaos isn't necessarily bad, it's just the nature of a network that has no centralized, controlling authority to settle disputes. It's one of the tradeoffs you take when deciding to avoid centralization. It's still early enough that fork wars in Mastadon seem likely, and would take years to settle. When the first bitcoin fork happened, bitcoin cash, happened in 2017, it peaked at a value of about 25% of the main chain. Today it's value is about 0.5% of the main chain and it is effectively irrelevant.

KerrAvon 4y ago
But what would the forkers gain? Bitcoin doesn’t seem interesting as a precedent because there’s no financial gain in forking Mastodon. The currency of the fediverse is user content. If you can’t or don’t interoperate, you lose all of the content.
Zak 4y ago
There are multiple forks of Mastodon already being run on live servers, often ad-hoc forks with minor tweaks. If you define fork narrowly enough, even changing the character limit might count, and quite a few servers do that. Most forks do not break interoperability, which is very different from Bitcoin forks. Beyond that, Mastodon interoperates with other software that speaks ActivityPub like Pixelfed and Friendica.