this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2025
13 points (93.3% liked)
Mastodon
2298 readers
3 users here now
The project: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon
Mastodon instance affiliated with Lemmy.World: https://mastodon.world/
Discuss the Mastodon platform here. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Which part of it is preachy?
I was hoping to just provide context for the question. I think it's unavoidable that a given implementation/interface provides particular affordances (see https://erinkissane.com/the-affordance-loop - it's a good read). I think half a century of communication theory would agree. So the question is "what affordances do you want your interface to provide?"
I know Mastodon can be forked. It already has, and I hope it will be more. But those forks will have to ask their own version of the question. But mastodon is NOT just a library for others to build on, it's a whole package, which is most often used as-is, with maybe some very minor graphical changes. Those things you suggest are possible, but not best served by an unmodified version of mastodon (and also, other softwares already exist for those that do work better for those applications).
That's more or less the point of the post though. The affordances framework can be applied retrospectively as well as in the design phase. And software grows and evolves over time, so there is the possibility of divergence from the original design, and that could include intentionally heading towards a different affordance set..
Mastodon doesn't have a complete feature set, and I don't think it aims to be a direct clone of twitter (otherwise there wouldn't have been such resistance to retweets). Seems like the perfect opportunity to think about the problem, while it's still growing.
An alternative is to not bother, and just rely on forking to produce software with different affordances. I think that's a perfectly fine strategy. But there's still value in laying out the mission/values and intended affordances, so someone doesn't fork for a feature that would easily fit within mainline Mastodon's mission (of course, merging a fork is possible, but it can be a PITA).