A lot of people have talked about the possibility of forking Mastodon to get the many improvements their communities need. Making such an effort successful is another discussion entirely.
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I don’t really see the point in forking a project like Mastodon unless you are already deeply involved with its development. It doesn’t do enough that you couldn’t rewrite it better (as in in a way you understand better and with lessons from the original taken into account) in the time it would take you to fully understand all the details of the existing code base.
Yea agreed. It’s not the forking that matters though IMO, it’s the commitment to a true and stable alternative, whatever the best way to that is.
Mastodon lacks a lot of basic features, like full text search.
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.
It is about as common as using a database server for content though to use something like ES, Solr or similar software for search.
It absolutely is. Yet, as Sean said, it’s also yet another bit of software to run and maintain, and ES is known to be a bit of an effort to keep going well.
Admins having only finite amounts of time and/or resources, might make the very understandable decision to leave it out.
@deadsuperhero There are several forks of Mastodon that have been around for years and work well (not only #Hometown) like #Ecko, #Glitchsoc, etc. for years.
https://joinfediverse.wiki/What_is_Mastodon%3F#What_are_Mastodon_forks_and_why_use_them?
They have many more functions such as editable character limit,
editable poll options, local posts, changeable favicon, markdown formatting - and if that’s not enough, there is plenty of other software in the Fediverse for micro- and macrobloggingYeah, 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.
Those aren’t the kind of forks that this article is addressing
The article didn’t really explain what was so controversial about Mastodon? Last I heard, they created a U.S. non-profit. Did I miss something?
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.
What did nextcloud fork?
The original project was called Owncloud and was made largely by the same people, but they split over a disagreement in management.
Nextcloud is a fork of Owncloud. IMO, as a product Nextcloud is superior in every way.
Owncloud
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