@julian @thisismissem @hongminhee @pfefferle Separately, Mastodon are doing great work and have a non-stop barrage of feature requests (often: demands) from all sides, and everyone is convinced theirs is the most critical (ofc).

We've chatted to them about long-form, and they're well aware

They don't need importance impressed upon them, but they certainly do need funding and PRs — so I think you're very much on the right track there!

@julian I totally agree with @renchap that it is important to keep the user on the platform of his/her choice! I like the idea of having a better "read more" UX or maybe the lightbox idea.

But to have the best possible experience and to improve the engagement, you should not force the user to leave the platform.

Otherwise it feels very much like subscribing to an RSS-Feed with only excerpts, where you always have to leave the reader for reading the whole text!

@julian @thisismissem @hongminhee @johnonolan but that's no longer completely true. You can send a `summary` if `as:sensitive` is false

only if `as:sensitive` is set to true, the `summary` will be used as content warning.

@pfefferle @julian @hongminhee @johnonolan

And if as:sensitive isn't set..?

@thisismissem @julian @hongminhee @johnonolan then Mastodon uses the `summary` as summary.

@pfefferle @julian @hongminhee @johnonolan

Hmm.. I wonder what @samsethi was hitting into the other day then? He said something about summary marking posts as sensitive incorrectly

@thisismissem @pfefferle @julian @hongminhee @johnonolan @samsethi did this change in a recent Mastodon version? Have client apps caught up with it?

@KevinMarks @thisismissem @julian @hongminhee @johnonolan @samsethi that is a good point! Maybe it is a client app thingy!

@johnonolan @julian @thisismissem @hongminhee @pfefferle except the maintainers have made it clear they do not want PRs unless you get pre-approval from them for your implementation plan or whatever.

@lkanies @johnonolan @julian @hongminhee @pfefferle for big stuff, yeah, talk to the maintainers before implementing — that is consistent for any open source project.

@thisismissem @lkanies @julian @hongminhee @pfefferle yup, 100% — You can't just walk into someone's house and start re-arranging the furniture and expect them to be pleased.

Always good to start with bugfixes & smaller things to learn the codebase, and for maintainers to get to know+trust you.

Once you've showed that you're going to stick around, you generally get more freedom and approval to take on larger things.

Source: Years of contributing to WordPress, long before Ghost

@johnonolan @lkanies @julian @hongminhee @pfefferle I can also attest that that's the case with Mastodon — I did a heap of small contributions before being able to drive bigger changes.

@thisismissem @johnonolan @julian @hongminhee @pfefferle that’s good to hear. Because… that’s not the way I see them talk about it. Literally every time someone talks about doing a PR, there’s a request for consultation beforehand. I’ve never seen that in any other community.

(It’s true that my OSS contributions were mostly quite a while ago. And a lot of them were to the project I started, which I absolutely did not run that way.)

@johnonolan @thisismissem @julian @hongminhee @pfefferle it’s only rearranging the furniture if they accept the PR, as you know.

OSS is supposed to be about permissionless innovation, so it’s weird to have to get permission first.

@lkanies@hachyderm.io well, if we're going to beat this analogy to death, then it's more like you're free to copy my house and everything in it, and re-arrange it (now your furniture) as you see fit.

I'd prefer if you didn't re-arrange my furniture though.

@lkanies @johnonolan @julian @hongminhee @pfefferle

tbh, no open source maintainer likes suddenly receiving a sizable pull request out of the blue, it tends to be disruptive or require additional time input to review/correct/review, hence nudging folks towards discussing with the team first.

@thisismissem @johnonolan @julian @hongminhee @pfefferle totally. These just don’t feel like nudges.

And sometimes, those big pull requests are the only way someone can work. It doesn’t mean the maintainers owe the author anything. But there are a *lot* of people whose first step cannot be “have sizable organization and permission meeting with stranger”.

All of my major pre-puppet contributions started with experimenting with code.

@julian I agree, you have beaten that analogy to death

You are welcome to do whatever the hell you want with code I post for free on the internet. And I am welcome to ignore all of that work, or not.

Nothing you do to my code intrinsically affects anything in my life.

@lkanies @johnonolan @julian @hongminhee @pfefferle In the past when the project has closed sizable pull requests, people have gotten pissed, so... yeah

@lkanies @thisismissem @julian @hongminhee @pfefferle it is permissionless innovation: In your own fork.

A pull request is a proposal to make changes upstream, if you want to do that then there’s nothing permissionless about it and never has been

Modern OSS maintainers are remarkably polite about it, too! Have a read through Linus Torvalds old mailing lists if you want to see how OSS really started. Big contrast