trying to get changes adopted by mastodon at a software or protocol level reminds me of the general frustrations of electoral politics. it's only slightly less ineffectual

there was a time in like 2018 where it felt like notable changes actually were getting merged at a steady pace but after like 2019 it slowed down a lot. i think maybe because the early contributors burned out. probably also a sense of protocol stagnation due to the lack of w3c socialcg action until like 2023. probably also a worldview that the software was "good enough" and that all that was left was to slowly improve it. a confluence of factors really. but the end result is what we have now.

i think that probably the single biggest barrier to mastodev is that everything is bottlenecked by needing approval from like, what, 2.5 people? there's a severe lack of community and a similarly severe lack of delegation. this is to say that the primary challenge mastodon faces is not technical, but rather it is an organizational challenge.

@trwnh I am really hoping that organizational challenge is sorted out soon.

@trwnh I think it’s up to 3.5 but ultimately you’re not wrong.

@thisismissem not standing around waiting for it to happen but if/when it does happen i welcome it

@vmstan i can't remember if the extra person has merge/commit/write privileges. i know there are people on the team who work on various things but this is mostly about the "final step", what it takes to actually get something merged.

more to the point, i think the recent "cleanup" of PRs got people talking about why a lot of them were left open for 2.5 years with no forward momentum. it's not a good look, even if there are reasons for it. people don't know the reasons.

@trwnh @vmstan I think we know why: an absentee leader

@thisismissem @vmstan idk if "absentee" is the right word. i follow the mastodon repo. i see gargron doing stuff, often stuff that other people should be doing actually! or possibly even stuff that other people already did, in some other PR in the pile of PRs. i think past a certain point when an organization grows to that level, the head ought to be taking on more decision-based work. this requires delegation. this requires people to delegate to. this requires organizational effort.