That’s not a contradiction, it’s maybe an incomplete argument. And I was relying on my previous sentence that mastodon has a history of steamrolling other implementations to imply that they would do it again and were already warning about that. But none of this even matters; I’ve made a follow up comment that lays it out more explicitly.

I didn’t cherry pick a statement. I included the part where they said the very first draft.

I did fail to explain how its a power grab, but that’s was only because I thought it was a fairly obvious one-to-one point. I’ve also added another example. But lemme try again.

1. Mastodon has a history of pushing features that affect interop with other implementations without seeking feedback from other implementations or outright ignoring the feedback they do receive.
2. A member of the mastodon team wrote a FEP to formalize a setting related to search indexing. This was the right way to go about it. yey Mastodon was working with other implementations. But that FEP didn’t receive positive feedback and it seems like it was abandoned.
3. Now mastodon is trying to standardize something using the ideas from that FEP, outside of the FEP process (which is the agreed upon way to collaborate between implementers).
4. They’re warning on their site that they have deadlines and may not incorporate feedback if they can’t resolve it without breaking deadlines.
5. They are under no obligation to incorporate it after their initial draft and, historically, mastodon is unwilling to update their work to incorporate other implementers’ feedback.

A more collaborative way to do this would have been to seek feedback before making a grant proposal and making the grant proposal jointly with other projects so they weren’t the only ones getting paid for it.

Mastodon has a history of steamrolling other implementations.

This means we might not always be able to incorporate all the feedback we get into the very first draft of everything we publish

The site even warns that theyre on a deadline and may not incorporate feedback.

EDIT: they also mention a “setting” that determines if a user/post is searchable. theyve presented a FEP to formalize this setting but nearly everyone else had issues with their proposal. as usual for mastodon, this looks like them sidestepping external feedback and just doing what they want

I feel you but i dont think podcasters point to youtube for video feeds because of a supposed limitation of RSS. They do it because of the storage and bandwidth costs of hosting video.

It’s a cool feature, but it sucks that (once again) the mastodon team is taking control of fediverse-wide features and ignoring outside criticism.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/30398

BEAM is the VM that Erlang runs on. It also supports Elixir and some other lesser known languages

I could see walking through a debug session document with a junior dev to guide them on how to debug classes of issues better. Or if they’re running into a bug and ask for your help, you could write out the first few debugging steps and let them take it from there. That might be easier to understand than “I’d check service X and see if it’s processing Y like it should or just passing it on to Z”. Having a defined way to explain how to debug an issue could be useful

I would argue that overriding methods on a prototype is not a hack. It’s equivalent to overriding super methods in Java classes, but using javascript’s prototype-based inheritance instead of class-based inheritance.

But I agree with your main point about choosing a language that lets the developer implement their solutions freely.

But public posts federating across the network isn’t an “experience”. It’s the basic functionality of the network.

for profit corporation being able to suck up your posts is probably what has many upset

They can already do that without a bridge. And it doesn’t “suck up your posts”. It works just like any other instance. They have to search for you and follow you. Then they receive posts going forward, but they won’t get historical posts.

I personally would block such a service

Good! You can do that and that is a perfectly reasonable solution. That’s part of what has ppl upset on the other side of this argument. All of this arguing and vitriol is happening over a service that you can block like any other fediverse actor.