If you’ve heard that people have problems with the head of mastodon (gargron) this recent little incident might be an example.

First ... I totally agree.

Second, firefish and calckey are the same thing (calckey rebranded to firefish).

Third ... it's not just about software. I think that's superficial reasoning. There's a lot of patience, organisation and earned trust required before there's an instance with admins choosing to run a particular platform with a good number of users on there. The success of mastodon ought not, IMO, be (entirely) attributed to dumb luck.

There's been a lot of persistent and committed work from gargron and mastodon, and the truth that many "platform diversity" types (including myself) run into is it's not the user's fault ... who's going to maintain, run, promote and support a platform and its early instances with commitments to decent performance, scalability and maintenance into the future? Calckey/firefish, for example, have actually kinda struggled recently, despite really trying and having an attractive platform, because they haven't been able to provide a stable and performant instance with even minor growth in users, nor a UI that works well on mobile. It's an uphill battle, and I don't think you can blame users for wanting some degree of trustworthiness from a platform before they jump in, however much of a chicken-egg problem it is.

Problem is, like 80% of people are on Mastodon, and many features (quote posts being the most obvious one) require the people you're posting to to have the same interaction with the post.

Using the quote post one for an example: If Mastodon never implements quote posts, what's the point? Most people will only see you posting links and it ruins the whole interaction you're looking for, so using another piece of software isn't going to help.

In regards to people disagreeing with decisions that Mastodon makes (such as full text search like this), it's a bit more complicated. Depending on the feature as well, it's possible for the things you don't like about a feature to still affect you, even if your instance doesn't have it implemented. A LOT of people complained about universeodon.com having full text search, and there was nothing they could do about it (other than just blocking universeodon.com).

I'm personally of the opinion that Mastodon should use its success and mindshare to be a little more like what people expect to get people on decentralised services (within reason - we still want good privacy controls and anti-abuse tools), and then other platforms (or instances!) can then take it further when it comes to things like no search, no quotes, etc. for insular and private communities that people want.

Misskey all the way! MFM is way more fun than plain markdown

a PR is not the place for that discussion.

You're right, but gargron would do the same thing on an issue. He's done it before; it's how he handles disagreement.

I said it elsewhere, but it may be the case that mastodon was lucky to be at the right place and right time, but he thinks it’s success is entirely due to his decisions and beliefs. If so, IMO, there’s not much hope, as that kind of confidence can only be dislodged by failure.

He wasn't happy to add quote toots, though. There's a whole Mastodon mythology built up around quotes.

Then the Elon account boom ended, and suddenly he was happy to do it.

Hes happy to do whatever gives him positive attention.