mei 🌒& @ckie@pixie.town

@amber TO CLARIFY: THIS IS ABOUT ROPE BONDAGE AND NOT MASTODON INSTANCE MODERATION

Webkit was never supposed to be compiled

This is real compiler output, done by real compilers:

-DSTATICALLY_LINKED_WITH_WTF
-Wno-tautological-compare
UnifiedSource-f2e18ffc-31.cpp.o

"Hello, I would like to compile six thousand seven-hundred seventy-seven targets"

They have played us for absolute fools

kids these days will never get to experience the expectant excitement of this screen ever in their life. not the tense sound as it reads your disk or the clicky sounds of your harddrive as the game is installed, or the celebratory drive opening as you finish... soulless downloads is all we have left. pour one out for....

So for "open" projects, specifications in particular, there is a very common governance structure: the Core Team.

The idea is that feedback is taken from all over the community, and there is a small Core Team of dedicated "full-time volunteers" who ultimately make the decisions and are responsible for resolving issues.

This is extremely common; in this post I'm going to mainly take Matrix as an example, but it applies the same way to almost every other 'open specification' project.

Now, while this model sounds great on paper, it has some serious issues that lead to poor community representation, and a specification that is ultimately not truly open. Not through any malice, but as a consequence of the practicalities of governance.

The biggest issue that I want to talk about here, is the "full-time volunteer" thing. The assumption is that there must be a few people who can keep an overview of the whole thing, the 'big picture', and who have a lot of time to spend on that.

Just one problem: almost nobody can afford to volunteer full-time. It's virtually impossible to combine such a task with the full-time job that one needs to live... unless the 'volunteering' is on company time, and that's where it goes wrong.

Because of the high time demands placed by the core governance role, the end result is that Core Teams are almost always made up of people representing their employers. If not explicitly, then implicitly - because if you don't make your boss happy, you might not get to continue working on this on the clock.

Which, in turn, means that the only representation in such an "open" specification is corporate representation, and there's no real way for the community to be represented. Even someone who *wants* to represent the community, is still beholden to their funder's priorities and expectations.

This, in turn, can have disastrous consequences; in the case of Matrix, for example, the spec process often blocks on invisible internal discussions among Element employees! This is very unlikely to be intentional sabotage; it is just the logical practical outcome of this governance model.

That then makes it even more difficult for 'outsiders' from the community to participate, because they don't even get to see much of the discussion, they're essentially flying blind and can't afford the time to untangle all the internal discussions.

The Core Team becomes ever more centralized, ever less transparent, and the community is ever less represented. This is how an open spec dies.

(I want to emphasize again that this criticism is *not* specific to Matrix; it is a widespread problem.)

So... how to solve this? Well, let's start by identifying the root of the problem: the "heavy Core Team" approach. Appointing a 'responsible team' makes a lot of sense in a corporate environment, but not in a community process. It is a hierarchical construct that will lead to hierarchical outcomes.

What you want is a more decentralized model; specific people overseeing individual proposals/categories, for example, without a "top-level Core Team" that calls the shots. Instead, focus on mutual cooperation.

Likewise, you want to ensure that 100% of spec discussion is public, in an easy-to-find location, well-referenced. It should take almost no effort to find the whole history of a proposal.

Be wary of implicit Core Teams; even without appointing one explicitly, make sure that it doesn't become de-facto governed by those who have the most time to spend.

Expect those with a lot of time to spend some of it to make participation easier for those with less time, instead of doing spec work directly.

I'm sure that there are many more approaches that can work here, but hopefully these are some useful pointers to identify and avoid the problem!

And if we're lucky, maybe we can use these principles to pull some existing "open" specs back from the cliff edge.

stolen bc of no alt text

i bought a cane two years ago. in retrospect i wish i had had a cane around when i was 14 years old. hear me out. there are many reasons to love cane. Here's some times canes help me. maybe u want one too! (pls be careful tho if u get one u gotta learn how to use it right so u dont hurt yrself with it)

- ever pull a muscle or stub your toe real bad and now putting weight on that foot hurts? you'll be very happy that you already have a cane to help take some of the weight off.

- filled with dread any time you need to lean/squat down to clean items up off the floor? cane makes this way easier, because now your arm muscles can help lower you down and push you back up. this is why i vacuum with any regularity instead of declaring floor bankruptcy.

- frequently feel the need to sit down while standing in line? cane makes it easier to stand longer without feeling this, also makes it easier to sit down and get back up if you need to.

- seriously, sitting down and getting up from sitting is so much easier with a cane

- have trouble climbing stairs? cane in one hand, railing in the other hand, now you are dual-wielding climbing assistance

- getting in/out of cars a struggle? cane helped me.

- good for climbing hills

- good for descending hills

- scared of falling down on an escalator? cane helps.

- have trouble getting on and off a bus when its high up from the ground? cane can help you gradually lower yourself to reduce the work your knees put in. same thing for curbs without curb cuts

- if u need it, now u can sit in the front of the bus without people looking at u funny because lmao it turns out that visually indicating a disability is way more effective than telling people that many disabilities are invisible unfortunately.

- do u lose your balance a lot? cane is very good for regaining balance, or not losing it in the first places. good for progesterone dizzy spells!

- its a stim toy tbh

- u can put stickers on your cane like putting stickers on a laptop

if yr worried about social impact, my experience has been that people i already knew asked me "what happened" when i first got it and i just said i got it to help me get around and then they didnt care. i have never had a stranger ask me why i have a cane. most people dont rly seem to notice or care.

fyi the most natural way to walk with a cane tends to be to move it forward with the arm opposite the leg you're moving forward. so if its in your right hand, you move your right hand and your left leg together. then you move your right leg on its own. you can switch hands! i do this constantly. it takes practice. practice with yr cane.

u also gotta dial the height of the cane in properly or it can mess yr posture up. seriously, take some time on that one, get someone who knows to help u if u can.

canes are based

It lets people opt-in to reading whatever you're discussing.
It allows people with traumas and triggers time to reflect before opening something.
You can use them to set up joke punchlines.
Instead of putting "🧵 2/??" or whatever at the bottom of your posts, you can put the post number in the subject field instead and it makes your thread easier to navigate.
Collapsed posts take up way less space on the timeline, making it easier to navigate.
People will still read your posts (I promise okay?), and opting in to reading something is more meaningful than being forced to read it anyway.
Subjects / Content Warnings are well supported across pretty much all fedi software.

Please add Subject / CW to your posts!