Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

I still feel that Twitter's fiery death and the subsequent migration of folks to fedi has, on the whole, done more harm than good to the fediverse.

The problem isn't even the amount of people, or their background - the problem is the *timing*. A large mass of people who didn't really *want* fedi, but who were searching for a 'new Twitter' and this was the only option available to them, for one reason or another.

They never had the time to lurk around and explore the community before getting involved in it; or the time to understand the dynamics here at their own speed. Because the Other Place was on fire and they had to move their social venue ASAP.

This caused a lot of disregard for the existing community dynamics, and that combined plus the volume caused tensions with existing users.

In this context, the reasons that people give for moving to Bluesky (https://mas.to/@kissane/110793942888550843) don't remotely surprise me. Many people are *still* looking for a 'new Twitter', and Bluesky is much closer to that.

I think that's important to keep in mind when evaluating those reasons: they should not necessarily be seen as 'problems with fedi', so much as 'reasons why fedi is not suitable as a drop-in Twitter alternative'.

That doesn't automatically make people *wrong* for having those problems with fedi, either. But the answer may very possibly be "fedi is not Twitter, and this community just isn't a good fit for you." It doesn't *need* to be for everybody.

(I would also be remiss not to mention the corrosive role of the press and Gargron in this; both severely misrepresented what fedi is. For different reasons, but it has caused a lot of people to feel like they didn't get what they were promised.)

The curse of spotting the early signs of toxic behaviour: if you don't tell others they will be like "well how could we have known if you didn't tell us" later, but if you *do* tell them then they will take every opportunity to find justifications for why it's actually not that bad and they're not quite seeing it etc. etc.

Bonus points for this dude mocking the attempt at a Matrix fork, because imagine that, an anarchist organizing an alternative if the existing thing doesn't work anymore, surely that can't be taken seriously 🙄

"Anarchist" does not mean "I'm allowed to be shitty to anyone I want and pollute community resources without any consequences", you *are* actually expected to do the "accounting for other people's needs" part as well

(Leaving this here as a FAQ since I get this 'question' entirely too often.)

Because every single time I engage in a discussion with an XMPP proponent, it takes less than 5 minutes to get to "XMPP is fine, you just need to adjust your expectations/requirements", and this FOSSbro attitude is *exactly* why I jumped ship from the XMPP community years ago.

(scene: at a job interview)

Interviewer: What's your background?
Me: ADHD

Well. I've just learned a couple of things about the #Matrix spec and its process that are giving me serious concerns about the long term.

I'm refraining from sharing details here right now, because they would be extremely easy to misinterpret, and it's not an immediate problem to worry about.

However, I do think that it's time to start seriously thinking about forking the protocol, and I've created a room for talking about this: #fork:pixie.town

If you're interested in working on this (as a developer, as a technical writer, as a spec designer, or something else), then please join the room!

However, it's important to recognize that such a spec fork will impact many existing communities and developers, and so breaking compatibility is not to be taken lightly. If possible, it should be avoided.

So if you feel like burning everything down and starting over, this is probably not the project for you. Also, I do expect everybody *not* to harass Matrix core folks over this.

If those things are not an issue for you, then please join! ​