The Seven Deadly Fediverse UX Sins: A Redemption Report Card

more good news: this is becoming a defacto standard

i appreciate that some level of standardisation is happening, but mastodon's implementation becoming a de-facto standard is happening a lot, and in some cases at the expense of the neutrality of the fediverse.

i guess the alternative - the w3c working group - is pretty slow (by design) and not really viable for "proof-of-concept" features (as mentioned here), but these things seem to commonly not materialise into a concrete, vendor-neutral standard, and it continues being mastodon's universe that we're all living in. other fediverse software projects begin to add things like "compatibility mode" for mastodon-specific things to make it continue "just working", but it never really does "just work".

per that post, loops (@dansup if you read this, you're an absolute weapon, it's incredible to see what you put out week after week) and such are specifically pivoting to be "compatible with mastodon", not compatible with a concrete api. whether or not that api does become a standard is pending, so i'll reserve further comments on that specifically, but i think it really needs to be clear that this is pretty much a report of "mastodon and company", not "the fediverse". this got upgraded to an a-, but it only talks about mastodon, and this issue isn't specific to it.

i almost want to beg people to simply stop contributing to mastodon for a second. not because i want to handicap mastodon in any way, but in some naive attempt to push the work to other software projects in the ecosystem that need improvement just as much as mastodon so it doesn't end up like "chromium and company". a post elsewhere on lobste.rs right now discusses google using its weight to (once again) force weird stuff into the web api standards, and we're all just along for the ride.

Very odd. Sometimes when I click on the link to this article it just returns json.