A 🧵 on what I want to call #CriticalMastodon. Just a personal view, but without the insight or dress sense of Jacob Bronowski.
I came in 2018, looked around and loved the idea. I love open-source. I love federation. I didn't review the protocol or code, but it seemed Gargron and the community had done something generally sensible and I expected the usual process of open-source natural selection would do its thing.
Effective open-source leadership, it seems to me, takes motivated and talented leaders with integrity. But not autocracy. The right balance of steering and community participation must be struck.
Linus or Guido would be my examples code-wise, but Jimmy Wales at Wiki is another example. It's about stewarding a community, not being the Big Dick like Elon. And I'd be an Elon, I fear, although at least I know I'd rather be a Jimmy. I lead one extracurricular at work where I try to be a Jimmy, so at least I'm practising.
The D in BDFL needs to be ironic. The B: absolutely not. The L depends, especially on the first two. You basically need to be the opposite of Musk to lead. He has power, not leadership. He's insecure, and makes up for it in being a bully. I want to be less like him. Thank god I'm not megarich.
Anyway, the design of Mastodon seems cool. It's not de rigeur in high-profile tech, but the entire history of the internet and the open-source software that piers most of it is utterly dependent on high-quality leaders with integrity, talent and humility, backed by decent people sharing what they can.
@happysinger It also takes a critical mass and stable enough infrastructure, which it now seems to have. PubSubHubbub as-was just didn’t have that before.
@happysinger TBH you nailed it with the very first hashtag in the first toot, but I was too gorm- and coffee-less to parse it. 😴
@nullifidian Basically, the fate of the world depends on whether we amuse each other enough for the next month or so. Get posting!
@happysinger I will. I'm too full of chocolate to think properly just now.
@nullifidian The idea of the critical mass, or network effect, is something (I'm sure you realise) I tried to nail a few toots later in the thread.