You know I'm a committed user of the fediverse, perhaps this post will surprise
you. Still, at some point the truth has to be told, before lying leads to a
catastrophe.
I think I've been present in the fediverse (sometimes hosting a pod of some
software and sometimes not) since
Thank you for all the context! Fully agreed on basically everything, esp. that there’s always going to be some fragmentation. Still happy that we were able to limit that substantially. 🙂
Some more context I just remembered (funny how things come in waves):
Notice that I always say Mastodon devs and don’t name particular people. Part of that is out of respect and to keep it from seeming personal, but another important thing is that there were several Mastodon devs involved in the committee.
So when I say that there was a clear majority that means several Mastodon devs had a vote and they still lost.
But what happens in committee is people are allowed to argue for or against motions. At times, there would only be one person willing to argue on one side while several Mastodon devs would argue on the other.
So even if there was a majority vote numerically, there was a larger perceived dissent that would prevent motions from passing.
One chair was more affected by this than the other but again out of respect I won’t say which.
This is important to understanding why standards committees sometimes have undesirable outcomes. It’s also one of the reasons why sometimes groups committee shop and prefer W3C or IEEE or any of the others.
Standards committees is actually one of
humanity’ssociety’s biggest unsolved problems. 🙃