What are the ethical considerations of using platforms — such as Mastodon and Pixelfed — whose active maintainers 1) are very very closed off to new PRs that add features that aren’t aligned with their “vision” in an “open source as in look or fork, but don’t touch” way and 2) actively endorsing and working to assist Meta in its plan to extinguish the communities we’ve built on fedi?

Numerous other fedi platforms such as Sharkey, Iceshrimp, and even Akkoma have not had their main developer teams come out and take this step of endorsing Meta’s plans for extinguishing fedi as we know it.

How soon will it be before Mastodon and Pixelfed start including features aimed at Threads integration at the expense of the rest of us? The truth is, it’s already happening.

The first party Mastodon app is the way many new users are onboarded into the entire fediverse, and its already made design changes to parallel the design of the threads app. A key example of this is how the instance section of a user’s handle in their profile is shown in the Mastodon app after the recent updates.

Sticking with Mastodon, and even glitch-soc, in the long term raises lots of practical and even ethical questions imo given the direction of the team.

It looks like Pixelfed is going down this path as well.

#Mastodon #Pixelfed #meta #threads