With posts like this, it's becoming really clear and important that we disentangle "the Fediverse" from "Mastodon."
@Gargron, you've done great work that we're all grateful for, but you're standing on the shoulders of many, many others that you rarely credit or acknowledge.
This attitude isn't what we built the fediverse for. 😢
Eugen Rochko
in reply to blaine • • •See thread: mastodon.social/@Gargron/11013…
Eugen Rochko
2023-04-02 16:51:19
blaine
in reply to Eugen Rochko • • •I think your replies there are not great. 😢
You and Mastodon GmbH benefit massively from the immense amount of work that the wider fediverse community does.
While I appreciate the perspective that the software != the community, I respectfully disagree. The decisions for the software impact the community, as we heard so profoundly at the Black Twitter Summit. The concern I have is that you often conflate the software and the community when it suits, but reject it when it doesn't.
blaine
in reply to blaine • • •Eugen Rochko
in reply to blaine • • •blaine
in reply to Eugen Rochko • • •in that case, we agree! 💜
fwiw, I'm not concerned about the thread – it was specifically the statement around the Mastodon copyright.
I think it'd be really helpful to figure out a way to build that narrative can hold that distinction.
Eugen Rochko
in reply to blaine • • •blaine
in reply to Eugen Rochko • • •sorry, I misspoke - I meant trademark. It's possible you didn't mean to imply this, but "you are benefitting from the recognition of our trademark ... you can develop your own social media platform from scratch and participate in the fediverse that way" seems to suggest that "if you don't like our decisions, do your own thing, but don't call it Mastodon."
If that's not a fair assessment, I'd be greatly relieved.
Eugen Rochko
in reply to blaine • • •blaine
in reply to Eugen Rochko • • •I believe you that it was a far cry from what you intended. 💜
The BDFL approach is complicating in these scenarios, because in social settings "benevolence" to one is "hostile" to another.
I think @swetland's point gets to the root of this: chaos.social/@swetland/1101305…
It's absolutely fine for one person to have a strong view of what "Mastodon, the software" is, but anyone dictating what the Fediverse is anathema to us all. It gets messy when "Mastodon" is used for "the Fediverse."
Brian Swetland
2023-04-02 18:06:28
blaine
in reply to blaine • • •The challenge I see is one of categories: cf, "Debian" is a variant of "Linux", even though Linus decides what goes in the official kernel.
If Linus said to Debian "you can ship and modify the linux kernel, but you can't call it Linux" that would be a huge problem. Given the aspirations we all have for the fediverse, that conflict feels potentially even more profound.
Brian Swetland
in reply to blaine • • •blaine
in reply to Brian Swetland • • •@swetland 💯
I'm super down for using Mastodon to refer to the network, but if Mastodon GmbH is going to assert trademark over divergent implementations, "Houston, we have a problem" as they say 😅
Brian Swetland
in reply to blaine • • •ASP ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
in reply to Eugen Rochko • • •Ed
in reply to Eugen Rochko • • •Ed
in reply to Ed • • •trademark or brand name that has become the generic name for a class of product or service, sometimes resulting in loss of legal protection
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Eugen Rochko
in reply to Ed • • •blaine
in reply to Eugen Rochko • • •@peepstein this is very far from my experience.
e.g., I've had many conversations with journalists who equate the fediverse with Mastodon, and most laypeople who have heard of Mastodon don't know what the fediverse is, but understand "mastodon" to refer to the thing I understand "the fediverse" to be.
Eugen Rochko
in reply to blaine • • •Ed
in reply to Eugen Rochko • • •Jared White (ResistanceNet ✊)
in reply to Ed • • •@peepstein I don't agree with any of that. Mastodon is Mastodon. Everyone in the know, knows exactly what that is, and those who don't can be educated accordingly. I've already gone through this entire conversation with regard to the term "podcast" (no, it does not mean "any audio show on the internet"!)
It's really quite dangerous to repurpose technical terms to mean what they are not. HTML is not any markup, it's a very specific type of markup. Markdown is not Textile. etc.
blaine
in reply to Jared White (ResistanceNet ✊) • • •@jaredwhite @peepstein I think the point is that it doesn't matter what any of us think if common usage overrides our intent or understanding.
All that matters is that we correctly assess how terms are used and understood, and work from that basis.
My OP was calling out the need to disentangle "Mastodon" from "the Fediverse" if (and only if) the intent of Mastodon GmbH was to assert trademark control against "non-conformant" forks (or, indeed, non-derived fediverse software).
Eugen Rochko
in reply to blaine • • •blaine
in reply to Eugen Rochko • • •@jaredwhite @peepstein removed. I'm not looking for an argument over miscommunications. 💜
I do think the trademark issue is real, and disagree with your assessment that people understand the difference between "Mastodon" and "the Fediverse"; you have a lot of power in this space, and your words carry a lot of weight.
blaine
in reply to Eugen Rochko • • •@peepstein when people who don't know about "the fediverse" refer to "mastodon", they mean "a decentralized alternative to twitter" – which is what you and I know as the fediverse.
They're *not* specifically referring to "Mastodon, a software project written in Ruby on Rails that interoperates with a wider network of other software that we've never heard of"
Eugen Rochko
in reply to blaine • • •blaine
in reply to Eugen Rochko • • •@peepstein my heartfelt opinion is that that perspective is stifling to the other possibilities presented by the fediverse. 💜
Mastodon is the, err, elephant in the room. I sincerely believe that we'll all be better off with more diversity, and right now the terminology is a real barrier to that, for everyone involved.
tallship
in reply to Eugen Rochko • • •@peepstein
Really Eugen?
Your interview with Time Magazine notwithstanding?
That was IMO, a grave error on your part - conflating mastodon with #Fediverse and without one single utterance of the word "Fediverse" throughout.
It served to cause much of this confusion on the part of n00bs and as a result, now jeopardizes your trademark.
Fact: There's no such thing as a mastodon network. Only the #ActivityPub powered Fediverse
⛵
.
Admin
in reply to blaine • • •Working and thinking on "native" #openweb aproches to governance
SocialHubRigo Wenning
in reply to blaine • • •and I think they inevitably have to. Like Mozilla controls what "Mozilla" or firefox mean.
As long as mastodon is supporting ActivityPub (and its foreseeable evolution), I think we are still fine. Because competition remains possible.
Compare to all the nice surveillance capitalism services from silicon valley to understand that your concern may sound alarmist.
That notwithstanding, I understand and share your concern.
Mike Connor
in reply to Rigo Wenning • • •@rigo as someone who’s been involved in that (most notably with Debian/Iceweasel) since 2006 or so this is how marks and OSS generally work.
You can fork and rebrand Firefox as much as you want. But if you want to call it Firefox you have to get your changes approved. (In the same way that every change to Firefox gets reviewed!)
Turns out this is important because there were far more people who wanted to distribute Firefox with malware than with good changes.
blaine
in reply to Mike Connor • • •@mconnor @rigo totally. Linux is a clear exception here, because "Debian" definitely isn't "Linux" but also it is.
I think Mastodon is going to be more like that, so my original (now deleted) point is (imho) pretty important. Either we're going to end up with "Mastodon" as a generic term that refers to the network of federated social software, or we need to intentionally stop using "Mastodon" in that way and replace it with a generic term (e.g. fediverse).
Eugen Rochko
in reply to blaine • • •Anil Dash
in reply to Eugen Rochko • • •♾️ Roko's Apprentice ♾️
in reply to Eugen Rochko • • •