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Comment by mdaniel | Hacker News Reader

So this one is a fork, and infosec.exchange is a fork ( https://github.com/glitch-soc/mastodon ); are the mastodon committers opposed to incorporating those changes, or this fork situation is "as it should be" while these experiments run their course?

I'm all for experimentation, but since "the exodus" I've become acutely aware of how many instances are out there advertising their version number[1], so the first big rails (or mastodon itself) vuln is going to be some ooooonooooz

1: although in this case, it says a version but the "Source Code" link points to the wrong repo, so .. security by obscurity I guess?

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I've gotten the impression Eugen has a very clear idea of what he wants Mastodon to be and isn't shy about rejecting features that he doesn't think serve that goal. Those forks are the model of good open source. Other people have strong ideas about how it should be, couldn't convince the main project's owner, and moved on to create their own version that suits their vision.

It's great. This is how it should be. And it's a huge improvement over open source projects that languish for years for lack of strong leadership with no one forking it because there's no one to say no to features. As long as the possibility exists, people are wary of forking. Remove the possibility, and people can feel confident doing their own take.

As for Mastodon, as far as I know all the major forks are maintained by experienced developers who incorporate security updates.

And federation is about the protocol and the interoperability, which is how software achieves stability and longevity (although neither is guaranteed). It's perfectly fine for multiple implementations, or forks of a single implementation, to bloom.

"By our best understanding, our major changes are not wanted by the Mastodon project, hence maintaining this fork instead of trying to commit the changes to Mastodon."

https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown#readme

Mastodon lead developer has resisted including some of the glitch-soc improvements since 2017 -- like "local-only posts", which are valuable both from a privacy and anti-harassment (and are also in Hometown).

I'm not sure about Glitch, but Hometown has several different features [1] that Mastodon may never opt to include as it changes the behavior a bit.

1: https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/wiki

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