Mastodon Forking Discourse
Reading through the GitHub issue that spawned this discourse, Gargron's comments' argumentative tone and unwillingness to compromise lead me to believe he likely has a high rating on Stack Overflow, Reddit, and other communities where being a smug self-important asshole is rewarded.
He talks about this project like it belongs to him and him alone. While technically true, that's exactly the sort of attitude that kills projects centering community. #ForkOff
Mastodon Forking Discourse
@mawr wow.. Gargon's posts were thoroughly unpleasant to read and reeked of "I do what I want because I can so we are doing this even though lots of people are giving good reasons not to implement this feature or include reasonable ways to disable it."
Ick. That is a terrible attitude to have for an open source project..
Mastodon Forking Discourse
@mawr That is unfortunate. I personally have hard time seeing what purpose "trending topics" would serve on a platform like Mastodon. I'd probably need to do some more research but my gut feeling is that they are primarily a big data gathering, information and awareness manipulation tool. Especially with how they are thoroughly manipulated and abused on other social media platforms.
Mastodon Forking Discourse
@wobblewuffess For sure. I'm really frustrated that someone that callous can be at the head of a project that's spawned such a compassionate community.
There's a reason for it though. Mastodon's initial userbase was overwhelmingly oppressed minorities seeking refuge from Twitter and as a result, tools were spawned to meet their needs (content warnings were a direct result of that).
It's now reached a larger audience that supports a more callous view of minority needs.