Sorry if this is off topic, I don’t mean to stir a shitstorm. I just seem to hear barbs about Pixelfed developer dansup’s online behaviour every now and then, but no one ever comes out and make clear what the trouble is.
I guess it’s a legitimate complaint that he holds out on open sourcing projects, and keeps them close to his chest rather than distributing workloads. Given he’s currently developing Pixelfed and Loops and a messenger called Sup, I can understand the worry that he’ll hit a figurative wall and take all projects down with him…
So I found this open letter just now as I were trying to get to the bottom of it, and I genuinely can’t tell if this is what people have been growling about?
The above link is to the “appendix” where the anonymous authors appear to show receipts for the behaviour they flag. In shorter form, from the letter itself:
dansup, the maintainer of Pixelfed, Loops (which NLnet helps fund), and FediDB, among others, is a dangerous force in the fediverse community. With a follower count of over 22 thousand, he has repeatedly shown himself to be hostile to fellow FOSS fediverse developers, have a lack of care for open-sourcing his work, and be in favour of injecting the fediverse with advertisements. He has also proved himself to be prone to conspiratorial thinking, regrettable public statements, and embarrassingly public meltdowns.
Somebody tell me what is going on here?
[edited for typos]
While we do Drama about [Insert open source developper name here] we have open and closeted nazi owning social media and big software companies. So I think we should better focus on them than on whatever Drama in the FOSS world
Eh, the open source community can worry about the open source community. Those other things don’t mean we have to put on horse blinders to others bringing awareness. No need to be dismissive.
True. But we are not the open source community. And the fediverse is not inherently open source by nature. ActivityPub is designed to be used by anyone.
FOSS is a big part of the fediverse. Doesn’t mean everything in fediverse is or has to… BUT it means it is very relevant to discuss.
deleted by creator
Is this not relevant, since this person is a linchpin in creating federated alternatives to those social media sites? And if he fails he drags them all down.
You both have fair points, but I favour taking the broad view rather than hyperfocusing on one single, worst of class supervillain. We can do both.
Celebrating finally having more contributors to Pixelfed: https://mastodon.social/@pixelfed/113865305989589430
Dansup absolutely suffers from the instinct of not open sourcing stuff until it’s fairly late in the stage of being an MVP, but I think that’s largely because he’s learning these technologies as he goes and is afraid of criticism on that front. Personally, however, I do not think it is the case that he does not believe in the Open Source project. I also trust him when he says he’s working towards a nonprofit to distribute the load. It seems his first steps are to get funding via kickstarter to quit his job, and then I imagine organizing a nonprofit structure is next.
This is an insightful comment. Just to add, once you allow contributors to the project, you add a whole other set of tasks that have to be performed. You have to become a project manager, and your mental model of the project becomes disrupted due to changes made by other people. I can fully sympathize with wanting to build an MVP before sharing.
Side note: I have no idea who this person is or what his history is. I’m just adding my opinion based on personal experience.
Strong Matt Mullenweg energy
Yeah, you’re not wrong. The difference is, Mullenweg didn’t really melt down until his project had made it financially (and was fully open source).
If the ads section on the post is true he is a real hypocrite.
I don’t want to say either way because I’m just observing from the sideline, but I’m trying to find context for what bubbles to the surface.
I don’t think anyone can argue that he works harder than most, maybe juggles a few too many projects for one man? Then he goes online and checks his better judgement at the door 🤷
Fork or contribute to the projects. Easy.
From the top level of this: An open letter to NLnet to pull funding from development of Loops
Conflict of interest
This open letter has been authored by contributors who wish to remain anonymous. The authors, as well as some of the undersigned, are friends and acquaintances of hazycora, and as such, we acknowledge any potential conflicts of interest stemming from our relationship.
I don’t know either party but from the information made public it looks like dansup has acted like a dick and fallen out with hazycora and the drama has escalated hard.
From what I’ve observed dansup has been going full tilt to get Loops done because of the issues with TikTok and he is not great at delegating or really dealing with people. However, it would be a shame for such vital projects to have their funding cut but, equally, if I was in charge of those grants I’d be worried about dansup burning out and progress stalling. So it should be a requirement that all this is made open source as a priority, with a short to medium term goal being to have these projects run by a group of people to ensure the future and avoid similar issues going forward.
This seems like an extremely lame nothingburger
