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.
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
I don’t know how big the dependency is and what the internal structures are like. I only remember that 2-3 years ago there was a message from him saying that he had some kind of burn-out and therefore needed a break of several months.
Since I neither use Pixelfed nor am the target group of Loops, I have not looked into the details, but there have already been some discussions and criticism of the ‘strange’ terms of use with regard to Loops, see here: https://bajsicki.com/blog/loops-video-terms/
He changed Loops TOS recently to match Pixelfed ones and made them much shorter, so it’s outdated information already, you can check it here
Thanks!
I had passed on Loops when it released because of those ToS. Looks much better now, so I might reconsider.
Very good news, thank you very much!
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).
Probably related: https://lemmy.world/post/24487031
Yeah, that would be the New Year’s meltdown referenced, I guess. So is there bottled up crazy behind every deleted toot of his? Should we be apprehensive about using his projects?
Should we be apprehensive about using his projects?
The majority of [ gestures vaguely ] is created and maintained by individuals with varying levels of crazy. You think the six COBOL developers holding up every bank on the planet are totally sane and hinged?
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 🤷
