I like the enthusiasm expressed in the blog post, and agree that groups coming to Mastodon might be a really good thing for the fediverse and open-source in general.
I'm a bit concerned about "the twitter effect", where cynicism and toxicity are rewarded by the algorithm. This is perhaps less of a problem on the fediverse, since there's no corporate interests fanning the flames, but I've definitely seen similar dynamics play out on Lemmy as well. Tribal dynamics and echo chambers create some really toxic behavioral patterns.
In any case, I hope r/rust devs can contribute to the fediverse, and Lemmy's codebase and community to make it the kind of place we've all desperately needed for so long!
Oh yeah, that's the one! It's a very powerful scene. Crazy that it came out in 2011, a lot of it seemed so prescient. I watched it soon after the pandemic started, I think Netflix featured it around that time for obvious reasons.
On a post in the feed, hit the three dot button and filter out that user/community or instance. If you want to block rather than just filter, go to the bot user profile and hit block in the top bar.
Completely agree with everything you've written, and will also add that any fork will need to either constantly keep up with and stay compatible with the upstream Lemmy repo, or if the fork decides to make breaking changes, it will need to port over security and other QoL changes that upstream gets.
I don't have any particular complaints about the speed of Lemmy development or which features the devs are prioritizing or shutting down. Since there are two primary devs who are working on a pretty complex Rust codebase, it is going to take time for new contributors to understand it inside out as well as they do. The philosophy of a codebase is also very important for maintainers to guard, as just adding code or features without an overarching vision can lead to chaos.
Having said that, I'm strongly in favour of multiple forks of the Lemmy backend bring developed. This allows new features, visions, optimizations, etc to be developed quickly and a lot of diverse opinions and philosophies to be entertained, exactly as we're seeing with instances. Alternative UIs are another example of the benefits of this approach.
This also allows Lemmy maintainers to see which changes are beneficial, and merge them back into the main codebase much more easily. For example, if a fork has 10x the performance with half the resource usage, it'll be an easy sell to merge back in.
Edit: typo
Edit 2: shutting down, not shitting down 🤦
I don't think they shove their vagina down your throat. I think it's maybe their uterus? Or their fallopian tubes or something? Any xenomorphologists here?
I have fond memories of whiling away many hours discovering fascinating new sites on del.icio.us. A fediverse reinterpretation sounds interesting!