In the hayday of the fediverse migration, when people left Twitter in droves, I was on their mastodon instance (then on the one for paid members, "arpa").
The instance was buckling under the load, and the federation lagging hours behind the rest of the world, when not down for hours.
Then we were behind several versions of Mastodon for months because of difficulties in migrating the DB on NetBSD (which is kind of a religion there)
I remember being frustrated by the lack of communication. The sysadmin was then talking about it on the weekly openmic hour on anonradio and that was a bit better, but the rest of the support was laconic messages on bboard when people asked about updates, and silence most of the times.
The feeling I got was that there is, understandably, a hierarchy of users, and the inner circle is overworked and sometimes struggling, but also incommunicado towards the rest the of the members.
Perhaps I'm not the right kind of social person, but I tried and failed to feel at home there. Maybe I misunderstood the whole project.
I still think they are great and I kept donating to it for a while even after I stopped hanging out in com and mastodon. I will maybe try again. I have to invest more human time on it.
sig-11 · · focus · HN ↗
I remember being frustrated by the lack of communication. The sysadmin was then talking about it on the weekly openmic hour on anonradio and that was a bit better, but the rest of the support was laconic messages on bboard when people asked about updates, and silence most of the times.
The feeling I got was that there is, understandably, a hierarchy of users, and the inner circle is overworked and sometimes struggling, but also incommunicado towards the rest the of the members. Perhaps I'm not the right kind of social person, but I tried and failed to feel at home there. Maybe I misunderstood the whole project.
I still think they are great and I kept donating to it for a while even after I stopped hanging out in com and mastodon. I will maybe try again. I have to invest more human time on it.