The Trouble with Forking Mastodon
In recent weeks, people unhappy with Mastodon project talked about forking the project in a different direction. It's harder than it looks.
A lot of people have talked about the possibility of forking Mastodon to get the many improvements their communities need. Making such an effort successful is another discussion entirely.
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I don't really see the point in forking a project like Mastodon unless you are already deeply involved with its development. It doesn't do enough that you couldn't rewrite it better (as in in a way you understand better and with lessons from the original taken into account) in the time it would take you to fully understand all the details of the existing code base.
Yea agreed. It’s not the forking that matters though IMO, it’s the commitment to a true and stable alternative, whatever the best way to that is.
Mastodon lacks a lot of basic features, like full text search.
It actually does have that nowadays, it's just that the feature requires Elasticsearch to work, which is one extra piece of infra for admins to worry about.
It is about as common as using a database server for content though to use something like ES, Solr or similar software for search.
It absolutely is. Yet, as Sean said, it's also yet another bit of software to run and maintain, and ES is known to be a bit of an effort to keep going well.
Admins having only finite amounts of time and/or resources, might make the very understandable decision to leave it out.
