💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~say › gemlog › more_ssb.gmi captured on 2024-05-10 at 10:36:36. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

View Raw

More Information

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

More about SSB

I'm not trying to be a huge negative nancy but the more I think about this the more crazy it is to me. SSB recently received a mortal blow, but despite its flaws its still a very functional, useful and charming system.

What ended up happening over the last 5 years fundamentally is the developers and community weren't able to escape the gravity well of their own ecosystem. It's crazy. It's like how they say if earth were a little larger chemical rockets wouldn't be able to reach orbit. RIP.

In this case they couldn't untangle themselves from all the crap that comes with JS/npm and that whole way of thinking and doing things.

The original line of thinking from Dominic still makes a lot of sense today. What happened? "Almost no one makes it out". I like to imagine JSON Molina was talking about Ohio, and in my experience that's sadly true. But in the case of SSB, and what to me is the most salient prior art, Diaspora, "Did you really believe?" is about making it out of the self imposed mental isolation of people who lose track of the whole world that exists beyond JS and beyond their shrinking social circles of loved ones and coworkers.

Here are some things they did wrong:

• Built their house (protocol) on sand (hashing canonically unordered JSON) from day 1
• Prioritized backward compatibility over fixing their problems so as not to disrupt their community. Does that community still exist? No. This was an explicitly stated choice.
• Relied on a sort of "hundred flowers campaign" (aka "Can't Someone Else Do It) for client development instead of focusing on having one or two MVP clients.
• Completely threw the baby out with the bathwater of community growth by disabling most public access to the network because their own members kept advertising on the reddit-clone with the worst people on earth: Hacker News.
• Finally, they let the fox into the henhouse. I'm sure much worse things were happening behind the scenes but even on the surface the fox called Monopoly Money was allowed in and left to his own devices.