@prologic@twtxt.net This might be a bit of a stretch, but anyway:

You could compare the situation to Git and GitHub. Git itself is free software and all that, just like twtxt. GitHub is not.

There are many incentives to use GitHub over plain Git on your own server. Once critical mass is reached, you are basically required to have a GitHub account, just so you can work with people who host their stuff there. And boom, you have a “monopoly”. It’s not a “strict” monopoly, but for mere practical reasons it basically is. You’ll be having a very hard time if you wanted to fully avoid GitHub.

Note that this isn’t the same as “making Git proprietary” (or twtxt, for that matter). The point is (I’m quoting from a Google translation of his blogpost): “… then close the protocol to force users to stay on the proprietary platform.” It doesn’t matter if Git/twtxt itself is free if users are effectively forced to use a proprietary service.

Yarn.social and twtxt are a looooooong way away from this. But I have to admit that I can somewhat understand what @lucidiot@tilde.town is thinking. To be honest, I had similar doubts in the beginning (didn’t we have a discussion about that? 😅). Those doubts are long gone, because I now believe that you’re a good guy – but they were there.

I think it’s normal, at least for purists/minimalists/nerds, to have these kinds of doubts. I don’t take that as hostility from @lucidiot@tilde.town.

Regarding “should we fork”: It could be beneficial to Yarn.social to fork. Get rid of some historical baggage and end discussions like these once and for all. But I reaaaaaally hope that you don’t fork. 😅 For the reasons outlined in this old posting on nixers.net, I will not run yarnd myself. twtxt’s simplicity of just hosting a text file is a killer feature for me.

To end on a more positive note: If it weren’t for the threading extensions of Yarn.social, I doubt that I’d still be an active user. Automatic threading is super important, for me at least. 🥳

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I agree with @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org very well said. I guess I can also understand the “worries” (as unfounded as they are) too, especially coming from your perspective. As you say though (thank you 🙏) Yarn.social is a far cry from this situation.

All along we started out with:

What is the community doing now, what has it always done, what does it want to do.

And we formalised that.

At the same time we built what is now called yarnd, or Yarn.social Pod(s). Aside from the fact it is both decentralised and distributed and uses Twtxt, and all the Extensions, as well as IndieAuth, Atom, WebMentions and WebSub (all open source protocols and specifications, most of which are from the “Small Web”) there’s nothing special going on – yarnd is just a multi-user client and implementation of the specs.

My only goal has always been (and unlikely to change) to bring the simplicity of Twtxt to the masses (I think you all remember this). Hide the complexities of hosting a feed (as simple as that is for tech savvy folks)…

… and build what I believe (and have always believed now for the past few years) the best kind of social media. The slow kind, the truly decentralised kind and the one that is easy to reason about and build against.

It’s just a freka’n text file 🤣

Finally… Even if Yarn.social and yarnd instances (Pods) tomorrow were to suddenly be spawned in the thousands, with thousands of users or more, nothing much would change I don’t think. We would have scalability problems with the search engine (pretty sure), and at that point some of those pods might be “Hosted Pods” (for a fee), which I’m hoping by then would go back into a “foundation” (yet to be named, TBD) to continue to fund the “foundation” (TBD).

@movq@www.uninformativ.de This is computing, we don’t get rid of historical baggage.