Florence

Published by maloki as a Medium post and a write.as post: Some of you may remember me from hit series such as “Mastodon has a Project Manager”, “I've returned as Project Manager for Mastodon - a love-letter”, and “Time to Fork This Stuff”. It is time for a reboot.

picks up Mastodon This does not spark joy. Thank you Mastodon for all you've done for me, but I'm moving you into the no-joy pile.

In true Konmari spirit, I want to thank Mastodon for the time we've had. While Mastodon has been problematic to say the least, Mastodon has also been great in a lot of ways for a lot of us. We've found community, love, support, and valuable friendships. We've had opportunities to learn new lessons and grow. We've had people calling us on our bullshit, and it's generally been an open and welcoming space. I want to thank Mastodon for this.

Now some of us, both long time developers and contributors, as well as community members, are choosing to pick that up to continue building something new. I wish you the best, Mastodon; you served us well.

picks up Florence This feels different. I like this.

Florence

Fediverse Loves Open Responsible Ethical Networks for Communicating with Everyone

It's been a long time coming, and it's time we keep moving this forward.

Florence will be a lot more than just a Mastodon fork. We are still putting some of those thoughts into words, but we have plans to contribute to all fediverse software that will have us. Our goals include focusing on anti-harassment tools and accessibility. We want to utilize the strength of the diverse experiences, backgrounds, and knowledge we have seen to build something together. We want to listen and have open dialogue with all of you as part of the development process, and it will be at the heart of our work. We will bring this with us to any project that wants to take advantage of what we have to offer. We are stronger together.

Which is why today we want to present you with Florence Mastodon, and the plans for it.

Florence Mastodon

Instead of continuing the existing versions from Mastodon, we're going to be using semantic versioning, to make it obvious when you need to update your software or when there will be game-changing updates or important patches. We'll be sure to list what Masto-main version each release corresponds to.

• 0.1: For our first release we will have set up the repo and created an upgrade path from Masto-main, you can switch over now, if you like (glitch.soc or other forks would be a downgrade).
• 1.0: We will have incorporated changes from existing forks, to create Florence-Masto's unique flavour. At this point you've been on other forks, with other features, you should be able to switch. Since the goal is to get 1.0 out there as soon as possible, we will put new additions in the next update.
• 1.1: New features not existing in other forks, or features that need to be reworked, will probably end up here.
• 2.0: When we reach this point, the goal is to have included major UI changes which have been requested. What else is in store, time will tell.

There will be a longer post available soon if you want to read about our thoughts about how we'll version and work on the development for Florence. The idea is for the development team to elaborate on that to figure out how they want to work with Florence.

Organization goals

There's a few other things we're interested in, that I'll just list below:

• We are signing the Post-Meritocracy Manifesto as part of our goal to focus on compassion, community, and creating ethically sound software. We want to hear from marginalized people when creating this software, we want you to be part of our organization, we want to pay you (when we can, and according to need), and we want to give you credit for your work.
• We will always aim to utilize Open Source Software as part of our infrastructure. However, that won't always be practical, so we also want to be pragmatic.
  • Some of the conversation is still happening on Discord, but one of those conversations has been about moving off Discord, and we aim to finalize that in the next few weeks. More info soon!
  • Yes, we're starting out on GitHub, but it's for some practical reasons, and we are looking at putting the code somewhere more accessible, as we want it to be easy to provide feedback.
  • Yes, chosa and ocdtrekkie, we've forked now!

Now we look forward, and start building, together.