zlacker

People can make a case for the developer productivity benefits of rails to a startup or business, but it’s hard to see it as worth the cost to the Mastodon community as a whole. But maybe it’s won the Fediverse market because of the depth of features which is a benefit of that productivity.

>>jeremy+(OP)
FWIW, there are some - maybe one or two - alternate implementations of Mastodon server brewing out there. Not of a generic ActivePub server, but specifically a server with an intention to be fully compatible with Mastodon.

So in the future, there may be more, hopefully more efficient choices.

>>jeremy+(OP)
My read is it's mostly social, there's a lot of people accustomed to Mastodon and not much interest in exploring other options. There are implementations in Elixir (Pleroma, Akkoma) and work being done in Rust (Calckey, currently node but moving towards a Rust implementation). Mastodon dev team are not particularly open to criticism so my general sense is that admins should choose another project.

>>mal-2+T61
Yes, I’ve explored all this but I think Mastodon has won mainly because of its admin functionality, a huge fraction of dev effort is focused on tools to manage content moderation, spam policies and so on. Pleroma has a bad reputation because it was behind on that stuff at one time - maybe still - and a lot of instances had to be blocked because they couldn’t be managed effectively enough. I think it’s easy to underestimate how wide that moat is.

>>jeremy+Zs1
That's fair, I've heard complaints that mastodon's moderation tools also leave something to be desired but it might still be the best. I haven't been an admin so I can't comment firsthand.