Some changes have recently been made to the diaspora protocol while extracting it outside the main application.

While this is great work and changes do need to be made, in this case changes were made without raising awareness of those changes to all the stakeholders in the protocol.

Please, the protocol is more than diaspora. Even if it is "YOLO code", coming from one developer, that doesn't mean it doesn't have to be supported, maintained and more importantly, not broken for ALL stakeholders.

Change is fine, change without announcement is not fine. I'm guessing this was just an oversight, not realising that asking the other server software stacks to verify and test would be a good idea.

To me, and probably the person writing the actual code, this is clear. But I just had a discussion with some other core developers who don't think consulting stakeholders is necessary.

So, to raise the point and to take an official decision, we need to vote on the matter.