maegul (he/they)

A little bit of neuroscience and a little bit of computing

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 19th, 2023

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  • It’s not too hard. There are a bunch of different platforms one might experiment with as well as instances. Some will use multiple accounts for different needs or interests. On lemmy, multi accounts are useful for have different feeds, for example. I probably have 7-10. I’ve probably forgotten about a few of them. If you’re curious, it happens.



  • Suspicion is totally fair re BlueSky IMO. The system they’ve design seems to me (and others AFAICT) to have the potential to include interconnected components or sections with various degrees of independence.

    The elephant in the room, which I point out on BlueSky whenever I can, is that no one seems to really be trying to build the hard parts of that out. Which is a shame because it could be interesting.

    EG, there’s a chance that a hybridised system running both BlueSky’s protocol and the fediverse’s could be viable and quite useful. Add to that the integration with some E2EE, and it finally feels like an actual attempt at building something new for the modern internet.

    Fortunately there is some noise around these ideas, so hopefully their system can outlast their finances. But yea, a rug pull is definitely not out of the question.


  • If there is a platform that does it better, I bet people will start to notice.

    Yea … I suspect it’s a protocol problem more than any one platform, because there’s just too much flexibility in the protocol and so any inter-platform transfer is necessarily noisy. Multiplied by the number of platforms, and you get quite a bit of noise.

    To your point though, a new platform that kinda does it all on its own could likely take off quite well and then set a new de facto standard around how to do things. Bonfire seemed to be that, and may still be. AFAIU, they’re trying to solve performance issues right now before properly opening up.



  • Just feels like every attempt at alternative social media is dying as the internet shrinks to a few corporate websites that control everything.

    Yea … it’s sort of a lens for me as I view/critique the actions and decisions of people building alt-social … this stuff is hard and fragile but also important … so not fucking around with it kinda matters (to me at least).

    The hate toward BlueSky from mastodon/AP people, for example, is misguided I think. The, IMO, general lack of concern for inter-platform interop across the fediverse bothers me too, where I ask whether a platform is being a good “fediverse citizen”. And some of the “cultural purity through vigilance” culture out of the mastodon/microblogging crowd is, IMO, short sighted.

    A common thread being a readiness for negative behaviour and effects rather than building and supporting.



  • In general, this is true of the broader population as a whole. Mastodon got the size that it’s an actual place (and I think this applies to lemmy/threadiverse too). But it’s by no means “THE place” or even categorically a big public place. More like old-school forums that have a particular user base and vibe that you visit from time to time.

    For the fediverse, the “migration” was exciting and successful, but compared to big-social, a drop in the ocean. And the biggest clue for that is that the people most excited about Threads joining the fediverse are Evan (author and lead “advocate” of ActivityPub) and Gargron (masto CEO/founder) … they want to taste that big-social scale and know that they don’t have it and likely never will.



  • Reality for mastodon, I think, is that the “migration” is basically over, and has been for over a year now. The Brazilian move to BlueSky (and not mastodon) highlights it very well.

    Recalibrating on what we want and can do with the fediverse, as well as how central we want the mastodon project to be, are the best things to do now.

    For me, it seemed like Gargron didn’t really know how to speak about the lack of a Brazilian migration to mastodon in favour of BlueSky, and handle a new moment of actually dropping in popularity or perceived relevance (having been the underdog then rising start for a while), which I take as a cue that being the dominant center of the fediverse isn’t a natural fit for Gargron and his project, to the point where the fediverse may have just outgrown it.

    So, random thoughts:

    • I think de-emphasising mastodon as the fediverse’s big player and surest means of gaining users is likely a good idea in the medium to long term. Replacing twitter for twitter users is now something others do substantially better: Threads and BlueSky. While I’m not sure Mastodon, or its decentralisation, offers anything particularly novel, different or attractive. If anything, its lack of compatibility with other fediverse platforms is likely a negative.
    • More broadly, a focus on microblogging is best de-emphasised, for the same reasons as above. Conspicuously, mastodon is the only platform that’s really trying to replicate twitter-style microblogging. Just about every other platform tries to go beyond it in some way.
    • Instead, IMO, community building through richer and more flexible platforms is what the fediverse should focus on, in large part because it matches what the fediverse’s decentralisation actually provides: control and ownership over your community.
      • Indeed, I think the fediverse needs to kinda wake up to what it really is. So much of the advocacy during the twitter migration was pushing the idea that the decentralisation doesn’t really matter (and “it’s just like email”) and can be ignored for the most part.
      • In reality, it does matter and can’t be easily ignored. And the world has more or less realised that, with mastodon (and the fediverse) now suffering from a branding issue.
      • So I say the way forward is to accept what decentralisation is and either add an additional layer to polish the UX, or lean into it and build on it rather than pretend this place is something else.
    • By community building, I mean “flexible space creation” that likely translates to a range of relatively composable features, structures and content types and formats. Basically, stop rebuilding big-social style platforms, and build “humane spaces” that more or less comprise any/all of the formats of the existing platforms in a way that people can use however they want.
    • Unfortunately, this is likely not trivial, at all, and would likely require better organisation amongst those contributing to the fediverse, and perhaps improvements to the protocol itself.

    As for the threadiverse (lemmy, piefed, mbin, nodebb etc), it’s always struck me that group based structures (EG, lemmy communities) seem to work better over federation. Account migration from instance to instance is simpler, in part because the user is not the central organisation. Which instance you’re on doesn’t really matter that much. Also, blocking a whole community seems a useful middle ground between blocking a user and defederating a whole instance at the instance level, and ditto with community level moderation which can operate over federation. Additionally, the little technical talk I’ve seen on the issue seems to indicate that moving a community from instance to another might actually be quite viable.

    If true, then community building might be best started with the group based platforms. Maybe an ecosystem of formats that involves all of them other than microblogging might work well?? Perhaps user-based content could take on a different structure from what microblogging does … perhaps something like what BlueSky does could be adapted to fuse user-based structures into group-based platforms like lemmy (IE, your content exists in a pod which you can own and which is portable, which is then sucked up into various public feeds depending on what permissions you provide)??

    Things like private communities, group chats, blogs, wikis (and RSS feed management?) intuitively seem to me to pair well with group-based platforms and community building.



  • AFAICT, it helps you pick an instance based on your interests, which only barely helps with the problem. If you’re new to the ecosystem, you typically just want to join in and see what’s going on before making any decisions. And you probably don’t want to bother with selecting criteria for a selection guide at all.

    What I’m suggesting is clicking a button “Sign Up”, enter credentials, verify and done. Then allow the whole finding an instance process pan out naturally.

    Part of the issue IMO is that how an instance advertises itself isn’t necessarily how it will be seen by someone … they need to see it for themselves.


    1. Fix picking an instance. It’s an irredeemably bad UX, even for tech people who could run an instance if they wanted to. Gotta remove that as an initial UX barrier first, which would require a new layer of system with integration with all of the clients.
    2. Accept that this isn’t like mainstream social media and likely never will be, even if instance picking becomes easier for newcomers. So instead focus on what can be done well here. IMO it’s customisable community building.

    Currently all the big fediverse platforms kinda suck at this, in part because it likely requires a bunch of features, but also because they’re all made in imitation of big social platforms that were always less “homely” and more engagement farms.

    To bring normies, something new and unique needs to be offered. IMO there could be a rich ecosystem of content and structures and communities that draws people in.

    My fear is that the protocol and federation are the limiting factors on this, and so I suspect some restructuring or redesign is necessary.






  • I can see this argument, at least in general. As for community mods, I feel like it’d be generally fruitful and useful for them to be and feel empowered to create their own spaces. While I totally hear your argument about the size of the “mod” layer being too large to be trustworthy, I feel like some other mitigating mechanisms might be helpful. Maybe the idea of a “senior” mod, of which any community can only have one? Maybe “earning” seniority through being on the platform for a long time or something, not sure. But generally, I think enabling mods to moderate effectively is a generally good idea.