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Fediverse hot takes:
(hachyderm.io)
Voyager.app for life. Screw the browser.
- since MySpace, social media has been primitive in the forms of expression afforded its users … essentially plaintext and an emoji or two. This has produced exceedingly low expectations in users about the richness of what content they are permitted to author online. Damn that.
- The great big elephant in the room for the fediverse (apart from #Mastodon ) is that choosing an instance is simultaneously meaningless and important. But the ways in which this is so are not intuitive or even known to anyone but acolytes and admins.
5a) Proof: even if you learn the details of how instance interactions work and cause things like incomplete reply retrieval, you will forget it until reminded, because it’s unintuitive.
- The Fediverse's biggest mistake so far was not laying out the carpet for the Twitter et al Migrants. They were forced to recognise that the fediverse was always
"correct"/good and to simply "join" a foreign place and obey its customs.
Instead, they should have been given their own "place" (a soft Mastodon fork and separate instances) to grow, call and have a culture of their own.
If new platforms eat the fediverse's lunch (eg BlueSky), it will be by providing this experience.
@fediverse
7) In the aggregate, #Mastodon / #fediverse are simply unintuitive.
Add up all of the design missteps or confusions (which happen), mixed and confusing but often strongly felt cultural standards, lacking or hard-to-find documentation or explanations, and, federation strangeness/quirkiness ... and you get a platform that crosses past the reasonably intuitive line.
It's reparable, but probably not easily so.
@fediverse
8) The ideal fediverse is (?):
- Everyone is on single-user instances with much personal control (hosted by one of many services).
- People congregate in various "platforms as communities", which is where the real moderating and community management happens.
- A variety of software and platform options exist for both the user-instances and community platforms.
The flaw of the #fediverse is that it conflates hosting and community services (ie, 1 & 2) and so underperforms at both.
@fediverse
9) Like #Twitter and #BlueSky, the fediverse also likely has had its well poisoned ... by "tech libertarianism".
Twitter: "Nazi bar", BlueSky: "Crypto scam". Fediverse: "tech libertarianism fanatics".
You may disagree, but others, perhaps many (?) see it that way and feel that the virtues of a properly designed and managed centralised social media are superior to chaotic volunteer-run decentralisation.
Maybe we should be forced to "work it all out together in the public square"?
this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2023
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