Breaking the law of silence about the mental health crisis in Queer Fedi, and the Tech Mastodon clique that makes it so miserable.
This is a very long post, so I imagine few will read it (fair enough), but I felt it added significant value to fediverse discourse and haven’t seen it around, so here it is.
Although it wasn’t really specifically the point of the post, reading it’s made me think that maybe the whole idea of “universally” federated social media (even excluding the spam etc) is fundamentally untenable regardless of the technical protocol, and that treating it as the end-goal might not be the play.
I didn’t read the post (sorry, it was too long and I’m tired) but the fediverse is equally suited to federated islands as to one fediverse, right? Most people will want the full fediverse but people can also create their separate spaces if desired.
I guess, yeah, but it has tradeoffs. Each island loses even more diversity of perspective (e.g., political echo-chamber, or building fedi tools that might work well for their island but make no sense for other islands), and making it harder to use as replacements for Xitter / reddit etc.
Like, a lot of discussion happens on topics like “how can we make Mastodon better for former Xitter users?” or the same thing but for lemmy and reddit. Maybe they’re fundamentally not the right questions to ask if the endgame state of federated social media is that it isn’t a direct replacement of centralized services.
I mean what are we arguing here? People fox holed themselves long before even the internet. People look for affirming information and topics. Its a psychological behavior you’d have to fundamentally design around which would likely result in just showing you shit you dont want to see.
But (it sounds like) you’re talking about voluntary grouping, where if you dump 100 people together at a party or networking event or whatever, theoretical-person Amy will vibe best with certain types of people, and so ends up chatting up Cleo, Ming, and Kiara because they share similar interests / humor / whatever – but there’s nothing actually stopping someone from outside of that from walking up and chatting with the newly-formed group. That’s kind of what (I thought) we had now in the fediverse, where for example I can go talk about Australian news on aussie.zone, jump to lemmy.world to talk about fediverse stuff, swing by redd.that to look at Unraid updates (all communities I’m part of), but then browse the incoming feed of everything coming into my instance and view a whole lot of communities which I’m not part of, most of which I never will be. It’s (nearly) all open-by-default. Yes, there’s some blocking / defederation etc, but the default state is that users on one instance can (whether or not they actually choose to) talk to other instances.
If a new user randomly picks any instance from the top 50 (of any fediverse software, excluding maybe Pixelfed since that’s probably the least interoperable with the others) to join up on, chances are very good (but will vary based on personal interest) they’ll be able to participate in like >=90% of the conversations that they want to in the sense that their instance is federating with all the people and communities they’re interested in.
What I’m thinking-out-loud-ing (“arguing” sounds a bit more assertive than what I’m aiming for) is that this might not be how ActivityPub would optimally be used; maybe just because ActivityPub could allow 90% of users to talk to 90% of users, it doesn’t mean that’s actually the best way to use it. Maybe it serves the user’s interests better if there are clusters of “sub-fediverses” instead.
As a grounded example: Beehaw partially self-isolates from the wider fediverse (it’s not just that users could communicate but don’t; the connection is severed) in an effort to better maintain its vibe and values. I had always viewed that as the exception to the norm, but maybe having (e.g.,) clusters of instances that only communicate with a comparatively smaller amount of other instances, say the other instances in its “cluster” plus a few other clusters only (as opposed to most instances communicating with most other instances) is a different – and potentially healthier – way to architect things. So I guess partial, selective federation rather than (what felt to me like) the current goal of “if it uses ActivityPub, we want to communicate with it*”. * with obvious exclusions for spam etc.
I can see your point. Alternatively, and I know this is precisely what people dont want to do, but you can just have multiple accounts. I do, and Jerboa makes switching between them painless. This grants me different “views” of the fediverse based on instance (as you said). I actually like this, as its more choices for me to choose what I want to see at what time.
well the safe island instances can all access discussions on the free-for-all instances and we all exchange ideas and learn from eachother and get along famously