I guess you mean something like “the dream of the Fediverse as a unified community is dead?” Or maybe “the word ‘Fediverse’ is now irredeemably tainted?” Or “it’s time for server operators to...
I guess you mean something like “the dream of the Fediverse as a unified community is dead?” Or maybe “the word ‘Fediverse’ is now irredeemably tainted?” Or “it’s time for server operators to split up into smaller organizations with better, more explicit rules in common?”
I think the Fediverse is mostly illegible to most people - or at least to me, and I doubt newcomers are any better informed. Server names are chosen rather whimsically and are meaningless to outsiders. I haven’t seen any maps of who is blocking who, so I don’t know where the borders are. There aren’t blogs with amateur journalists covering political disputes, so I tried reading #Fediblock, but I don’t know who the participants are or who to trust. I’m connected to a few people, but what little I can figure out about the bigger picture comes from rumors I don’t trust.
Compare with subreddits, which mostly have meaningful names, descriptions of what they’re about, clear moderation rules, and sometimes FAQ’s. It’s considerably easier to get a grip on what a subreddit is about than to choose a Fediverse server. Similarly for substacks and other blogs, where authors have about pages and you can read a few articles to get an idea of what sort of things they write and whether they’re of interest. Open source projects tend to be pretty legible too.
I think it might be due to differing incentives. Many people on Fediverse servers don’t want to be found except by a few like-minded friends, so the illegibility is intentional for privacy. But I think if there are going to be new collections of Fediverse servers that newcomers have heard of and can find and understand, they’ll be more successful if there is an official website with a policy document, a blog, a list of member servers, mailing lists or chats, and so on? These are the usual ways that organizations understand and define themselves.
The thing is, that’s a lot of work for some community organizers who will probably be unpaid at first. It’s not as easy to understand what to do as starting with a predefined way of starting a community with a meetup or a substack or a subreddit. And you need some kind of motivation and vision for why it would be great for the organization to exist and what makes it different.
I mean all three of those things (and I said all of them in the article), and several more things. Those are true because the concept of the Fediverse is simply not coherent anymore. Indeed, I...
I guess you mean something like “the dream of the Fediverse as a unified community is dead?” Or maybe “the word ‘Fediverse’ is now irredeemably tainted?” Or “it’s time for server operators to split up into smaller organizations with better, more explicit rules in common?”
I mean all three of those things (and I said all of them in the article), and several more things. Those are true because the concept of the Fediverse is simply not coherent anymore.
Indeed, I think you illustrate this very well when you say: "the Fediverse is mostly illegible to most people". Of course it is - it doesn't exist! There is no vantage point from which you can look at every ActivityPub and OStatus server and discern the links and walls between them, because they only exist in the same "place" in the same way that Tildes, Lobste.rs, and Reddit do.
What you can do is look at little islands of connection. Some of these islands make themselves legible on purpose, like the UFoI (at least, once they release their member list); others don't, but are able to be observed meaningfully from without and within.
I don't think it's meaningful to try to say anything at all about "the fediverse" as a whole. You can't say how many people use it, for any reasonable definition you care to pick. You can't talk about "Fediverse culture" any more than you can really talk about "Internet culture" these days; that used to make sense back when "the Internet" was like, e-mail, IRC, USENET, and Gopher, but even then not really. Nowadays nobody would refer to "e-mail culture" seriously, I don't think.
"The Fediverse" is just a collection of software and protocols, and even then it's a loose one. (For instance, one of my references says that Diaspora isn't "fediverse" but instead part of "the Federation", which together comprise "the Free Network".) I don't think it's a useful term anymore.
Okay, makes sense! I haven’t heard of UFol (Google search brings up University of Louisville), so that’s another example of things being pretty illegible, from the outside anyway. Incidentally,...
Okay, makes sense! I haven’t heard of UFol (Google search brings up University of Louisville), so that’s another example of things being pretty illegible, from the outside anyway.
Incidentally, the web used to be pretty hard to navigate in the early days. I’d find websites because other websites had a web page that listed all the other servers they knew, and there was Cool Site of the Day. Then came Yahoo and search engines.
On Technology I want to start this post by highlighting a crucial point that is alluded to, but didn't receive enough time of day. The Fediverse, and frankly most FOSS that's out there, is...
On Technology
I want to start this post by highlighting a crucial point that is alluded to, but didn't receive enough time of day. The Fediverse, and frankly most FOSS that's out there, is extremely user unfriendly. That is to say, there's a barrier of technical literacy that you need to be able to cross in order to participate. A lot of people who are coders, or were already present in the Fediverse prior to Mastodon taking off because Elon Musk is a massive loser, are really blind to just how user unfriendly it is.
Yes, it's not difficult to register an account on an instance and it's not difficult to post a message. It is, however, very difficult for people to understand what is actually going on with the website. Aside from the issues of learning a new language which is inherent to any platform (such as what the difference is between an Instagram post, story and reel), there's an additional set of literacy that's unique to the Fediverse- one needs to understand how federation works. To this day, I've never seen a good explanation. I'm not even certain I really know what's going on behind the scenes a lot of the time, but if I go on Facebook and make a post, I know that people on Facebook are going to be able to see the post. This is touched on, briefly, in the section musing on whether two people are truly on the Fediverse together, but I think it doesn't get highlighted quite enough. This literacy barrier is huge to your average person. There's only so much time someone is willing to put in to learn a new platform before they give up and write it off. In fact, the very fact that it is a new platform is often enough (try asking someone on Signal to also be on Telegram or Whatsapp or Wickr or Viber or any other number of platforms that all accomplish more or less the same function).
There's not just the technical literacy part when it comes to understanding the platform, many of these platforms have a ton of bugs or extremely light UI which doesn't do a good job of explaining things. One common way that I've seen people feel pushed away from these platforms is that they don't really understand how to report content, or where to go for help. If they happen to stumble across some kind of tech support area and report a problem, the answer is almost always someone linking to an issue that's already been lodged on GitHub. How do they see what's changed? Where's the unified team rolling out upgrades and explaining what changed and how or what's on the horizon? How do I find documents explaining what this platform does or how to use it? It's simply not user friendly, and until UX design enters the FOSS mainstream, I don't think it'll ever really have the same appeal as major platforms which have entire teams dedicated to this.
I think finally there's a point to be made in here about algorithms and surfacing content that people want that are completely absent from the Fediverse. The Fediverse is very opt-in focused, you need to seek out the content that you want, but there's no real good way to discover new content except through small social circles. In general I think sociability online is in a reductive phase (gen-z tends to favor smaller scale interaction when it comes to socializing such as discord servers and group chats, while still utilizing platforms such as tiktok for curated content that they do not intend to use for socializing) simply because we've all been burned by moderation at scale being woefully inadequate.
On Moderation
A lot of the time is spent musing about moderation issues and how people view the Fediverse. This is a really important point- journalists are never going to stop writing about how some people are using the Fediverse to do disgusting things on the internet. There is, unfortunately, no way to avoid this except for the Fediverse to take a moral stance. FOSS in general also has this problem, and while I have seen some solutions to this (interesting kinds of FOSS licensing where they make moral judgements and restrict licensing for the use of say, white nationalism), there is a very "open" mindset in FOSS that is incompatible with how most people view the world. It's certainly not okay for it to be used for things that are pretty much universally illegal (like child porn) but it also can't be okay for right wing nationalism either, or it's going to poison the platform. Why leave Facebook which also has a right wing nationalism problem for a platform that you need to learn if it also has a right wing nationalism problem?
This is of course exponentially more problematic when you get to ideas like moderating content across instances, such as users from a right wing instance flooding yours. One can block the instance, or more likely when size becomes unsustainable shift to an opt-in or whitelist mode of communication, but you will never approach the size of more unified platforms like Instagram if you do this. As I mentioned earlier, however, I think the size or scale of social media when it comes to sharing your day to day and interacting with friends is in general shrinking and people are interacting with social media in a different way today than they were 5 or 10 years ago as people continue to learn that large scale open commenting is just a bad idea in general (Youtube comments, I'm looking at you).
On Social Media and Rules
I think all of this points towards a general shift in mindset on social media. People are slowly moving to smaller, curated communities for their day to day chatting. I think this is a reflection of how free speech at scale simply does a bad job at allowing people the safety and security they're looking for in day to day social interactions. You don't want to have to think about whether a bigot or troll is going to tell you to kill yourself when you express an opinion on something or want to have a conversation. Small communities offer a level of personal touch because the moderation to user ratio is much higher. There's more direct interactions with individuals and a higher level of trust you can build up when you're regularly interacting with the same people.
I personally think there's a lot more that can be modeled from in person communities. Were you ever presented with a list of rules the last time you went to a meetup, dropped in on an event, talked to someone at a book read, or at the coffee shop? In person communities self police themselves - your group of friends has conversations when someone exhibits a behavior that makes others upset. They self regulate with conversation, rather than with rules. This is something that I think social media can learn from. Having an extremely light set of rules, with more conversations and more open to interpretation can help a place feel like a community. When people get a chance to have open conversations about how they felt, they are more invested. Instead, they click a button to report a post and need to specify which rule is broken. The person exhibiting the bad behavior gets to try and wiggle out by avoiding specific terms or specific language, but still sending the same hateful, bigoted, or aggressive message. They wrap their words in a package which "meets the rules" but still manages to make others upset. People universally don't like this, but many are unwilling to reject the iron bars of rules in favor of people utilizing judgement because they worry that the judgement may come down on them for the things they say. It's a place of insecurity, it's risky, and people aren't used to doing this online. But they opt in to this kind of structure every time they interact with people in real life - their friends will talk, they might even lose them for saying offensive things or treating them poorly.
I think we're headed towards smaller communities where rules are more flexible, and I think that's something that no one has really figured out how to do at scale. The next major social media company will likely be the one that figures out how to do this - to allow communities to self modulate, but at scale.
I agree with most of your points here, but I do want to note that you're falling a bit into the trap that I'm talking about in the article: you're talking about "the Fediverse" not having...
I agree with most of your points here, but I do want to note that you're falling a bit into the trap that I'm talking about in the article: you're talking about "the Fediverse" not having dedicated support teams and so forth, when I don't think that's really meaningful.
For instance, you mention people not knowing how to report problems. On Mastodon, that workflow is quite well streamlined, and it's a constant point of improvement - but on lots of other ActivityPub speaking platforms, it's not, or it's nonexistant. At what point does "the Fediverse" have a good reporting workflow? Is it when Mastodon's mainline has it? What about one of the forks of Mastodon? Or is is when every single ActivityPub speaking software deployed anywhere has a good workflow for that?
Aside from that, though, I agree. Especially the last bit:
I personally think there's a lot more that can be modeled from in person communities.
Yes! When have we ever expected every in-person community to get along with every other? When have we ever expected every in-person group we joined to be eternal and have 100% uptime and moderation? It's interpersonal communication - and that makes it hard, inconsistent, and ephemeral by its nature.
When framing this problem, I was attempting to do so through the lens of the average user. Someone who is simply not going to have the tech literacy to understand these differences. You're right,...
When framing this problem, I was attempting to do so through the lens of the average user. Someone who is simply not going to have the tech literacy to understand these differences. You're right, this is a question you can't really answer, but to an end user who's just looking for a website to sign up to and interact with people on, ultimately this is a question they aren't going to be able to answer. The first Fediverse site that figures out how to do it right could very well become it's own ecosystem and potentially lead to the creation of a new tech giant, but ultimately I think it's far more likely that the first one that understands how to do small communities at scale will achieve this.
It's interpersonal communication - and that makes it hard, inconsistent, and ephemeral by its nature.
It's interesting because we have different sized forums for different things. A group of friends is smaller than a gathering for an event or a conference which is smaller than a local government or a town hall, and so on, and so forth. I think we haven't stopped to consider the different purposes of these groups and what barriers there are to restrict their sizes. Someone from the other side of the world likely isn't coming to your town hall, but on the internet there's no reason someone from the US couldn't participate in a subreddit dedicated to a city on the other side of the world such as /r/Stockholm. Being extremely open to people from all over the world is useful in many ways, but it also poses plenty of problems. I think the rise of small curated communities like discord servers, Fediverse websites, and the such is an attempt to manage size while remaining open to a global community. It certainly provides an interesting and unique good to the world - I love the fact that I can be connected to someone as thoughtful and interesting as you, which is only really possible because of the internet.
In-person events where strangers meet tend not to be self-policing; even if the rule set is pretty light, they do generally have them, and there’s often someone in charge. It’s easy to...
In-person events where strangers meet tend not to be self-policing; even if the rule set is pretty light, they do generally have them, and there’s often someone in charge.
It’s easy to underestimate what it takes to hold an event safely. One example is tech conferences, which have often had trouble with sexual harassment and now commonly need codes of conduct and people who are prepared to act on complaints. The Rationalist community has had trouble apparently by underestimating what you need to do to run good in-person events.
Or more old-school: bars often hire bouncers for good reason. Businesses in a bad part of town can have problems with anti-social outsiders.
Excellent post. I was caught a touch offgaurd first (I probably shouldn't have been), this is very much a "The Fediverse is dead, long live the Fediverse!" blogpost. I very much agree that the...
Excellent post. I was caught a touch offgaurd first (I probably shouldn't have been), this is very much a "The Fediverse is dead, long live the Fediverse!" blogpost. I very much agree that the term "The Fediverse" is a bad way to describe the communities in the same way "The Emails" is a bad way to describe email infrastructure.
Everything is a hot mess because there's so many places things get mixed up and misattributed. People can't wrap their heads around the software not being coupled with the community, because by and large that model has been actively fought against in the modern age....you can't build a walled garden with open, standard protocols.
To copy the terrible journalism quote the blog referenced:
It doesn’t matter that you can’t see them, as a Mastodon user you are sharing a social media platform with them.
You use email? SO DO PEDOPHILES! SMS? PEDOPHILES! Encryption? PEDOPHILES!!
As a result, conversation about “the Fediverse” is impossible. We can’t meaningfully argue over whether or not “the Fediverse” (or “Mastodon”-the-network) is racist; of course it is, of course it isn’t only. We can’t meaningfully argue over whether or not “the Fediverse” is fragile; of course it is, of course it isn’t only.
In this way: The Fediverse is just another microcosm of the internet. Every bit of bigotry you see there is present elsewhere, but you might not see it as much due to the legions of moderators and admins.
I very much agree with everything in the "We Have to Keep Going" section. I have more complicated feelings about expectations users have to open source developers, which almost had me writing a very different comment on this thread. Lots of its half-edited remains are below, I'll try to fix it up later. The largely stem from "Isn't That Mastadon," and the subsequent footnotes 3/4.
Ultimately, I am reminded of this most recent example. The tale of a dev burnt out by demands of users whom don't pay (or pay a pittance) making demands of a project. I'm not going to attack or defend Gargron much, and I'll preface with "I don't know much, and I'm not going to dive too deep in this rabbithole." I'll quote from footnote three, but don't misconstrue my picking apart these specific points as a dismissal. There's a lot of valid criticism in there as well. Even what I'm picking apart is not wrong, it's just complicated.
After a little while it became clear that Gargron, the person who built most of the software, is the sole decision-maker over the code and considers it his personal project. [...] It’s his view that Mastodon is his personal project that he can handle however he wants, and the nearly $4,000 per month that he gets through Patreon and Liberapay are kind donations from people who support his decisions. [...] Like it or not, he is in charge of the main branch of a huge community project and he promises various advantages over Twitter to attract members.
And.....he's the CEO of the company that owns the repo. So for all intents and purposes...it is. You'll notice none of those donation tiers say "You get decisionmaking power" You get access to be in the discussion, which is still more than you'd get anywhere else. His answer of "fork it", is a perfectly valid one at the end of the day..... In the end of the post...that's exactly what someone named Maloki is trying to do then (forming a fork with a different governance model).
I really want to highlight a hypocracy of this post, because it happens all the time.
They are entirely capable of duplicating the project and making the features they want, but if we wanted to do that we would have to pay someone. The financial cost would be significant, and in order to keep the code maintained with new updates from the main project we would have to keep paying. For most people this is just not sustainable.
Ding, ding, ding. Emphasis mine. I'm reminded of something I heard: Ideas are cheap, implementation is expensive. You know why there's about 10,000,000 people with ideas for the perfect MMO but not 10,000,000 perfect MMOs? Because implementing an idea is exponentially harder than having the idea. I don't say this to disparage, but trying to stand up and proclaim "but that was my idea, I deserve credit" is somewhat akin to me demanding credit for a bugfix when all I did was click "report bug".
None of this will change until he shares some of the power over his project with people of colour, women, and other marginalised groups who are vulnerable when they speak up online.
If you don't like the governance model, fork. You could well just have a downstream fork that just doesn't accept commits they don't like without having to write a line of code. If one wants to fix the problems they've been told no to, fork and implement those fixes. If one succeeds, the original will be left as a footnote. If you don't have the skillset, make friends with someone who does and ask them nicely to help.
I largely agree with you. However: Many forks exist, and many have died. The issue, as you say, is resources - and Gargron does a lot to make sure the Mastodon gGmbH is The Brand of Mastodon, and...
I largely agree with you. However:
If you don't like the governance model, fork.
Many forks exist, and many have died. The issue, as you say, is resources - and Gargron does a lot to make sure the Mastodon gGmbH is The Brand of Mastodon, and it's quite hard for other people to get grants, donations, etc.
So, in other words, that's already happened and is being actively undermined at every turn.
Edit: it's also worth mentioning that many people other than Gargron contribute code to Mastodon regularly, including the author of that blog post (until that post, obviously). People regularly come to Gargron with code in hand and get told it's not wanted. It's not as if they're just griping out of nowhere.
Oh yea, agreed. Forking is not easy, and the grievances must be major and inspiring large numbers to pull it off (see Jellyfin). I think the most valid reason it's given as an answer to criticism...
Oh yea, agreed. Forking is not easy, and the grievances must be major and inspiring large numbers to pull it off (see Jellyfin). I think the most valid reason it's given as an answer to criticism is the value it serves in "walk a mile in my shoes then come back to talk."
Hence why Fediverse is useful insofar it helps people understand Mastodon is more like Outlook+Exchange for ActivityPub than it is a Twitter clone.
Once the public groks that, more alternatives will be sustainable. With any luck Tumblr will follow through on ActivityPub support.
At the risk of sounding confrontational: So what? Admittedly, I don't know much about FOSS and FOSS culture - I'm not even a programmer - but is there some expectation that just because someone...
It's also worth mentioning that many people other than Gargron contribute code to Mastodon regularly, including the author of that blog post (until that post, obviously). People regularly come to Gargron with code in hand and get told it's not wanted. It's not as if they're just griping out of nowhere.
At the risk of sounding confrontational: So what?
Admittedly, I don't know much about FOSS and FOSS culture - I'm not even a programmer - but is there some expectation that just because someone comes with code in hand for some new feature or even a simple bug fix, that it's supposed to be taken in and implemented without question? That sounds like huge potential for runaway scope creep. Even for FOSS, I imagine there's still some kind of overall vision for a product. That there are gatekeepers of sorts to ensure that proposals are still in line with the overall vision or purpose.
Like others, I don't disagree that it's hard to simply fork and start your own thing. People on reddit have tried to "flee" en masse at times, to recreate new reddit-like sites elsewhere, but it rarely (probably never) works out. Tildes here is the only successful reddit-like platform I've seen. But its success is because it's intentionally trying not to be reddit. It doesn't have the userbase of reddit and it probably never will, by choice.
But if I had to guess, other mastodon forks probably do want to be like mastodon or even be the replacement for it. Network effects alone make that a hard sell. Even Google+ couldn't make a new social media platform happen.
I guess you mean something like “the dream of the Fediverse as a unified community is dead?” Or maybe “the word ‘Fediverse’ is now irredeemably tainted?” Or “it’s time for server operators to split up into smaller organizations with better, more explicit rules in common?”
I think the Fediverse is mostly illegible to most people - or at least to me, and I doubt newcomers are any better informed. Server names are chosen rather whimsically and are meaningless to outsiders. I haven’t seen any maps of who is blocking who, so I don’t know where the borders are. There aren’t blogs with amateur journalists covering political disputes, so I tried reading #Fediblock, but I don’t know who the participants are or who to trust. I’m connected to a few people, but what little I can figure out about the bigger picture comes from rumors I don’t trust.
Compare with subreddits, which mostly have meaningful names, descriptions of what they’re about, clear moderation rules, and sometimes FAQ’s. It’s considerably easier to get a grip on what a subreddit is about than to choose a Fediverse server. Similarly for substacks and other blogs, where authors have about pages and you can read a few articles to get an idea of what sort of things they write and whether they’re of interest. Open source projects tend to be pretty legible too.
I think it might be due to differing incentives. Many people on Fediverse servers don’t want to be found except by a few like-minded friends, so the illegibility is intentional for privacy. But I think if there are going to be new collections of Fediverse servers that newcomers have heard of and can find and understand, they’ll be more successful if there is an official website with a policy document, a blog, a list of member servers, mailing lists or chats, and so on? These are the usual ways that organizations understand and define themselves.
The thing is, that’s a lot of work for some community organizers who will probably be unpaid at first. It’s not as easy to understand what to do as starting with a predefined way of starting a community with a meetup or a substack or a subreddit. And you need some kind of motivation and vision for why it would be great for the organization to exist and what makes it different.
I mean all three of those things (and I said all of them in the article), and several more things. Those are true because the concept of the Fediverse is simply not coherent anymore.
Indeed, I think you illustrate this very well when you say: "the Fediverse is mostly illegible to most people". Of course it is - it doesn't exist! There is no vantage point from which you can look at every ActivityPub and OStatus server and discern the links and walls between them, because they only exist in the same "place" in the same way that Tildes, Lobste.rs, and Reddit do.
What you can do is look at little islands of connection. Some of these islands make themselves legible on purpose, like the UFoI (at least, once they release their member list); others don't, but are able to be observed meaningfully from without and within.
I don't think it's meaningful to try to say anything at all about "the fediverse" as a whole. You can't say how many people use it, for any reasonable definition you care to pick. You can't talk about "Fediverse culture" any more than you can really talk about "Internet culture" these days; that used to make sense back when "the Internet" was like, e-mail, IRC, USENET, and Gopher, but even then not really. Nowadays nobody would refer to "e-mail culture" seriously, I don't think.
"The Fediverse" is just a collection of software and protocols, and even then it's a loose one. (For instance, one of my references says that Diaspora isn't "fediverse" but instead part of "the Federation", which together comprise "the Free Network".) I don't think it's a useful term anymore.
Okay, makes sense! I haven’t heard of UFol (Google search brings up University of Louisville), so that’s another example of things being pretty illegible, from the outside anyway.
Incidentally, the web used to be pretty hard to navigate in the early days. I’d find websites because other websites had a web page that listed all the other servers they knew, and there was Cool Site of the Day. Then came Yahoo and search engines.
Yes! My drug of choice was the slightly more Millennial StumbleUpon, but I absolutely adore that kind of curated discovery mechanism. Good stuff.
It was so good. We had a drinking game in college: Stumbleporn. You'd turn on adult content and drink every time you got porn.
Man, i used to start my day with cool site of the day and suck.com. Good times.
On Technology
I want to start this post by highlighting a crucial point that is alluded to, but didn't receive enough time of day. The Fediverse, and frankly most FOSS that's out there, is extremely user unfriendly. That is to say, there's a barrier of technical literacy that you need to be able to cross in order to participate. A lot of people who are coders, or were already present in the Fediverse prior to Mastodon taking off because Elon Musk is a massive loser, are really blind to just how user unfriendly it is.
Yes, it's not difficult to register an account on an instance and it's not difficult to post a message. It is, however, very difficult for people to understand what is actually going on with the website. Aside from the issues of learning a new language which is inherent to any platform (such as what the difference is between an Instagram post, story and reel), there's an additional set of literacy that's unique to the Fediverse- one needs to understand how federation works. To this day, I've never seen a good explanation. I'm not even certain I really know what's going on behind the scenes a lot of the time, but if I go on Facebook and make a post, I know that people on Facebook are going to be able to see the post. This is touched on, briefly, in the section musing on whether two people are truly on the Fediverse together, but I think it doesn't get highlighted quite enough. This literacy barrier is huge to your average person. There's only so much time someone is willing to put in to learn a new platform before they give up and write it off. In fact, the very fact that it is a new platform is often enough (try asking someone on Signal to also be on Telegram or Whatsapp or Wickr or Viber or any other number of platforms that all accomplish more or less the same function).
There's not just the technical literacy part when it comes to understanding the platform, many of these platforms have a ton of bugs or extremely light UI which doesn't do a good job of explaining things. One common way that I've seen people feel pushed away from these platforms is that they don't really understand how to report content, or where to go for help. If they happen to stumble across some kind of tech support area and report a problem, the answer is almost always someone linking to an issue that's already been lodged on GitHub. How do they see what's changed? Where's the unified team rolling out upgrades and explaining what changed and how or what's on the horizon? How do I find documents explaining what this platform does or how to use it? It's simply not user friendly, and until UX design enters the FOSS mainstream, I don't think it'll ever really have the same appeal as major platforms which have entire teams dedicated to this.
I think finally there's a point to be made in here about algorithms and surfacing content that people want that are completely absent from the Fediverse. The Fediverse is very opt-in focused, you need to seek out the content that you want, but there's no real good way to discover new content except through small social circles. In general I think sociability online is in a reductive phase (gen-z tends to favor smaller scale interaction when it comes to socializing such as discord servers and group chats, while still utilizing platforms such as tiktok for curated content that they do not intend to use for socializing) simply because we've all been burned by moderation at scale being woefully inadequate.
On Moderation
A lot of the time is spent musing about moderation issues and how people view the Fediverse. This is a really important point- journalists are never going to stop writing about how some people are using the Fediverse to do disgusting things on the internet. There is, unfortunately, no way to avoid this except for the Fediverse to take a moral stance. FOSS in general also has this problem, and while I have seen some solutions to this (interesting kinds of FOSS licensing where they make moral judgements and restrict licensing for the use of say, white nationalism), there is a very "open" mindset in FOSS that is incompatible with how most people view the world. It's certainly not okay for it to be used for things that are pretty much universally illegal (like child porn) but it also can't be okay for right wing nationalism either, or it's going to poison the platform. Why leave Facebook which also has a right wing nationalism problem for a platform that you need to learn if it also has a right wing nationalism problem?
This is of course exponentially more problematic when you get to ideas like moderating content across instances, such as users from a right wing instance flooding yours. One can block the instance, or more likely when size becomes unsustainable shift to an opt-in or whitelist mode of communication, but you will never approach the size of more unified platforms like Instagram if you do this. As I mentioned earlier, however, I think the size or scale of social media when it comes to sharing your day to day and interacting with friends is in general shrinking and people are interacting with social media in a different way today than they were 5 or 10 years ago as people continue to learn that large scale open commenting is just a bad idea in general (Youtube comments, I'm looking at you).
On Social Media and Rules
I think all of this points towards a general shift in mindset on social media. People are slowly moving to smaller, curated communities for their day to day chatting. I think this is a reflection of how free speech at scale simply does a bad job at allowing people the safety and security they're looking for in day to day social interactions. You don't want to have to think about whether a bigot or troll is going to tell you to kill yourself when you express an opinion on something or want to have a conversation. Small communities offer a level of personal touch because the moderation to user ratio is much higher. There's more direct interactions with individuals and a higher level of trust you can build up when you're regularly interacting with the same people.
I personally think there's a lot more that can be modeled from in person communities. Were you ever presented with a list of rules the last time you went to a meetup, dropped in on an event, talked to someone at a book read, or at the coffee shop? In person communities self police themselves - your group of friends has conversations when someone exhibits a behavior that makes others upset. They self regulate with conversation, rather than with rules. This is something that I think social media can learn from. Having an extremely light set of rules, with more conversations and more open to interpretation can help a place feel like a community. When people get a chance to have open conversations about how they felt, they are more invested. Instead, they click a button to report a post and need to specify which rule is broken. The person exhibiting the bad behavior gets to try and wiggle out by avoiding specific terms or specific language, but still sending the same hateful, bigoted, or aggressive message. They wrap their words in a package which "meets the rules" but still manages to make others upset. People universally don't like this, but many are unwilling to reject the iron bars of rules in favor of people utilizing judgement because they worry that the judgement may come down on them for the things they say. It's a place of insecurity, it's risky, and people aren't used to doing this online. But they opt in to this kind of structure every time they interact with people in real life - their friends will talk, they might even lose them for saying offensive things or treating them poorly.
I think we're headed towards smaller communities where rules are more flexible, and I think that's something that no one has really figured out how to do at scale. The next major social media company will likely be the one that figures out how to do this - to allow communities to self modulate, but at scale.
I agree with most of your points here, but I do want to note that you're falling a bit into the trap that I'm talking about in the article: you're talking about "the Fediverse" not having dedicated support teams and so forth, when I don't think that's really meaningful.
For instance, you mention people not knowing how to report problems. On Mastodon, that workflow is quite well streamlined, and it's a constant point of improvement - but on lots of other ActivityPub speaking platforms, it's not, or it's nonexistant. At what point does "the Fediverse" have a good reporting workflow? Is it when Mastodon's mainline has it? What about one of the forks of Mastodon? Or is is when every single ActivityPub speaking software deployed anywhere has a good workflow for that?
Aside from that, though, I agree. Especially the last bit:
Yes! When have we ever expected every in-person community to get along with every other? When have we ever expected every in-person group we joined to be eternal and have 100% uptime and moderation? It's interpersonal communication - and that makes it hard, inconsistent, and ephemeral by its nature.
When framing this problem, I was attempting to do so through the lens of the average user. Someone who is simply not going to have the tech literacy to understand these differences. You're right, this is a question you can't really answer, but to an end user who's just looking for a website to sign up to and interact with people on, ultimately this is a question they aren't going to be able to answer. The first Fediverse site that figures out how to do it right could very well become it's own ecosystem and potentially lead to the creation of a new tech giant, but ultimately I think it's far more likely that the first one that understands how to do small communities at scale will achieve this.
It's interesting because we have different sized forums for different things. A group of friends is smaller than a gathering for an event or a conference which is smaller than a local government or a town hall, and so on, and so forth. I think we haven't stopped to consider the different purposes of these groups and what barriers there are to restrict their sizes. Someone from the other side of the world likely isn't coming to your town hall, but on the internet there's no reason someone from the US couldn't participate in a subreddit dedicated to a city on the other side of the world such as /r/Stockholm. Being extremely open to people from all over the world is useful in many ways, but it also poses plenty of problems. I think the rise of small curated communities like discord servers, Fediverse websites, and the such is an attempt to manage size while remaining open to a global community. It certainly provides an interesting and unique good to the world - I love the fact that I can be connected to someone as thoughtful and interesting as you, which is only really possible because of the internet.
In-person events where strangers meet tend not to be self-policing; even if the rule set is pretty light, they do generally have them, and there’s often someone in charge.
It’s easy to underestimate what it takes to hold an event safely. One example is tech conferences, which have often had trouble with sexual harassment and now commonly need codes of conduct and people who are prepared to act on complaints. The Rationalist community has had trouble apparently by underestimating what you need to do to run good in-person events.
Or more old-school: bars often hire bouncers for good reason. Businesses in a bad part of town can have problems with anti-social outsiders.
Excellent post. I was caught a touch offgaurd first (I probably shouldn't have been), this is very much a "The Fediverse is dead, long live the Fediverse!" blogpost. I very much agree that the term "The Fediverse" is a bad way to describe the communities in the same way "The Emails" is a bad way to describe email infrastructure.
Everything is a hot mess because there's so many places things get mixed up and misattributed. People can't wrap their heads around the software not being coupled with the community, because by and large that model has been actively fought against in the modern age....you can't build a walled garden with open, standard protocols.
To copy the terrible journalism quote the blog referenced:
You use email? SO DO PEDOPHILES! SMS? PEDOPHILES! Encryption? PEDOPHILES!!
In this way: The Fediverse is just another microcosm of the internet. Every bit of bigotry you see there is present elsewhere, but you might not see it as much due to the legions of moderators and admins.
I very much agree with everything in the "We Have to Keep Going" section. I have more complicated feelings about expectations users have to open source developers, which almost had me writing a very different comment on this thread. Lots of its half-edited remains are below, I'll try to fix it up later. The largely stem from "Isn't That Mastadon," and the subsequent footnotes 3/4.
Ultimately, I am reminded of this most recent example. The tale of a dev burnt out by demands of users whom don't pay (or pay a pittance) making demands of a project. I'm not going to attack or defend Gargron much, and I'll preface with "I don't know much, and I'm not going to dive too deep in this rabbithole." I'll quote from footnote three, but don't misconstrue my picking apart these specific points as a dismissal. There's a lot of valid criticism in there as well. Even what I'm picking apart is not wrong, it's just complicated.
And.....he's the CEO of the company that owns the repo. So for all intents and purposes...it is. You'll notice none of those donation tiers say "You get decisionmaking power" You get access to be in the discussion, which is still more than you'd get anywhere else. His answer of "fork it", is a perfectly valid one at the end of the day..... In the end of the post...that's exactly what someone named Maloki is trying to do then (forming a fork with a different governance model).
I really want to highlight a hypocracy of this post, because it happens all the time.
Ding, ding, ding. Emphasis mine. I'm reminded of something I heard: Ideas are cheap, implementation is expensive. You know why there's about 10,000,000 people with ideas for the perfect MMO but not 10,000,000 perfect MMOs? Because implementing an idea is exponentially harder than having the idea. I don't say this to disparage, but trying to stand up and proclaim "but that was my idea, I deserve credit" is somewhat akin to me demanding credit for a bugfix when all I did was click "report bug".
If you don't like the governance model, fork. You could well just have a downstream fork that just doesn't accept commits they don't like without having to write a line of code. If one wants to fix the problems they've been told no to, fork and implement those fixes. If one succeeds, the original will be left as a footnote. If you don't have the skillset, make friends with someone who does and ask them nicely to help.
I largely agree with you. However:
Many forks exist, and many have died. The issue, as you say, is resources - and Gargron does a lot to make sure the Mastodon gGmbH is The Brand of Mastodon, and it's quite hard for other people to get grants, donations, etc.
So, in other words, that's already happened and is being actively undermined at every turn.
Edit: it's also worth mentioning that many people other than Gargron contribute code to Mastodon regularly, including the author of that blog post (until that post, obviously). People regularly come to Gargron with code in hand and get told it's not wanted. It's not as if they're just griping out of nowhere.
Oh yea, agreed. Forking is not easy, and the grievances must be major and inspiring large numbers to pull it off (see Jellyfin). I think the most valid reason it's given as an answer to criticism is the value it serves in "walk a mile in my shoes then come back to talk."
Hence why Fediverse is useful insofar it helps people understand Mastodon is more like Outlook+Exchange for ActivityPub than it is a Twitter clone.
Once the public groks that, more alternatives will be sustainable. With any luck Tumblr will follow through on ActivityPub support.
At the risk of sounding confrontational: So what?
Admittedly, I don't know much about FOSS and FOSS culture - I'm not even a programmer - but is there some expectation that just because someone comes with code in hand for some new feature or even a simple bug fix, that it's supposed to be taken in and implemented without question? That sounds like huge potential for runaway scope creep. Even for FOSS, I imagine there's still some kind of overall vision for a product. That there are gatekeepers of sorts to ensure that proposals are still in line with the overall vision or purpose.
Like others, I don't disagree that it's hard to simply fork and start your own thing. People on reddit have tried to "flee" en masse at times, to recreate new reddit-like sites elsewhere, but it rarely (probably never) works out. Tildes here is the only successful reddit-like platform I've seen. But its success is because it's intentionally trying not to be reddit. It doesn't have the userbase of reddit and it probably never will, by choice.
But if I had to guess, other mastodon forks probably do want to be like mastodon or even be the replacement for it. Network effects alone make that a hard sell. Even Google+ couldn't make a new social media platform happen.
That is specifically not a problem with federated social media.