Many communities are accidental in the sense that they’re just whoever happens to have made their home there. The families in a suburb might share some common demographics due to things like the...
Many communities are accidental in the sense that they’re just whoever happens to have made their home there. The families in a suburb might share some common demographics due to things like the cost of housing and what jobs are available nearby, but other than that, they might not have a lot of common goals.
There are also more intentional communities that happen due to entry requirements. Many organizations have a hiring process. There are academic conferences and conventions where people with a common interest gather. These don’t happen by accident - there are people who make it their job.
Social networks like Twitter, Bluesky and the Fediverse to some extent have always struck me as rather incoherent because every participant ends up with their own custom view of things depending on who they follow. It’s hard to find good discussions and easy to end up in dysfunctional ones. It’s a bit surprising that semi-coherent communities happen at all.
Contrast with subreddits, forums like Tildes and Hacker News, and blogs where we are at least seeing the same top-level posts for the most part. This also happens in private mailing lists and Whatsapp groups.
Yeah, that does happen a lot. Also true on Bluesky. There, the “social aggression” isn’t always successful, but people try. Such disputes do happen on Tildes fairly often and the difference is...
The result is a community that defaults to social aggression for boundary maintenance
Yeah, that does happen a lot. Also true on Bluesky. There, the “social aggression” isn’t always successful, but people try.
Such disputes do happen on Tildes fairly often and the difference is that Deimos will stop them if they get too heated. But a community is still shaped by what you can talk about without starting a bitter argument.
I’d say BlueSky’s social aggression has been pretty successful at herding the range of acceptable opinion. The blocklists are a great tool for blunting the impact of certain types of posters, but...
I’d say BlueSky’s social aggression has been pretty successful at herding the range of acceptable opinion. The blocklists are a great tool for blunting the impact of certain types of posters, but I think anyone joining BlueSky today is going to encounter a lot of unhinged posting and will be disinclined to sift through it to find enough value to be worth learning about the blocklist feature or the shared moderation lists.
The shared moderation lists also have the same HOA-brained scope creep that Mastodon instances suffer from. In theory you’re just signing up for someone’s general moderation and vibe-setting decisions, but in practice the groups that maintain these start to attract highly ideological users who want to use their moderation powers to banish wrong-think and not just cull abusive users.
The most difficult part is that all the enforcement mechanisms are all-or-nothing, so the equilibrium ends up being that a lot of obnoxious and anti-social behavior is permitted to slide because it’s not quite on the level of being worthy of a ban or total disaffiliation forever. In days of online forums moderators had a lot more tools for “vibe setting.” They could directly edit the content of posts to soften language or remove a section of objectionable behavior within an otherwise okay post. They could use temporary mutes or temporary bans to encourage people to cool off. There were options for keeping people around but enforcing boundaries around behavior without needing to kick people out entirely. You could have an escalation path with off-ramps for correcting the bad behavior instead of letting people lean into their worst selves until they cross a line that requires banning. The way it’s set up you’re either a good or a bad account rather than a person who sometimes makes mistakes.
In general I think much of the Fediverse has been a failure because they seek to recreate the social model of sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. But that entire model for socializing is actually bad! There’s no salvaging it. Federation would have worked best if it was presented as just a protocol for posting your things to the internet and allowing other people to follow the things you post. Instead its most vocal supporters are pitching things as drop-in replacements for Twitter, Instagram, or whatever else only with blackjack and hookers. Just create the identity/account and the schema for syndicating posts and let other people build whatever kind of interface they want for looking at it.
The Fediverse, particularly Mastodon, still suffers from the reputation of being “complicated.” Its key distinguishing feature — federated instances — is also its Achilles’ heel. A few years ago,...
The Fediverse, particularly Mastodon, still suffers from the reputation of being “complicated.” Its key distinguishing feature — federated instances — is also its Achilles’ heel.
A few years ago, I started recommending joining the Fediverse/Mastodon via the developers’ instance, mastodon.social, and focusing on the personal timeline. It’s simpler to explain and — I hope — to understand, but something gets lost along this easier path.
I hadn’t realized this until I read this post by Laurens Hof on the Connected Places blog. He makes a very astute distinction regarding the Fediverse experience, between the instance layer and the federation layer, and argues that most people live in the federation layer.
There's more in his article. For me, it was enlightening.
Many communities are accidental in the sense that they’re just whoever happens to have made their home there. The families in a suburb might share some common demographics due to things like the cost of housing and what jobs are available nearby, but other than that, they might not have a lot of common goals.
There are also more intentional communities that happen due to entry requirements. Many organizations have a hiring process. There are academic conferences and conventions where people with a common interest gather. These don’t happen by accident - there are people who make it their job.
Social networks like Twitter, Bluesky and the Fediverse to some extent have always struck me as rather incoherent because every participant ends up with their own custom view of things depending on who they follow. It’s hard to find good discussions and easy to end up in dysfunctional ones. It’s a bit surprising that semi-coherent communities happen at all.
Contrast with subreddits, forums like Tildes and Hacker News, and blogs where we are at least seeing the same top-level posts for the most part. This also happens in private mailing lists and Whatsapp groups.
Yeah, that does happen a lot. Also true on Bluesky. There, the “social aggression” isn’t always successful, but people try.
Such disputes do happen on Tildes fairly often and the difference is that Deimos will stop them if they get too heated. But a community is still shaped by what you can talk about without starting a bitter argument.
I’d say BlueSky’s social aggression has been pretty successful at herding the range of acceptable opinion. The blocklists are a great tool for blunting the impact of certain types of posters, but I think anyone joining BlueSky today is going to encounter a lot of unhinged posting and will be disinclined to sift through it to find enough value to be worth learning about the blocklist feature or the shared moderation lists.
The shared moderation lists also have the same HOA-brained scope creep that Mastodon instances suffer from. In theory you’re just signing up for someone’s general moderation and vibe-setting decisions, but in practice the groups that maintain these start to attract highly ideological users who want to use their moderation powers to banish wrong-think and not just cull abusive users.
The most difficult part is that all the enforcement mechanisms are all-or-nothing, so the equilibrium ends up being that a lot of obnoxious and anti-social behavior is permitted to slide because it’s not quite on the level of being worthy of a ban or total disaffiliation forever. In days of online forums moderators had a lot more tools for “vibe setting.” They could directly edit the content of posts to soften language or remove a section of objectionable behavior within an otherwise okay post. They could use temporary mutes or temporary bans to encourage people to cool off. There were options for keeping people around but enforcing boundaries around behavior without needing to kick people out entirely. You could have an escalation path with off-ramps for correcting the bad behavior instead of letting people lean into their worst selves until they cross a line that requires banning. The way it’s set up you’re either a good or a bad account rather than a person who sometimes makes mistakes.
In general I think much of the Fediverse has been a failure because they seek to recreate the social model of sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. But that entire model for socializing is actually bad! There’s no salvaging it. Federation would have worked best if it was presented as just a protocol for posting your things to the internet and allowing other people to follow the things you post. Instead its most vocal supporters are pitching things as drop-in replacements for Twitter, Instagram, or whatever else only with blackjack and hookers. Just create the identity/account and the schema for syndicating posts and let other people build whatever kind of interface they want for looking at it.
The Fediverse, particularly Mastodon, still suffers from the reputation of being “complicated.” Its key distinguishing feature — federated instances — is also its Achilles’ heel.
A few years ago, I started recommending joining the Fediverse/Mastodon via the developers’ instance, mastodon.social, and focusing on the personal timeline. It’s simpler to explain and — I hope — to understand, but something gets lost along this easier path.
I hadn’t realized this until I read this post by Laurens Hof on the Connected Places blog. He makes a very astute distinction regarding the Fediverse experience, between the instance layer and the federation layer, and argues that most people live in the federation layer.
There's more in his article. For me, it was enlightening.