some thoughts on fedi more generally
It's incredibly bad at supporting coherent meta-conversations, and that's not just a problem of the technology.
The model that ActivityPub implementations tend to follow for supporting group interactions, is to let groups emerge organically in an informal manner, as a natural result of the clustering of people who are similarly aligned.
That works really well for a lot of things, but not for conflict resolution *between* those organic groups, whichever they are.
Each group mostly just sees the things posted by 'their' group, and so is very likely to get only half the story of what's going on, if that; and usually through the lens of a member of their group. This means that in a conflict, both parties are operating on a wildly different view of what actually happened.
I'm not sure that you can actually fix this on a technical level, I suspect it's fundamental to this model. If you don't have explicitly defined communities "in" which something happens, there is simply no reliable way to get a complete view of all conversation around a topic within that community. There isn't even a way to convene a meeting to sort things out.
Sure, you have hashtags, and you have group accounts, but all of these are opt-in and so only make discoverable those things which are explicitly posted to them, which is usually only a small fraction of what actually happened, and not the parts that are important to understanding it.
I can't see how *anything* that's built around personal profiles/timelines foremost, would avoid this fate. It seems like a fundamental and far-reaching design error to me, something that practically guarantees unsustainable conflict, no matter how good the moderation tools.
It's also a design choice that basically every social platform since 2010 has made.
tangent, political
The question comes to mind of what role this shift towards egocentric social platforms has played in the political landscape becoming ever more individualistic, pessimistic, and hostile to organizing.
It sure would have been a very effective mass isolation tactic.
some thoughts on fedi more generally, concise
@joepie91 I wonder if people got hooked on the crack-like addiction of rapid timelines. I loved forums and got a lot of a sense of community from them, even met most of my RL friends through them. But even busy ones wouldn't always have new things to read when you refreshed. People are used to a constant firehose now. Which you could perhaps replicate somewhat if you could conglomerate all your various forum updates into one feed.
some thoughts on fedi more generally, concise
@internetsdairy I think that's sort of the case, and especially at first this would have seemed alluring and felt powerful, but I feel that by this point the downsides of that are understood widely enough that it's probably not as strong of a selling point as it used to be.
Lots of people talk about 'social media detox' now and that suggests that people now have a more well-rounded understanding of the tradeoffs of this model, than they used to.
some thoughts on fedi more generally, concise
@joepie91 yeah, I get the impression most people realise social media today isn't the healthiest. Even my 12yo knows it, not that it really leads to a change of behaviour... I guess a lot of people never used the older alternatives so they don't realise it could be different.
some thoughts on fedi more generally, concise
Organizing by profile still encourages culty attention seeking behavior, but without the ability to capture that attention through high volume low effort posts I think that'd be greatly reduced. The ability to identify each other as people and keep up with our friends is just too important to lose IMO.
Though a social network that started with tag searches by default, and let you click through to someone's profile, might be good. Still, I want to be able to discover what my friends care about, which I can't do if I can't look at the tag groups they participate in. Maybe if the profile timeline was a list of tags, rather than posts? Hm...
re: some thoughts on fedi more generally
@joepie91 yeah, fedi is certainly worse for it, but idk, even in a defined group there can be subgroups, people just ignoring the 'other side'
at least fedi blowups don't generate nearly as much individual messages as on, uh, discord
idk, this feels like at least a 50% people in general problem
re: some thoughts on fedi more generally
@Ember That's... sort of true, but not in the same way I'm describing.
On here, it's very common for people to genuinely not be fully aware of the situation, but believe that they are. This causes things to escalate even when they *could* have been hashed out. And I've seen this same problem replicated in basically every egocentric social platform.
In defined communities, *those* folks can converge on a shared understanding. Likewise, it is possible to convene meetings, and whatever other community-wide actions are needed to resolve a conflict. That's just not really possible here, because "who is involved" isn't even really defined very well.
I've spent a lot of time on forums when I was younger, and conflict certainly happened there too. But there was always a path to resolution, as long as the operators of the community gave a damn about it, and things could be talked out, compromises suggested, and so on. There was a wealth of things that were possible, that simply are not possible here.
People who deliberately disrupt things and aren't seeking to resolve conflicts cannot be solved by a choice of technology. But design choices can certainly affect *how many* of them there can be in a given community or conflict, and also extend the problem to those genuinely unaware, because "does not know the details" and "is stoking the fire" become externally almost indistinguishable.
re: some thoughts on fedi more generally
@Ember I guess a more concise summary would be "egocentric social platforms make every conversation a peanut gallery" and that's what makes the problem unmanageable
re: some thoughts on fedi more generally
CC: @Ember@blobfox.coffee
re: some thoughts on fedi more generally
@cy @Ember I feel like you're making a lot of assumptions here that aren't quite right. What I'm talking about is cohesive communities; interactions don't center *around* individuals, but that doesn't mean that people are not known on a personal level within a community (like how communities have worked for thousands of years already).
re: some thoughts on fedi more generally
But please do call me out on my assumptions. I'm really feeling around in the dark here. Never had a community, myself.
re: some thoughts on fedi more generally
@joepie91 oh yeah, true.
thanks for explaining /gen
some thoughts on fedi more generally, concise
The more I think about the design of social platforms, the more convinced I become that social platforms should not have profiles with timelines at all.
Getting rid of them isn't going to magically bring world peace, and it's not going to solve political issues, but holy shit would it prevent a lot of community failure modes wholesale.