Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

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.

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.

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.

So, different readers are likely to have drawn different conclusions from this post, and that's kind of the point I was trying to illustrate here. Don't just consider how it harms whatever "side" you're aligned with, also consider whether the "better" option might do the same but for someone else.

The actual problem here is that fascists have set up the scenario such that there are no obvious 'solutions' that don't end up harming *someone* in the process, and you need to recognize this and change the way you deal with conflicts like this accordingly. This is divide-and-conquer shit and you need to realize that. Whether someone did something wrong is besides the point.

Blocking people cannot be the end of this particular conversation, you all need to collectively confront the reality that there's going to be a lot more work to do here, to solve this shit, to solve the problem that led to this situation existing in the first place, and that that's going to require some difficult conversations, publicly or otherwise. Including conversations that *you*, the person reading this who is involved in the meta, need to have.

(You, personally, may already be aware of this and have been working on that. In that case, consider this post redundant.)

I'm not going to get involved in the "who's in the right" discussion, because I think everything worth saying there has already been said and there's nothing meaningful I can add.

The only thing I wish to add is a meta-meta consideration, as it were: be very careful in how you respond to fascists sabotaging your ability to do moderation and community defense, consider who actually gets hit by your choice in that matter, and whether that might empower fascists indirectly.

(If you're not sure what this is about, then you're probably not involved in the meta, and this comment is probably not relevant to you)

Also, FYI: *DO NOT* try to start an argument about the meta under this post, consider it read-only. I may block you if you try anyway.