This post invites input in “the comments” but contains no link to any comments that I can see, and there’s no sign of an email address either, so I’m making a thread here.
The list opens on the problem of Instance Selection Paralysis – and I gotta say, the usual narrative here is both right and wrong in my experience. In theory, I’m part of the demographic being described: I have not made an account on the Fediverse, and that’s related to the task of selecting somewhere to join in the first place. With that said, paint a picture like that and you’re at risk of people getting the wrong idea.
I have the curiosity and the patience to deal with this process. I’ve looked at the directories. I’ve looked at the rec lists. I’ve repeatedly spent hours at a time evaluating my options. I still haven’t made an account on any of them. And as long as Fediverse advocates keep thinking of the problem in terms of “selection paralysis” (and denying me a comment section), they’re not going to find out why.
IMO, this Tim Chambers guy is focusing on the wrong problem. The biggest UX problem besetting the Fediverse isn’t technogical. It’s social. It’s the people. I can’t fault them their passion, but every time I see somebody posting about politics on the Fediverse I think of “Spreading the Disease” by Queensryche:
Fighting fire with empty words
While the banks get fat and the poor stay poor
And the rich get rich and the cops get paid
To look away as the one percent rules America
The more online activism I see, the more I doubt the sincerity of the people doing it. Do they actually give a shit, or are they just trying to gain clout through performative concern for the cause du jour?
I’ve been there before, and I don’t ever want to participate in the Fediverse again, because once I started suspecting the motives of everybody posting about politics there it became impossible to stop.
I certainly wouldn’t recommend the Fediverse to others. I honestly believe that people would be happier online if they had their own websites, with or without blogs.
Not what I had in mind, but I can understand adding it to the list. On the one hand, I figure some folks would argue that you can avoid certain kinds of pontificating by setting the right filters and picking the right website. On the other hand, on the social front more broadly, there’s a known problem with federated diplomacy being… underdeveloped, to put it mildly.
Maybe you can, but I don’t think you should have to, and I think that many of Chambers’ proposed fixes would make the problem worse.
I was writing about this sort of thing years ago.
The problem with social media is that all of the downsides are opt-out:
public posting by default
being followed by random strangers
receiving unsolicited private/direct messages
receiving unsolicited public replies (sometimes you just want to broadcast)
being visible to the open web
being indexed by search engines
being subject to gamification via likes/retweets or favorites/boosts
I’m not just talking about Twitter, incidentally. The Fediverse honestly isn’t much better. When Eugen Rochko designed Mastodon and “lain” created Pleroma, they seem to have deliberately replicated all of the worst aspects of corporate social media and made many the same mistakes the GNU Social people made while adding new failures:
Posting to public timelines by default.
Anybody can follow you by default.
Your profile contains a hidden RSS feed accessible from the public web.
Search engines can index your public posts by default.
People can see how popular you are by default.
New accounts not only can but are encouraged to follow complete strangers, which rolls out the welcome mat for trolls and spammers.
Anybody can reply to your public/unlisted posts or direct message you by default.
While perusing the comments on this PR discussing fixing the phantom reply issue I see there is apparently a necessity to make a request to every server involved in a discussion.
This darkens my already dim view of the W3C which can’t seem to do anything useful in the current decade.
