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I really miss something like thematic "groups" or "channels" in Mastodon, i.e., a mechanism for making sure that all the people subscribed get all the messages
by TuringTest 8y ago
I really miss something like thematic "groups" or "channels" in Mastodon, i.e., a mechanism for making sure that all the people subscribed get all the messages published in it.
That's the #1 feature that allows separate communities to grow, which makes places like Usenet or Reddit or ICQ to become a global conversation where anyone can participate, and where private conversations between restricted communities can happen independent of a central server.
The "timeline" model where everyone publishes their own stream, and anyone subscribe to individual persons, is good for fast propagating of ideas and news; but it doesn't create "clusters" of like-minded ideas that you can follow, and forces everybody to curate their own inputs. This makes it really difficult to jump in, as building a subscription list that provides interesting content and avoids noise has a lot of friction.
- epeus 8y agoYou can do that with hashtags, but it is only going to show up within your instance's federation. Gnusocial has ! Groups which do propagate all posts, but mastodon didn't implement that bit.
- TuringTest 8y agoYes, the article mentioned that and that's what made me think about it; it's a different model, close to Twitter but different from other "thematic" social platforms. Matrix.org has a good model for channels (called rooms), groups of channels [1] (called Communities), and distributed identities. I only hope that Matrix.org will become the common background middleware for all federated services, and all these will tend to implement the same features for interoperability. [1] https://medium.com/@RiotChat/communities-aka-groups-are-here-announcing-riot-web-0-13-riot-ios-0-6-and-riot-android-0-7-4-933cb193a28e https://medium.com/@RiotChat/communities-aka-groups-are-here...