4 ms·

I do think that Mastodon does accomplish this somewhat, honestly! Like each instance has its own vibe, and the sort of cross-instance virality is way less than

by rtpg 4y ago

I do think that Mastodon does accomplish this somewhat, honestly! Like each instance has its own vibe, and the sort of cross-instance virality is way less than "everyone in the same bucket" stuff. I feel like reddit's success is somewhat similar. You don't have to futz around with a bunch of accounts, but you're still working within different worlds, so to speak. Granted, this is less than, say, Discord's "each server you can have a different profile" thing, which I think is kind of the ideal here, but I feel like being able to deal with the technical issues lets communities exist! PhpBB kind of has this, with all the plugins, a sort of uniform interface... it's not the worst thing in the world to have a solid base for running communities. We definitely don't need everyone to be _in_ that same community.

lolinder 4y ago
> I do think that Mastodon does accomplish this somewhat, honestly! Like each instance has its own vibe, and the sort of cross-instance virality is way less than "everyone in the same bucket" stuff. It's still based on a model that is fundamentally different than the way that people socialize in the real world. You could do it differently, but the way it's designed you're supposed to have a single Mastodon account and pick an instance that hosts it. Instances decide whether to federate with other instances or not. The focus of the design is on content and creators, not on relationships. The old phpBB model was much closer to the way that social networks actually work in the real world. A friend might introduce you to a forum about writing, so you create an account and start hanging out with their friends there and discussing writing. You get to know someone else in that group and you find out that you're both into programming and they're involved in another forum that focuses on that. You join them over there with a new account. It's all just friend groups. You might be in many different friend groups or just a few. You may be the only one who is in both groups, or there might be several people who overlap. With some friends you avoid discussing politics, while with others you're comfortable discussing it in depth. Some friend groups form around a game, others around a shared interest. You show different facets of yourself to the different groups, and this is codified in the structure of the apps. This model is not well supported by Mastodon because it set out to solve a very different problem. They approached federation with the question "how do we avoid leaving our content in thrall to a corporation?" I want to approach it with the question "how do we get back to the informal friend groups that we used to have?"
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > You could do it differently, but the way it's designed you're supposed to have a single Mastodon account and pick an instance that hosts it. Instances decide whether to federate with other instances or not. Why wouldn't you just have a different Mastodon account on every instance where you want a presence?
  - darreninthenet 4y ago
    There's nothing stopping you but, at the risk of going around in circles, why would you bother? Is there an improved experience from doing so?
- dagw 4y ago
  the way it's designed you're supposed to have a single Mastodon account and pick an instance that hosts it. Instances decide whether to federate with other instances or not. That sounds quite a lot like the old usenet model actually. You got an account on one usenet server and it was up to the server admin to decide which usenet groups they wanted to partake in and which other usenet servers it wanted to pull/push posts from/to. Other usenet servers could also decide to cut off certain servers if they misbehaved.

by rtpg 4y ago

lolinder 4y ago

> I do think that Mastodon does accomplish this somewhat, honestly! Like each instance has its own vibe, and the sort of cross-instance virality is way less than "everyone in the same bucket" stuff. It's still based on a model that is fundamentally different than the way that people socialize in the real world. You could do it differently, but the way it's designed you're supposed to have a single Mastodon account and pick an instance that hosts it. Instances decide whether to federate with other instances or not. The focus of the design is on content and creators, not on relationships. The old phpBB model was much closer to the way that social networks actually work in the real world. A friend might introduce you to a forum about writing, so you create an account and start hanging out with their friends there and discussing writing. You get to know someone else in that group and you find out that you're both into programming and they're involved in another forum that focuses on that. You join them over there with a new account. It's all just friend groups. You might be in many different friend groups or just a few. You may be the only one who is in both groups, or there might be several people who overlap. With some friends you avoid discussing politics, while with others you're comfortable discussing it in depth. Some friend groups form around a game, others around a shared interest. You show different facets of yourself to the different groups, and this is codified in the structure of the apps. This model is not well supported by Mastodon because it set out to solve a very different problem. They approached federation with the question "how do we avoid leaving our content in thrall to a corporation?" I want to approach it with the question "how do we get back to the informal friend groups that we used to have?"

thaumasiotes 4y ago
> You could do it differently, but the way it's designed you're supposed to have a single Mastodon account and pick an instance that hosts it. Instances decide whether to federate with other instances or not. Why wouldn't you just have a different Mastodon account on every instance where you want a presence?
- darreninthenet 4y ago
  There's nothing stopping you but, at the risk of going around in circles, why would you bother? Is there an improved experience from doing so?
dagw 4y ago
the way it's designed you're supposed to have a single Mastodon account and pick an instance that hosts it. Instances decide whether to federate with other instances or not. That sounds quite a lot like the old usenet model actually. You got an account on one usenet server and it was up to the server admin to decide which usenet groups they wanted to partake in and which other usenet servers it wanted to pull/push posts from/to. Other usenet servers could also decide to cut off certain servers if they misbehaved.