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Yeah we have a long way to go to creating a true digital town square. Because in a town square setting you have to hear opposing opinions sometimes, and you ca
by INTPenis 3y ago
Yeah we have a long way to go to creating a true digital town square.
Because in a town square setting you have to hear opposing opinions sometimes, and you can't silence the people, you can't de-federate from them. You can simply move away and talk to someone else, form cliques. And that is exactly what is happening in the fediverse, drawing borders, borders of opinion and political context.
I don't think it's healthy to dismiss large swathes of humanity though. I think it's better if we communicate and find middle grounds.
Which is easier to do when you're stuck with someone IRL. Online it's much easier to reach for that block button.
- npunt 3y agoAgree. Instances are well-suited to smaller communities of people, but the idea of a broader town square with people that are sufficiently different from us I think requires rethinking the medium a bit. What we have doesn't cut it, and we keep assuming clunky and sometimes counterproductive tools like blocking (or blocking instances) are going to fix it this time. For a town square product we need to build from the assumption of it not being small community, which I think is unlike how twitterlike products are designed today. That requires encoding different conventions & assumptions of how we interact into the product, because we've brought a UI (the tweet/reply box) that assumes familiarity with the people we're talking to, when there likely is none. Something I've been doing as a hobby is putting together different ideas for how to improve this medium, and especially around this problem. We're squeezing the expansiveness of human beliefs and behaviors through tiny little tweet-shaped holes, and a lot is getting lost.