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Read @kissane ’s article on #threads https://mas.to/@kissane/111620930081617737.
> It’s been a wild week or so watching people who I thought hated centralized social networks because of the harm they do giddily celebrating …
> What I cannot make sense of is the belief that any particular implementation of open networking is such an obvious, uncomplicated, and overwhelming good that it’s sensible and good to completely set aside the horrors in Meta’s past and present to celebrate exciting internet milestones.
What, I see in @kissane ‘s article (https://mas.to/@kissane/111620930081617737) is a call out for those who resonate with the piece that the embrace of #threads by #mastodon and #activitypub advocates marks the beginning of the end of our relationship with this place.
Erin outlines I think how this maybe isn’t the place we were looking for. Not run by the people we thought.
How we might want to look for and think about where to go or what to build next, even if it’s only a fork or instance away.
Ha, yea. They were separate thoughts but I also saw the connection/resonance.
It was notable seeing people on bsky going along happily without any threads threat but instead fearful of opening up publicly and starting federation at all.
As Erin alluded to, I just don’t see how account curation or gate keeping doesn’t become more relevant in an AI world.
Seems analogous to geo-engineering to combat climate change: bitter but perhaps necessary medicine.
@maegul @kissane
In that light, I have some undeveloped thoughts that we've been thinking about federation all wrong: we focus on federating the content, but significantly less so on interconnected profiles. The focus is on making sure that pixelfed content is easy to see in a masto feed, but not on making sure that the people i follow translates in easy following of both their pixelfed and mastodon accounts. (and making sure that this is an opt-in process)
2/3
I think there is much more value in making sure that content stays on a single space, creating safety, having very many different types of spaces, and using federation as a tool for opt-in easier discovery of accounts
how this exactly would look like, im not 100% sure yet, like I said, my thoughts havent fully formed on this yet. But when you say that this feels like the beginning of the end for the space as we know it, I'm not sure if this is such a bad thing really
3/3
Yep yep yep.
I think I've said similar-ish things myself (though I can't help you with being fully formed ... nothing I say is fully formed!).
There's probably something to be said too about the de-humanisation of a fractured fediverse. It's hard to care about who you're talking to or whether you've known them before if it's too hard/noisy to find out. And so accounts and follows become more transactional than necessary.
Additionally there's lost follows from migrations
Riffing on your "single space" and "getting federation wrong" ... I think there's something to say about the lowest common denominator effect in a federation of multiple platforms where unless all/most platforms/users support something than it doesn't really exist as a feature on the fediverse.
Quote posts exist on some platforms, but not mastodon, so it doesn't matter if you're microblogging.
While I'm all for platform diversity, I feel like many don't realise this.
The effect of this (as a not fully formed thought) I suspect is to exacerbate the above. Sub-networks of iso-featured platforms develop. People fracture over multiple accounts across these platforms. Then followers fracture.
The whole *social* side of this becomes a second class citizen at a fediverse level.
The alternative? A protocol + base software that guarantees a "rich"/variable set of formats to establish the feature-set floor and provide "single spaces"?
@maegul @laurenshof I’ve been fussing with some adjacent ideas since summer, but Meta keeps getting in the way of a writeup :/
I really like that Masto account migration focuses on people over posts, though I’d like both. I’d like to see the same focus on the interpersonal reflected in the design of our conversations, which would mean bringing context forward and unifying fragmented feeds. (I have a suspicion that this is largely a software/app problem.)
@maegul @laurenshof @kissane Thanks I’ve had a mental itch about this but haven’t even got as far as you in articulating it. Like Laurens I’ve been leaning toward “embrace fracture” but I think that can quickly become unmanageable, even with good tools, if people are truly scattered across a million places that don’t talk to each other. Among other things, feels like an opening for fake accounts to slip in, unless there are well thought out countermeasures.