in the spirit of constructive criticism, what i really want to see is a social media platform that:
- allows users to curate comments on their own posts
- allows creating, annotating, categorizing, sharing, and subscribing to block lists
- permits easy syndication both in and out
- has a clear, human-readable and machine-readable data export mechanism
- has clearly stated moderation ideals and a clear strategy for scaling moderation
- has a legal status that prevents it from taking venture investment or going public, and/or is owned by its operators
- is open source and self-hostable
if it's not all of those things at launch that's fine but it should at least be somewhere on the roadmap and shouldn't be clearly financially impossible based on your business model
the fediverse does not do most of these things, but it does make it easy to form communities, permit syndication, and at least empowers users with safety tools a little bit better than twitter
oh also:
- invite only is good but doesn't solve much on its own
- moderation trees are good but you have to actually use them
- premade communities and categories are a terrible idea, organically formed categories are very important
- inline metadata was a mistake
@tindall I just wanted something that is like the Fediverse but doesn't pander to TL;DR culture for things where you do need to add a few more words/pictures, you don't want to be totally ephemeral and could be useful to others (like basic maintenance jobs I do on small European cars, electronics projects, maintenance work - posting this on Fedi means it disappears in the timeline and is hard to find again and they are things I might repeat every so often..)
@vfrmedia the beauty of federation is that you could absolutely build that software and have it integrate pretty well w the existing fediverse!
@tindall The organizer/designer part of my brain wants to make a list like this into a sort of wizard that shows SM designers the expected result of design choices. It prompts with questions like "Is there a single user database?" and "Can users add and remove moderators?" and then at the end says something like, "Congratulations, you created a trash fire!" and lists all of the nefarious activity enabled by the decisions.
Aren't you effectively describing a blog with a federated comments section?
Aside from scaling moderation,which u have NO idea how you'd do that, particularly in a non profit kind of way, and am very interested in your ideas on how to do that!.
@StevenSaus there are lots of ways to fulfill these requirements! But yeah that's definitely a good solution to a lot of these problems I think!
Hi, there. Pardon this intrusion but as someone (the only one) who's been using the hashtag #SeizeTheMeansOfCommunity for awhile I'd like to express frustration that *everyone* seems to regard *community* as a kind of add-on to their individuality. What people call online *community* is mostly online *association* because every platform I've seen starts with and centers on some form of self-expression ("posts") rather than starting with the enabling of joint ("community") action.
@tindall
What I'd *like* to see when I enter a "social" platform, is the centering of stuff people can do together, with the ability to "post" relegated to a subsidiary position. I want to login to an "us", that affords me a place to stow and distribute stuff, sure, but which starts with the assumption that I'm logging in to undertake a community-oriented interaction.
@tindall
I feel like I see *way* too much of Fediverse-as-refuge and not nearly enough of Fediverse-as-a-way-to-undertake-things that I may be unable to (effectively) undertake on my own.
I don't primarily want a vanity press, I want a multipurpose action center.
I want community-for-community's-sake not simply my place to be heard....
@baslow Might I suggest trying out literally any instance except for mastodon.social?
@tindall
Is there an instance that affords me the resources to share and collaboratively edit documents? To jointly purchase coffee in bulk? To fire up a chatroom so a bunch of us can hangout and plan our response to the Supreme Court decision? To have a video call with a member who hasn't been feeling well? To publish a community newsletter to let other communities know what we're doing?
My critique is structural, addressing basic design issues, not about the ethos of an instance....
@baslow I disagree. I have experiences much like that with the communities of two instances I regularly frequent.
Ok, in the instances in which you've experienced a more robust sense of community:
- Have you posted photos of yourself in which your face is fully visible?
- Have you posted information about your current location (within, say, one or half a km)?
- Have you posted information about where you plan to be at a certain time?
- Have you posted information about yourself that you'd prefer not be known more widely?
@baslow Yes, yes, yes, and yes. That's a huge part of the reason (for me) that fedi is better than Twitter - the more robust privacy settings, especially on instances with instance-only posting, confer a far greater sense of safety and trust.
@tindall
Okay, so my next question is:
Have you felt free to do all these things on single instances of Mastodon or do some of them happen in others forms of Fedi platforms?
If you only feel free to do these things on instances (of whatever type) which are local only then must we, in effect, purchase the necessary of trust at the expense of the ability to reach out more broadly from within the community? Community-as-sanctuary?
> Have you felt free to do all these things on single instances of Mastodon or do some of them happen in others forms of Fedi platforms?
If I understand this correctly, the latter. Private posting and tight control over who I allow to follow me makes this pretty easy.
Ok, if I understand *you* correctly then the benefits of community in the Fediverse come at the cost of ghettoization. Tight control and filtration segregate us -- and, to a certain degree protect us -- from the assaults of the larger world but they do *very little* to empower us to change that world because they contain us and keep the larger world from hearing what we have to say.
This is not the form of community I am advocating.
@baslow I don't think that kinda thing will ever be available to people like me in a world this queerphobic
If I were public about what I was doing in my community, hate sites would immediately use that to dox me. They have before.
@tindall
Please pardon me if you find this response presumptuous:
You and I wouldn't be having this conversation, IMO, had it not been for the Stonewall Riots (for onlookers: https://www.history.com/topics/gay-rights/the-stonewall-riots )
To me, their lesson is: you don't simply accept that the world is full of shits, you band together with willing allies (comrades) and you fight the shits of the world.
I think, given some thought, it is possible to design social platforms that would help make that possible.
@baslow I'm curious about what you think we disagree about here. You clearly very vehemently disagree with something you think I've said but I'm not sure what it is.
@tindall
I would say that I am only incidentally disagreeing with you... and I wouldn't call it vehement at all.
Rather than answer your question more directly than that I'll direct you to some of my blog posts and we can see if that clarifies where I'm coming from -- and the nature of my interaction with you:
https://asorrybowl.blog/what-im-going-to-be-when-i-grow-up
https://asorrybowl.blog/seizethemeansofcommunity-notes-towards-a
https://asorrybowl.blog/seizethemeansofcommunity
Do these put my previous replies to you in a different light?
Cheers.
@tindall something in that vibe, doesn’t cover everything is https://ssb.nz #ssb - it’s a p2p social network & you are in control of who you listen to. Other people can comment still, but it’s called secure scuttlebutt / gossiping for a reason - you only hear what you listen for :)
I’ve been using https://planetary.social/ recently, though Patchwork will forever be my favorite client from forever ago.
the vibe i get is tumblr, but if it was delivered by postcards 🌇
bonus points for:
- making communities with definite boundaries easy to form
- allowing users to delegate moderation in their communities to trusted parties, BUT
- not giving user-moderators unlimited power over those in the communities they moderate
- providing webhooks so people can add their own functionality (like mailing lists)
- providing an API so people can easily write their own clients