Gregory's Server
Sorry to bring that up @grishka, this may be obvious to you, but social media encourage or discourage specific types of interactions.
Reddit encourages posts lacking nuance, comforting your community into its values or its beliefs (depending on its quality).
Facebook and Twitter encourage short, easy to produce, hustling posts. This is also how the French television works and we have a famous quote here, French-speaking article but probably worth being pasted into deepl.com
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temps_de_cerveau_humain_disponible
Diaspora* seems to welcome beginners with centres of interests: hashtags to follow, introductions, etc. This seems to discourage idiots from posting and it indeed has discouraged me around 2016-2017.
So we may think about what you want to encourage and how you could do this
Reddit encourages posts lacking nuance, comforting your community into its values or its beliefs (depending on its quality).
Facebook and Twitter encourage short, easy to produce, hustling posts. This is also how the French television works and we have a famous quote here, French-speaking article but probably worth being pasted into deepl.com
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temps_de_cerveau_humain_disponible
Diaspora* seems to welcome beginners with centres of interests: hashtags to follow, introductions, etc. This seems to discourage idiots from posting and it indeed has discouraged me around 2016-2017.
So we may think about what you want to encourage and how you could do this
The problem #1 with modern social media services is their obsession over engagement metrics. This is the root cause of all evil: the forced algorithmic feeds, the recommendations you can't opt out of, the deliberately convoluted UIs for simple things, the dark patterns, and so on. Fediverse doesn't have this problem.
Now, different software aims at different things. Mastodon wants this whole "instance is a community" with its public feeds. In Smithereen, instances offer infrastructure and moderation, and that's it. I'm aiming to make a cozy place for people to connect with friends and with people with similar interests — exactly what VKontakte was in the '00s. I'm actually going to have a way to link your VK profile and import your VK data such that the switching experience is as smooth as possible.
I'm not going to encourage a particular type of communication. I'm giving people a capable, easy to use tool, and it's up to them to figure out what to use it for.
The problem #1 with modern social media services is their obsession over engagement metrics. This is the root cause of all evil: the forced algorithmic feeds, the recommendations you can't opt out of, the deliberately convoluted UIs for simple things, the dark patterns, and so on. Fediverse doesn't have this problem.