Gregory's Server@liaizon @Natureshadow @pinkyfloyd @smallcircles @lrhodes @bengo I’m starting to be more aware of a fundamental philosophical tension here. On one hand, an idea that content is fungible. Text is text, images are images. A subscription is a follow is a friend. On the other: a humanism that bristles at this kind of decontextualization. Communities and relationships are about mutuality and shared context.
|
5 comments
 @liaizon @Natureshadow @pinkyfloyd @smallcircles @lrhodes @bengo I think all of the following come back in some way to this tension: UX roughness of Friendica groups or Lemmy/kbin posts on Mastodon timelines; people not understanding the point of character limits and seeing them as nuisances; chronic cultural collisions over race, gender, and US-centrism; heated debates over quotes, search, and Meta.  @misc @liaizon @Natureshadow @pinkyfloyd @smallcircles @bengo And context collapse is sorta built into the Fediverse, because we're all viewing posts from the context of our own servers. I know from the roadmap that Mastodon is exploring deprecating the Local timeline in favor of more flexible lists, but I actually think the Home–Local–Federatwd dichotomy s useful for emphasizes the plurality of contexts we're dealing with on the network.  @lrhodes totally agree that the local timeline is valuable on many instances and important conceptually … but it’s not useful on an instance as big as mastodon.social. So if they deprecate it, if’d be another example of mainline masto deprioritizing needs of smaller instances @misc @liaizon @Natureshadow @pinkyfloyd @smallcircles @bengo @jdp23 @liaizon @smallcircles Yup. And the hell of it is, I don't know if the devs would even see it that way. If they're interacting with the broader network primarily through .social, then they may not even see clearly how the needs of smaller instances differ. Their field of vision may be entirely filled by the idea that only proper function of an instance is to connect individuals to some grand unified network that is more conceptual than real. |
@liaizon @Natureshadow @pinkyfloyd @smallcircles @lrhodes @bengo I don’t think it should be one or the other, but we have to keep aware of the tradeoffs. As we make things increasingly freeform on the sender and recipient side, we lose the sense of discrete communities with shared understandings.