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
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
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).
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.
@sengi_app I’d suggest #SocialMedia and apps developers in general to precisely define what their use case is, and what it isn’t.
I really, really wish Mastodon wrote in its first-launch tutorial something like "Hello, social media by definition isn’t meant to make new friends, Mastodon somehow fixes this with local TLs but it’s still ’meritocratic’, if you’re already isolated AFK you might be interested in something else like IRC or Matrix; with #Twitter your database entries (e.g. tweets, files…) are shared by people who have no relationship with you and this format just isn’t meant for deep connections but instead for mass social consumerism; you may have intentional communities on Mastodon if your instance is properly moderated, but unlike honk(1) this is still a Twitter clone, and anyway on every small microblog instance, trying to have deep relationships with people will make you desperately try to grab people’s attention and give you this inner misanthropic and depression feeling; conversely small instances (including honk(1)) may be great if you use them to follow people who mostly talk about public interest matters like politics or cultural events, so choose your instance accordingly, and don’t hesitate to use other communication software"
@sengi_app I’d suggest #SocialMedia and apps developers in general to precisely define what their use case is, and what it isn’t.
I really, really wish Mastodon wrote in its first-launch tutorial something like "Hello, social media by definition isn’t meant to make new friends, Mastodon somehow fixes this with local TLs but it’s still ’meritocratic’, if you’re already isolated AFK you might be interested...
Yes I thought about that a lot with #Smithereen. Mastodon doesn't address the problem of "you've picked an instance and signed up, now what" in a way most people would expect it addressed. It has public feeds and puts a great emphasis on an instance being a community. Which doesn't work very well in practice because people want to participate in many communities and having a separate account in each is too much of an investment.
Gregory's Server
I'm fine. Everyone around me is fine too. We just hate our government a lot.