Some additional thoughts on why alt accounts don't seem to work here even though people have no issues participating in multiple separate forums.
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@kopper @volpeon It feels like there are only a few people who tag spam, and honestly I'm generally not interested in reading what they have to say, so I mute them and then the tag feed actually works pretty well. I don't think it is bad to have it linked to discovery, I want to discover on topic posts on subjects I am interested in from accounts I do not follow, and most people do seem to use them like that. We do need to keep building the culture around tagging, but we can do that.
@Shivaekul @volpeon but hashtags are a whole are "poisoned". that's my argument. as long as the cultural legacy of hashtags remain as "the things you spam under posts to get someone to notice you" then you just can't build that culture.
groups (as a concept) are much better for discoverability in my experience, as there are moderators who make sure you are not abusing the group for spam. hashtags are the wild west, and "do not post silly things under hashtags" is not exactly an enforceable rule, especially for people accustomed to how hashtags work from other microblogs -
@volpeon tbh the main problem here seems to be the microblogging paradigm's conflation of "categorization" with "discoverability" (so, hashtags)
in every other paradigm out there putting a #linux tag on your writing, or posting it under a "linux" category, would not be any deal, nobody would prolly notice it consciously. but conflating them with #discoverability leads to #TagSpamming and makes the concept of #tagging as a whole look like a #brand account looking for #attention
tagging (and implicitly, filtering in or out by tags) would solve this particular problem, but the primary influence on the entire network (whether anyone likes it or not) being a 1-1 clone of twitter with a sprinkling of bluesky which is itself a more unabashed clone of twitter, means that tags are effectively "dead" as a concept@kopper I think we need way more than mere tags to get the same level of separation as separate forums. For instance, hashtags are way too ad-hoc so it's often hard to tell which one is "right". Is it #bird or #birds or #avian or ...? Also, nothing stops people from posting anything under any tag.
What we need is a proper abstraction for communities which works like everywhere else. Let's call them "groups", let them have rules and a staff to enforce them (so they stay on-topic), and generate a group feed (for the filtering). I pitched this idea many times in the past, too. -
Some additional thoughts on why alt accounts don't seem to work here even though people have no issues participating in multiple separate forums. Last time I said it was because I can interact with the same people and posts regardless of which account I use.
The problem is, as usual, the microblogging paradigm. Sure, I could create multiple accounts and only follow furries on the furry account, software devs on the software dev account, etc. But it would never work because microblogging is unfocused. You can post about anything and there are no repercussions in going offtopic. You might lose some followers, but that's really it. Many people wouldn't care.
Even if we all started off on the basis to keep topics separate, it would fall apart very quickly. As soon as others stop doing it, it stops working for you as well because then all the software devs you'd been following would suddenly start talking about politics, sports, etc. Fediverse instances having a theme doesn't solve this because federation mixes them all together anyway.
In contrast, forums were focused on a theme and there was a staff to make sure it stayed on track. Alt accounts may serve other purposes, but they can't be a substitute for taking part in separate communities.@volpeon while I much understand this way of viewing it and agree to some level, I also think there's advantages to having alt accounts for e.g afterdark stuff.
but each alt is a full person and its interactions in a sense, you have to build a completely new group of friends from scratch.
I think that can be beneficial though, if you want to separate worlds for some subject *entirely* it works, but I've noticed it's a very poor way of 'categorizing' posts as you're essentially two(+) people.
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@volpeon while I much understand this way of viewing it and agree to some level, I also think there's advantages to having alt accounts for e.g afterdark stuff.
but each alt is a full person and its interactions in a sense, you have to build a completely new group of friends from scratch.
I think that can be beneficial though, if you want to separate worlds for some subject *entirely* it works, but I've noticed it's a very poor way of 'categorizing' posts as you're essentially two(+) people.
@volpeon I do like your ideas on the subject though, having a more forum-like fedi software would be cool and would allow for new ways to categorize things and make it more easy to find the content you're looking for too;
tags are way too basic for that purpose, and I feel like a lot of content gets 'lost' over time because it's e.g too far back on someone's profile to scroll through the mono-track timeline years back to find the specific content you're looking for
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@kopper I think we need way more than mere tags to get the same level of separation as separate forums. For instance, hashtags are way too ad-hoc so it's often hard to tell which one is "right". Is it #bird or #birds or #avian or ...? Also, nothing stops people from posting anything under any tag.
What we need is a proper abstraction for communities which works like everywhere else. Let's call them "groups", let them have rules and a staff to enforce them (so they stay on-topic), and generate a group feed (for the filtering). I pitched this idea many times in the past, too.@volpeon yup. groups for discoverability, tags for categorization
some shortcomings of groups could be rectified by allowing posts to be in multiple groups (however: this would issues when moderating replies. perhaps preventing groups from moderating replies and letting fedi's high moderator-to-user ratio take care of that would be ideal?), and making "remove from group" "detach" the group from the post without removing it outright so your own followers could still interact with it -
@volpeon yup. groups for discoverability, tags for categorization
some shortcomings of groups could be rectified by allowing posts to be in multiple groups (however: this would issues when moderating replies. perhaps preventing groups from moderating replies and letting fedi's high moderator-to-user ratio take care of that would be ideal?), and making "remove from group" "detach" the group from the post without removing it outright so your own followers could still interact with it@volpeon additionally, if we're preventing groups from "owning" posts, then we can think of groups just as "hashtags with quality control" and therefore options like "automatically syndicate from group X" become viable solutions to the fragmentation problem (do i post on linux@lemmy.ml or linux@lemmy.world or linux@programming.dev) -
@volpeon additionally, if we're preventing groups from "owning" posts, then we can think of groups just as "hashtags with quality control" and therefore options like "automatically syndicate from group X" become viable solutions to the fragmentation problem (do i post on linux@lemmy.ml or linux@lemmy.world or linux@programming.dev)@volpeon a private group that does indeed own it's posts could be presumably re-implemented as a separate thing entirely based on shared logic with a hypothetical "circles" functionality
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@Shivaekul @volpeon but hashtags are a whole are "poisoned". that's my argument. as long as the cultural legacy of hashtags remain as "the things you spam under posts to get someone to notice you" then you just can't build that culture.
groups (as a concept) are much better for discoverability in my experience, as there are moderators who make sure you are not abusing the group for spam. hashtags are the wild west, and "do not post silly things under hashtags" is not exactly an enforceable rule, especially for people accustomed to how hashtags work from other microblogs -
Some additional thoughts on why alt accounts don't seem to work here even though people have no issues participating in multiple separate forums. Last time I said it was because I can interact with the same people and posts regardless of which account I use.
The problem is, as usual, the microblogging paradigm. Sure, I could create multiple accounts and only follow furries on the furry account, software devs on the software dev account, etc. But it would never work because microblogging is unfocused. You can post about anything and there are no repercussions in going offtopic. You might lose some followers, but that's really it. Many people wouldn't care.
Even if we all started off on the basis to keep topics separate, it would fall apart very quickly. As soon as others stop doing it, it stops working for you as well because then all the software devs you'd been following would suddenly start talking about politics, sports, etc. Fediverse instances having a theme doesn't solve this because federation mixes them all together anyway.
In contrast, forums were focused on a theme and there was a staff to make sure it stayed on track. Alt accounts may serve other purposes, but they can't be a substitute for taking part in separate communities.More additional thoughts because the explanation above also may help you understand one point of conflict that never seems to go away: peoples confusion about instances.
I used to think that choosing an instance was like choosing an email provider. Others will say that it's also like choosing forums to join, and nobody had trouble with that either. The truth is, though, that it's both in the worst possible way.
This part of the fediverse is focused on microblogging. Like i said, microblogging in its current form has no concept for communities because everything goes into a global scope.
We like to say that instances on the fediverse are communities, and at the first glance that makes sense. They have a theme, rules and standards, a staff to enforce them, and a join process. It's the same as forums, right?
But instances are also federated, and this leads to the lines becoming blurred. So blurred, in fact, that it's hard to see any difference between them. Same as with alts, you can interact with the network and the experience will mostly be the same. The only difference is what parts of the network are inaccessible due to moderation and maybe a custom UI (if the user even sticks with the web UI).
Is this enough to create a sense of community? I don't think so.
Communities are formed around a shared interest, with members talking about it, sharing their own works, holding events, etc. How could instances possibly be neat units of communities when all of these acts happen across the boundaries? Personally, I never felt intrinsically closer with anyone just because we were on the same instance.
It's easy to choose an instance on a purely mechanical level. You open one, register, done. It's no different from other platforms and this *isn't* the part that makes people struggle. It's the lack of a clear point of instances in the first place. They're first and foremost a vehicle to drive decentralization, but are presented as communities, leading to clashing expectations and behaviors. This is where the confusion comes from.
This doesn't mean that instances are bad or pointless. The mistake the fediverse made was adopting the instance = community concept without ever adjusting the microblogging design to represent them as such. -
More additional thoughts because the explanation above also may help you understand one point of conflict that never seems to go away: peoples confusion about instances.
I used to think that choosing an instance was like choosing an email provider. Others will say that it's also like choosing forums to join, and nobody had trouble with that either. The truth is, though, that it's both in the worst possible way.
This part of the fediverse is focused on microblogging. Like i said, microblogging in its current form has no concept for communities because everything goes into a global scope.
We like to say that instances on the fediverse are communities, and at the first glance that makes sense. They have a theme, rules and standards, a staff to enforce them, and a join process. It's the same as forums, right?
But instances are also federated, and this leads to the lines becoming blurred. So blurred, in fact, that it's hard to see any difference between them. Same as with alts, you can interact with the network and the experience will mostly be the same. The only difference is what parts of the network are inaccessible due to moderation and maybe a custom UI (if the user even sticks with the web UI).
Is this enough to create a sense of community? I don't think so.
Communities are formed around a shared interest, with members talking about it, sharing their own works, holding events, etc. How could instances possibly be neat units of communities when all of these acts happen across the boundaries? Personally, I never felt intrinsically closer with anyone just because we were on the same instance.
It's easy to choose an instance on a purely mechanical level. You open one, register, done. It's no different from other platforms and this *isn't* the part that makes people struggle. It's the lack of a clear point of instances in the first place. They're first and foremost a vehicle to drive decentralization, but are presented as communities, leading to clashing expectations and behaviors. This is where the confusion comes from.
This doesn't mean that instances are bad or pointless. The mistake the fediverse made was adopting the instance = community concept without ever adjusting the microblogging design to represent them as such.@volpeon@icy.wyvern.rip I have what sounds like a minor disagreement, but IMO it changes the core of the argument
You're right that instances aren't like forums, so they don't build community like forums. But something else that isn't strictly kept in topic is IRL meetups in communities.
Parkour is the best example for me, I have this circle of friends where we met in parkour class and we all love it and to talk about it. But then at some point I'll mention that the song that's playing is really cool and I learn that someone there also plays drums and we go off on that tangent. Then I'll complain about my cats and I'll learn that one of them is a professional pet sitter.
My point is, building community in real life is the shared interest as the anchor for everyone to have something to talk about, and for new people to know how to enter the space, but then things will inevitably branch out.
So maybe picking an instance is more like picking a club or gym or hacker space to make friends in, rather than a forum. But I think it is building a community in the same way we build it IRL, where you know the beings behind the screens, not just their opinions on the topic -
@volpeon@icy.wyvern.rip I have what sounds like a minor disagreement, but IMO it changes the core of the argument
You're right that instances aren't like forums, so they don't build community like forums. But something else that isn't strictly kept in topic is IRL meetups in communities.
Parkour is the best example for me, I have this circle of friends where we met in parkour class and we all love it and to talk about it. But then at some point I'll mention that the song that's playing is really cool and I learn that someone there also plays drums and we go off on that tangent. Then I'll complain about my cats and I'll learn that one of them is a professional pet sitter.
My point is, building community in real life is the shared interest as the anchor for everyone to have something to talk about, and for new people to know how to enter the space, but then things will inevitably branch out.
So maybe picking an instance is more like picking a club or gym or hacker space to make friends in, rather than a forum. But I think it is building a community in the same way we build it IRL, where you know the beings behind the screens, not just their opinions on the topic@gwenthefops
That's a good point, but I think it doesn't contradict mine. What a club or gym does is provide a consistent separate environment for everyone to be at, segregated from the public. A familiar comfortable space they have to themselves. Instances lack this property because everything still takes place in the loud global space.
So like I said, the fediverse would have to present instances as communities in some way to restore this property and actually make them work for community building. -
@gwenthefops
That's a good point, but I think it doesn't contradict mine. What a club or gym does is provide a consistent separate environment for everyone to be at, segregated from the public. A familiar comfortable space they have to themselves. Instances lack this property because everything still takes place in the loud global space.
So like I said, the fediverse would have to present instances as communities in some way to restore this property and actually make them work for community building.@volpeon@icy.wyvern.rip it sort of does that, but you still go to your other communities and mention that thing that someone said in the gym, or you get times when communities meet when one of them is having a birthday party or something. Things bleed over
I think that is reasonably modeled by Sharkey's "home" mode, where your posts only go to the instance local timeline and to followers, but users can still boost it (aka retell the story to the beings in other communities).
Or maybe I'm missing some nuance in your take, in which case I'd love to hear more! -
More additional thoughts because the explanation above also may help you understand one point of conflict that never seems to go away: peoples confusion about instances.
I used to think that choosing an instance was like choosing an email provider. Others will say that it's also like choosing forums to join, and nobody had trouble with that either. The truth is, though, that it's both in the worst possible way.
This part of the fediverse is focused on microblogging. Like i said, microblogging in its current form has no concept for communities because everything goes into a global scope.
We like to say that instances on the fediverse are communities, and at the first glance that makes sense. They have a theme, rules and standards, a staff to enforce them, and a join process. It's the same as forums, right?
But instances are also federated, and this leads to the lines becoming blurred. So blurred, in fact, that it's hard to see any difference between them. Same as with alts, you can interact with the network and the experience will mostly be the same. The only difference is what parts of the network are inaccessible due to moderation and maybe a custom UI (if the user even sticks with the web UI).
Is this enough to create a sense of community? I don't think so.
Communities are formed around a shared interest, with members talking about it, sharing their own works, holding events, etc. How could instances possibly be neat units of communities when all of these acts happen across the boundaries? Personally, I never felt intrinsically closer with anyone just because we were on the same instance.
It's easy to choose an instance on a purely mechanical level. You open one, register, done. It's no different from other platforms and this *isn't* the part that makes people struggle. It's the lack of a clear point of instances in the first place. They're first and foremost a vehicle to drive decentralization, but are presented as communities, leading to clashing expectations and behaviors. This is where the confusion comes from.
This doesn't mean that instances are bad or pointless. The mistake the fediverse made was adopting the instance = community concept without ever adjusting the microblogging design to represent them as such.Agreed with all of this.
I think Mastodon in particular struggles with community, as it never really leaned into that to market itself, but rather going into "replace Twitter/Bluesky with us because we're ACTUALLY decentralised!" (despite the fact they never implemented migration or ActivityPods, so I disagree), but the Fediverse sucks for that, and I don't get why people are still marketing it as that. If Mastodon leaned less into "it's decentralised! it's better than bluesky!" (lmao) and more into community creation and curation, I think it and maybe even fedi as a whole would've had much less of an adoption problem.
Meanwhile with something like Wafrn, I can say that Wafrn already has a Homestuck themed instance, it's easy to understand "oh, this is like Tumblr, but for Homestuck fans!", and looking at its federated timeline there is a lot of Homestuck fandom posting from the get-go. They're still talking about other topics, but you can tell there's a proper community growing there. I think Misskey might also lean into this pretty well. I can't pin-point what Wafrn is doing better than Mastodon besides the fact it was inspired by Tumblr though.
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Agreed with all of this.
I think Mastodon in particular struggles with community, as it never really leaned into that to market itself, but rather going into "replace Twitter/Bluesky with us because we're ACTUALLY decentralised!" (despite the fact they never implemented migration or ActivityPods, so I disagree), but the Fediverse sucks for that, and I don't get why people are still marketing it as that. If Mastodon leaned less into "it's decentralised! it's better than bluesky!" (lmao) and more into community creation and curation, I think it and maybe even fedi as a whole would've had much less of an adoption problem.
Meanwhile with something like Wafrn, I can say that Wafrn already has a Homestuck themed instance, it's easy to understand "oh, this is like Tumblr, but for Homestuck fans!", and looking at its federated timeline there is a lot of Homestuck fandom posting from the get-go. They're still talking about other topics, but you can tell there's a proper community growing there. I think Misskey might also lean into this pretty well. I can't pin-point what Wafrn is doing better than Mastodon besides the fact it was inspired by Tumblr though.
Also FWIW there are/were "group instances" like gup.pe and the late chirp.social that did the community aspect better, ironically by having a central place for group members to mingle. I really do miss the Eurovision group on Chirp.
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More additional thoughts because the explanation above also may help you understand one point of conflict that never seems to go away: peoples confusion about instances.
I used to think that choosing an instance was like choosing an email provider. Others will say that it's also like choosing forums to join, and nobody had trouble with that either. The truth is, though, that it's both in the worst possible way.
This part of the fediverse is focused on microblogging. Like i said, microblogging in its current form has no concept for communities because everything goes into a global scope.
We like to say that instances on the fediverse are communities, and at the first glance that makes sense. They have a theme, rules and standards, a staff to enforce them, and a join process. It's the same as forums, right?
But instances are also federated, and this leads to the lines becoming blurred. So blurred, in fact, that it's hard to see any difference between them. Same as with alts, you can interact with the network and the experience will mostly be the same. The only difference is what parts of the network are inaccessible due to moderation and maybe a custom UI (if the user even sticks with the web UI).
Is this enough to create a sense of community? I don't think so.
Communities are formed around a shared interest, with members talking about it, sharing their own works, holding events, etc. How could instances possibly be neat units of communities when all of these acts happen across the boundaries? Personally, I never felt intrinsically closer with anyone just because we were on the same instance.
It's easy to choose an instance on a purely mechanical level. You open one, register, done. It's no different from other platforms and this *isn't* the part that makes people struggle. It's the lack of a clear point of instances in the first place. They're first and foremost a vehicle to drive decentralization, but are presented as communities, leading to clashing expectations and behaviors. This is where the confusion comes from.
This doesn't mean that instances are bad or pointless. The mistake the fediverse made was adopting the instance = community concept without ever adjusting the microblogging design to represent them as such.@volpeon@icy.wyvern.rip how much better do you think things could be if more fedi software was designed around the idea of instances being communities more? that's always been the direction I've prefered at least, since it would make choosing an instance feel more like a feature than just a necessary obstacle to allow for decentralization
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@volpeon@icy.wyvern.rip it sort of does that, but you still go to your other communities and mention that thing that someone said in the gym, or you get times when communities meet when one of them is having a birthday party or something. Things bleed over
I think that is reasonably modeled by Sharkey's "home" mode, where your posts only go to the instance local timeline and to followers, but users can still boost it (aka retell the story to the beings in other communities).
Or maybe I'm missing some nuance in your take, in which case I'd love to hear more!@gwenthefops
The key difference is that communities outside of microblogging require the intent to switch contexts. In case of the gym, it's the act of entering the building. Online, it's the act of opening a forum in the browser. In chat rooms, it's the act of switching rooms. There's always clear separation at this current moment, and the group members are aware of this as a subtext
Microblogging isn't like this, even with the existence of local posting because by and large, you're still always confronted with a mixture of global and local since it's too easy to switch between them on a whim. This deprives everyone of this deliberate context switching mechanism that otherwise permeates our lives, and this leads to all kinds of weirdness. I have written about it here: volpeon.ink/notebook/microblogging-misdesign/ -
@volpeon@icy.wyvern.rip how much better do you think things could be if more fedi software was designed around the idea of instances being communities more? that's always been the direction I've prefered at least, since it would make choosing an instance feel more like a feature than just a necessary obstacle to allow for decentralization
@tromino If the global space was very strongly de-emphasized in favor of community spaces, then I think we'd see less aggression and drama. A big problem fedi suffers are clashing expectations: some people want to have insect posts CWed, but members of an insect community obviously would think that's nonsense. Some write barely intelligible posts because that's just how everyone in their community types, while the rest hates these posts because they're hard to read. Community spaces would create the separation necessary to accommodate both.
