maegul

@aaaa

A useful lens I find is whether a social media system is good at creating, facilitating and hosting genuine communities.

Alt-social right now is struggling with this I think and, IMO, has plenty of room to grow in this regard.

The difficulty though is that it requires more features in our platforms, some likely non-trivial. That's a big ask for an open non-profit ecosystem.

An effective means of aggregating multiple parts into a unified view could alleviate this.

@aaaa

Personally, I'm there with you I think. I only use default web-UIs on all fediverse platforms I've used, and advocate for that.

But should multi-protocol systems and multi-platform clients become normalised, I think this goes beyond "to app or not to app". What I'm talking about could likely just be a web-app.

The issue is more around aggregation and creating something "greater than the sum of its parts" out of open alt-social.

@fediverse
Probably not original at all. But I suspect there's something to framing it around "improving the quality of internet discourse" through the emergent dynamics of a federation ... especially in comparison to monolithic big-social.

It also repositions the internet as a broader resource to be used effectively.

And instills independent and contentiously incompatible instances along with widely connected federation as desirable positives for social media and the internet in general.
2/2

@fediverse

A tricky part here is that the community still needs to be followed at least once on your instance for the content to come through. *I think*

So if a community isn't coming through, I'd recommend these steps:

* Search for the community and follow it like any other user.
* Add it to a specific/bespoke list, then remove that list from home (a setting available on each list). This removes "the firehose" from your home feed.
* Follow the corresponding tag as you would any other

2/2

@db0

Be sure to check out the "catch up" feature. Best thing I've seen in any social media client I think.

@marv99 no need to apologise!! All good!

I think I may have misunderstood you!

They did create an official substitute. It’s a whole separate instance at startrek.webpage. r/startrek, r/daystrom and r/risa have set up parallel communities there. I just created a lemmy account in the server too!

@marv99 I mean, there is no such thing as a corresponding community. There are just communities that may or may not have overlapping interests. Things are still too new and shifting for there to be established communities or pairs of communities.

From my understanding though, yes that’s an old or the oldest Star Trek community on lemmy. But that doesn’t mean it’s active.

@fediverse
7) In the aggregate, #Mastodon / #fediverse are simply unintuitive.

Add up all of the design missteps or confusions (which happen), mixed and confusing but often strongly felt cultural standards, lacking or hard-to-find documentation or explanations, and, federation strangeness/quirkiness ... and you get a platform that crosses past the reasonably intuitive line.

It's reparable, but probably not easily so.

@fediverse

6. The Fediverse's biggest mistake so far was not laying out the carpet for the Twitter et al Migrants. They were forced to recognise that the fediverse was always
   "correct"/good and to simply "join" a foreign place and obey its customs.

Instead, they should have been given their own "place" (a soft Mastodon fork and separate instances) to grow, call and have a culture of their own.

If new platforms eat the fediverse's lunch (eg BlueSky), it will be by providing this experience.

@fediverse

5. The great big elephant in the room for the fediverse (apart from #Mastodon ) is that choosing an instance is simultaneously meaningless and important. But the ways in which this is so are not intuitive or even known to anyone but acolytes and admins.

5a) Proof: even if you learn the details of how instance interactions work and cause things like incomplete reply retrieval, you will forget it until reminded, because it’s unintuitive.

@fediverse

4. since MySpace, social media has been primitive in the forms of expression afforded its users … essentially plaintext and an emoji or two. This has produced exceedingly low expectations in users about the richness of what content they are permitted to author online. Damn that.