As in a new one would be necessary to do the sorts of things I’m suggesting … or the current moment requires a sort of rebranding and pivot that is best served by a new platform?

In general, this is true of the broader population as a whole. Mastodon got the size that it’s an actual place (and I think this applies to lemmy/threadiverse too). But it’s by no means “THE place” or even categorically a big public place. More like old-school forums that have a particular user base and vibe that you visit from time to time.

For the fediverse, the “migration” was exciting and successful, but compared to big-social, a drop in the ocean. And the biggest clue for that is that the people most excited about Threads joining the fediverse are Evan (author and lead “advocate” of ActivityPub) and Gargron (masto CEO/founder) … they want to taste that big-social scale and know that they don’t have it and likely never will.

I don’t think this is true, maybe not at all.

Academia, by its nature, is socially exclusionary. So what they want/need is the ability to have flexibly closed spaces as well as very public spaces. Big-social never really provided that and in many ways I think academia is being kinda left behind by social media.

Reality for mastodon, I think, is that the “migration” is basically over, and has been for over a year now. The Brazilian move to BlueSky (and not mastodon) highlights it very well.

Recalibrating on what we want and can do with the fediverse, as well as how central we want the mastodon project to be, are the best things to do now.

For me, it seemed like Gargron didn’t really know how to speak about the lack of a Brazilian migration to mastodon in favour of BlueSky, and handle a new moment of actually dropping in popularity or perceived relevance (having been the underdog then rising start for a while), which I take as a cue that being the dominant center of the fediverse isn’t a natural fit for Gargron and his project, to the point where the fediverse may have just outgrown it.

So, random thoughts:

• I think de-emphasising mastodon as the fediverse’s big player and surest means of gaining users is likely a good idea in the medium to long term. Replacing twitter for twitter users is now something others do substantially better: Threads and BlueSky. While I’m not sure Mastodon, or its decentralisation, offers anything particularly novel, different or attractive. If anything, its lack of compatibility with other fediverse platforms is likely a negative.
• More broadly, a focus on microblogging is best de-emphasised, for the same reasons as above. Conspicuously, mastodon is the only platform that’s really trying to replicate twitter-style microblogging. Just about every other platform tries to go beyond it in some way.
• Instead, IMO, community building through richer and more flexible platforms is what the fediverse should focus on, in large part because it matches what the fediverse’s decentralisation actually provides: control and ownership over your community.
  • Indeed, I think the fediverse needs to kinda wake up to what it really is. So much of the advocacy during the twitter migration was pushing the idea that the decentralisation doesn’t really matter (and “it’s just like email”) and can be ignored for the most part.
  • In reality, it does matter and can’t be easily ignored. And the world has more or less realised that, with mastodon (and the fediverse) now suffering from a branding issue.
  • So I say the way forward is to accept what decentralisation is and either add an additional layer to polish the UX, or lean into it and build on it rather than pretend this place is something else.
• By community building, I mean “flexible space creation” that likely translates to a range of relatively composable features, structures and content types and formats. Basically, stop rebuilding big-social style platforms, and build “humane spaces” that more or less comprise any/all of the formats of the existing platforms in a way that people can use however they want.
• Unfortunately, this is likely not trivial, at all, and would likely require better organisation amongst those contributing to the fediverse, and perhaps improvements to the protocol itself.

As for the threadiverse (lemmy, piefed, mbin, nodebb etc), it’s always struck me that group based structures (EG, lemmy communities) seem to work better over federation. Account migration from instance to instance is simpler, in part because the user is not the central organisation. Which instance you’re on doesn’t really matter that much. Also, blocking a whole community seems a useful middle ground between blocking a user and defederating a whole instance at the instance level, and ditto with community level moderation which can operate over federation. Additionally, the little technical talk I’ve seen on the issue seems to indicate that moving a community from instance to another might actually be quite viable.

If true, then community building might be best started with the group based platforms. Maybe an ecosystem of formats that involves all of them other than microblogging might work well?? Perhaps user-based content could take on a different structure from what microblogging does … perhaps something like what BlueSky does could be adapted to fuse user-based structures into group-based platforms like lemmy (IE, your content exists in a pod which you can own and which is portable, which is then sucked up into various public feeds depending on what permissions you provide)??

Things like private communities, group chats, blogs, wikis (and RSS feed management?) intuitively seem to me to pair well with group-based platforms and community building.

Yea the writing had been on the wall for a while AFAIU. I don’t know what lessons are to be gleaned from its story, but I’d bet at a basic level it’s that building new social media spaces is not easy. An old school forum is likely fine. But a whole platform with all of the expectations and features people have today, hard if not impossible.

Oops. lol. I’ll leave the typo now!

Some vague stories around my grandfather before they migrated that sound like a godfather film but which no one knitted anything about.

Ha. Oops! I got the vibe that the conversation had become more general. But also I’m genuinely tired and tired and not wearing my glasses. Sorry!

Electric guitar and the quality of digital amplification. Takes all the pain, inconvenience and expenses of the traditional amp as a PA system away while letting you sound good. Really awesome TBH.

I feel like some software/platform features that encourage and foster more community-based and discussion could go a long way.

Some quick thoughts:

• user-specific multi-communities
• Being able to notifications for certain events or activities (incl special notifications from a community or ongoing discussion in a thread)
• Opt-in post visibility, such as excluding a post from the All/local feeds (similar to the private communities feature coming to lemmy)
• Perhaps controversial … but expanding into a quasi-blogging direction where people can have their own personal communities into which only they can post, a little like microblogging, but more like an actual blog given the character limit here. Along with multi-communities, it could be quite a nice complement and allow for communities to evolve around people with interesting ideas/thoughts.

They’ve been defederated from lemmy.ml, lemmygrad and hexbear for much longer though.

They’re not defederated from lemmy.ml

I’m not sure what your point here regarding Beehaw is though.

That they’re defederated from lemmy.world, a centrist/mainstream/reddit-like whatever instance, which plenty of others have trouble with too, indicating things aren’t as simple as “left instances are trouble”.

What right-wing-ish instances are we talking about?

It’s apparently historical, so prob 2020 or so.

“Demanding open source users” is a nice way of framing community demands negatively. lol

Well it can cut both ways I think. That open source burn out is real and that open source has attained a strangely consumerist culture is real. If you’re not aware you may not be plugged in enough. That of course is no excuse to neglect your community, I’d likely agree with you that the lemmy devs could do significantly better on that front. I think I’ve even seen them admit as much.

While the political friction is very real, my perspective on the whole dynamic is that the anticipation of or focus on the friction is one of the biggest source of problems.

For instance, you cite beehaw and state that it’s the extreme leftist instances that are the most troublesome … when beehaw famously defederated from lemmy.world ages ago, as well as sh.itjust.works, while the admin of lemm.ee has said, controversially for some of their users I believe, that they don’t really understand all of the fuss over hexbear. Meanwhile, lemmy.ml tries to stay widely federated AFAICT, and from what I’ve gathered, the admins have even gotten in hot water with their lefty users for not defederating from more right-wing-ish instances earlier, and then are often criticised for their active moderation on their own instance.

Point being that it’s all probably a bit of a mess that doesn’t neatly align with left v right.

I’d bet that the biggest problems with the core devs approach to moderation tooling is that they have like making them and don’t like what they perceive to be a culture of demanding open source users (which I’ve come to understand over time actually).

Jerry … admin of many instances!

the development of it seems to be headed in a direction I like better than that of lemmy

Just curious what sorts of things you have in mind here … it’s been a while since I used a k/mbin platform? (I was on kbin.social, RIP, hopefully it returns).

Yep, I’m the same as you. Didn’t notice a damn thing, and was curious how I’d missed anything. When I saw it was happening through new communities I knew it was the All-feed people seeing this.

I get that the All-feed is useful and fun, but seeing random shit is kinda the “price of entry” no?

This is important I think. While the word has clearly stuck beyond the actual company’s services … the word “search” in IT hasn’t died and will likely still be used. If the word ever fades away, it may be in part because “search” lived.

Just learnt of a new example today. In Australia a common kind of small tree is called a “wattle”. It’s flowers are yellow, everyone in Australia knows about them, and the flower is the floral emblem of the country (the yellow and green colours of Australian sports teams is probably from the flower too).

The name “wattle” however comes from “wattle and daub” (wikipedia), a method of construction that uses woven branches filled with some form of clay\cement like material such as mud. “Wattle” trees were ideal for and just used very often for “wattle and daub” building in early colonial times that it’s name became “wattle”, which generally refers to the woven branches. Now no one knows that construction technique or its name, but the know the tree’s name very well.

Otherwise, the save icon being a floppy disc is a clear visual example in technology that’s just now-ish passing beyond its redundancy.

Oh I’ve been there. I am there. I was not virtue signalling. It was a cry for help!

Yes! It gets addictive too. You start to like being able to just walk to everything you need. So independent and flexible and relaxing!

This was something I realised too (or similar). Having stuff also requires having space. If you don’t have space then you really shouldn’t have stuff.

When everything has its place, organisation, cleanliness and general liveability start to take care of themselves. And probably overconsumption and hoarding too.

It’s funny, because “insufficient space” or the “disregard to space” seem to be common themes for me in terms of how modern things are being done poorly.

Dunno. Unfortunately, kbin and mbin may not be in people’s radar.

Hopefully things get standardised well enough that platform specific issues don’t really happen.