Am I missing something or do many hold strong and significant communal bonds here to their instances? I can see that for the more professional instances, but everyone else? Compared to their total connections and bonds on the Fedi?
How do instances, on #mastodon say, provide for a community? Local feeds? Shared admins/mods? I’m not convinced this is good community management … like at all.
Increasingly convinced that a Twitter clone may be the obviously wrong way to do the #fediverse.
AFAIU, communities require multiple/different spaces which one can join, visit and find and discover their community in a safe and dynamic way.
A reverse chron feed isn’t a space IMO, local, global or otherwise.
That such spaces will emerge over the protocol seems to put way too much magical expectation on the protocol and less pragmatic emphasis on the importance of UI, software and platform design and engineering.
I think I’m serious … we need to ditch mere#microblogging.
@maegul
Mere microblogging isn't the fediverse, though? Lemmy & kbin are doing the Reddit clone thing. Hubzilla has some interesting mailing list-like features. Nothing's stopping someone from recreating the old school forum experience on ActivityPub. There's a possibility of creating something completely unique, even.
Microblogging may be the most popular expression of it right now, but other things are happening.
@dpflug all true (I’m prob on lemmy more than masto these days).
But microblogging is by far the dominant mode, and regarding the fediverse as a whole, platform interop is poor/non-existant, in which case we can’t talk about those platforms collectively.
@maegul
We are doing this :) social.coop does this as well to some degree. Still a bit clunky but were working on stitching the pieces together across different modalities.
Definitely don't subscribe to the idea of instances being merely a gateway to the same fediverse. Communities of all sizes and shapes are what really spurs growth, and doubly so if they're interconnected.
Liked your thread too! And yea, agree. A sort of tapestry or ecology of interconnected but also well established communities.
The other part missing I think is mobility. Making it sufficiently easy to move around the communities you’re interested in. If instances are the main community structure, then you need multiple accounts. If multiple platforms are invoked, multiple accounts again. Without more, the Fedi doesn’t offer much over traditional forums.
@maegul at Hoosier.Social I think we've had some success in something that feels like community. While we've taken steps to make sure regional-interest content is highly available in the local feed, primarily that's been through engaging our users directly with fun stuff, meetups, instance-wide events, etc I just launched a year long project to get regional-interest content creators to make homes here. We're right at the beginning, but I do feel like we are developing a community identity.
@maegul none of that is helped very much, though, by the way Mastodon itself seems to de-emphasize things like the local feed, especially in the mainstream apps that most new users get first And there are features I'd like that would help - instance -only posting, groups, etc. I know there are other fedi services, and forks, that provide those, but those choices come with complexities too that make it difficult for me to be confident in them as platforms to build something real and lasting.
Yep ... all of that makes sense and it's the sort of thing I'm talking about. It's not a stretch to say that the fediverse and Masto are actually making what you're trying to do hard not easy.
And your point about forks etc is spot on IMO. In all the talk about forks and alternative platforms, few realist the admin's situation where they need something reliable going into the future if they're to serve their community well.
The need for future platform reliability/stability from admins seeking to serve their communities well is so significant, I think ...
that I think all of the #mastodon forks and alternative ( #microblogging ) platforms would better serve the #fediverse if they banded together to make just one alternative with a significant amount of momentum behind it.
Take all the good parts from what's out there right now, form an organisation, make compromises, and get to work.
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