fluffy 💜
I totally understand @chr's decision to shutter cybre.space. Maintaining and moderating a large Mastodon instance is an extremely thankless task; at best, if you're doing a good job, nobody knows about it, and at worst, if something goes wrong, everything's a disaster and a fire drill and everyone's upset at you.
This is why I once again implore people to consider running their own blogs and using feed readers to follow each other.
Hélène
Hélène
fluffy 💜
@helene They are quite different, and my greater point is that the interaction model of timeline-based "microblogging" social networks is also deleterious to peoples' mental health.
Hélène
fluffy 💜
@helene Like, my entire point is that the rapid-fire nature of microblogging is where the problem comes in.
Even if the technical admin overhead of a fediverse instance were zero, there's still the massive social issues that make it a constant headache, and the design fundamentally takes away control from people in terms of what they see and who they interact with.
Hélène
@fluffy Well, I don’t really see much if any “drama”, so I’m assuming we all have very different expectations and experiences; which is fine! If you believe personal pages and blogs are more of your thing, that’s fine; it may not be the case for everyone, however, I know it wouldn’t suit me personally, for example.
I’d still recommend things like WriteFreely or Plume however, WriteFreely blogs can be followed from the fediverse (but do not have comments/etc), and Plume blogs support comments via replies. There are some instances out there hosting both WriteFreely and Plume openly! I’d still recommend against using centralised services, which are as prone to closing down at any moment, but can be even worse for many reasons (inexplicable limitations on content to appease advertisers, advertisements, user tracking, not having RSS or having it disappear out of nowhere, etc.)
Mastodon handles displaying things, federating things in very different ways. The hard limit on 500 characters may lead to less thought-focused posts, which leads to “threads”, which many people don’t really like. Things you mentioned, like hiding/rejecting a person’s replies to one of your posts (or to your posts in general) is entirely dependent on the software you use, and can be done.
PS: You might like to know that Mastodon, Pleroma and many other fediverse software expose RSS feeds for users. For example, yours is https://plush.city/@fluffy.rss.
fluffy 💜
@helene and don't get me wrong, Tumblr has a lot of issues with its interaction model as well, like the way that "notes" work is pretty cruddy too
Maybe it's just my own nostalgia based on how things were in the Movable Type and Livejournal days, and maybe that benefited a lot from a smaller audience to begin with.
But blog drama hit very different than Twitter/Mastodon drama.
fluffy 💜
@helene "In terms of what they see and who they interact with" comes down to two things:
1. The timeline where you have to peruse a deluge of disconnected thoughts and try to piece together a conversation from it
2. The inability to delete comments/replies to your posts in any nuanced way; there's just an all-or-nothing Block Someone result, and that still allows others to pollute your "space" for others to see
Hélène
fluffy 💜
@helene also quick jokes and shitposts are something that twitter/mastodon do better than blogs, yeah, but I'm not sure if enabling those is worth the other interaction pitfalls, and things like that are also well-suited to realtime chat places like Discord or IRC.
fluffy 💜
@helene but anyway the main thing that I really want people to do is to own their own experience, and to have experiences that they can own in the first place. Blogging is a much easier chunk to carve off for that than, say, running a personal Pleroma instance or whatever.
fluffy 💜
@helene for that matter, Mastodon started out as OStatus, which is basically "Twitter but using Atom+WebSub." The move to ActivityPub was to hack in slightly better access control as a minimum-effort thing, rather than in trying to actually solve the problem of distributed access control.
fluffy 💜
@helene like it's not just about the protocols, it's about how they're used and the entire UX involved.
You could very well build something exactly like twitter/mastodon/etc. on RSS (several people have, even), and I think that would still be an awful idea.
fluffy 💜
@helene I'm aware that mastodon publishes RSS feeds, but they're not particularly useful. Following mastodon from RSS means getting flooded with tiny micro-updates without context, especially when threads happen, and the entire interaction model is completely different.
Also I have serious misgivings about activitypub as a protocol, and I have written extensively about that on my blog.
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