KTVX94

Huh, “The Fediverse” ? No, no, it says “Defediverse” here.

To be fair, all I’ve heard from Mastodon is “it’s decentralized Twitter”. I can’t blame it on the newcomers, intentional or not that’s the way it’s presented. Also, ideologically platforms should strive to be neutral and seeking common ground. It’s one thing if you access a specific community (magazine/ subreddit or what have you) but when the platform itself is expected to lean towards a certain ideology, it ends up being an echo chamber that both works as a circle jerk and prevents others from joining in. I get that instances are self hosted and basically your own turf online so you get to do what you want, but defederating over personal beliefs is kind of authoritarian and detracts from the end user experience.

I’m not shitting on Mastodon here, to be very clear. On the contrary, I want the Fediverse to be the best it can be and find a good balance between growing to a size where it’s worth keeping it as a general home without being tethered to other social media for your frends and different perspectives and content but also keeps the values of decentralized and community-driven space.

Unless you just want a niche space isolated from the rest of the world, compromises need to be made on both ends, from the more hardcore and passionate members of the community and the “average online user”.

That’s a very interesting and useful read, albeit also really long, but worth it. I think that the mindset of people coming from Reddit (myself included) is different than the people from Twitter. Reddit itself is a weird paradoxical “huge niche” of people who tend to be less conforming and slightly more educated on tech. However, it is true that the Fedi community should make some compromises to really be welcoming and support newcomers, and the tecnical side should change to make it more viable in the aspects that this post outlined. Perhaps some under the hood optimizations and centralization compromises where smaller instances can depend on bigger ones like a tree instead of connecting to every single other instance.

My point is, the Fediverse will probably never be mainstream, but has a shot at being “big enough”. However this shot depends significantly on the people running it and the community at large making compromises at least as big as the ones newcomers make wheb joining to find a middle ground, which may not happen.