This really resonated with me, and I'm wondering what the practical implications are for the development of a sane social landscape for the modern internet.
We seem to all agree that VC-funded platforms are the wrong bet, and I would take it further and say that that means that no centralized platform can be the answer. You simply can't run something on the scale of Reddit with any other funding model.
I would like to think something like the fediverse could work—instances can in theory function as small villages, they can gate membership so that they can control the rate of new additions. An instance can be small enough in scale that it can be paid for out of pocket by a single admin, maybe with help from the members, which eliminates the perverse incentive for growth. Federation can (in theory) provide links between communities that aren't possible with a traditional bulletin board forum.
I do wonder, though, if the fediverse is going to suffer for straddling the middle ground between village and platform. A lot of people seem to want all the benefits of the village without losing the intensely-connected feeling of a place like Reddit or Twitter. Is such a thing possible, or are they mutually exclusive?
Villages used to be the norm on the internet, when far more communication happened on forums.
The great promise of the fediverse is that you can have both, even at the same time. You can be part of a single small group where you know the people around you and would notice someone new. But you can also have massive instances without any of those connections.
I think social networks and community driven websites/applications simply have a lifecycle. They all eventually crash and burn, only for a newer (note: newer is not the same as better) one to grab the share of users. It's a slightly stretched analogy, but each social network is a bit like a country/state. With a long view of history, it's rare for one to last a long time. History is riddled with failed states or once grand countries that everyone thought would last forever.
I have a burning question about the Fediverse... how does privacy work? Who guarantees it? Because trusting anon server owners is not in my book. At least centralization puts it under the direct scrutiny of US and EU.
We seem to all agree that VC-funded platforms are the wrong bet, and I would take it further and say that that means that no centralized platform can be the answer. You simply can't run something on the scale of Reddit with any other funding model.
I would like to think something like the fediverse could work—instances can in theory function as small villages, they can gate membership so that they can control the rate of new additions. An instance can be small enough in scale that it can be paid for out of pocket by a single admin, maybe with help from the members, which eliminates the perverse incentive for growth. Federation can (in theory) provide links between communities that aren't possible with a traditional bulletin board forum.
I do wonder, though, if the fediverse is going to suffer for straddling the middle ground between village and platform. A lot of people seem to want all the benefits of the village without losing the intensely-connected feeling of a place like Reddit or Twitter. Is such a thing possible, or are they mutually exclusive?