I think the problem holding back fedi the most right now is the instance = community mindset.

It is hostile for users because when joining, you have no way to know all the relationships and dynamics between instances going on here.
After you joined an instance, it might turn out half of the fediverse defederated from it. Or somewhere down the line your admin might get caught up in a dispute and suddenly many of your connections are severed, for reasons entirely outside of your control. How can you blame anyone for feeling frustrated about all this bullshit?

Even this aside, instance = community doesn’t really make sense to me. I’m an artist, I’m furry-adjacent, I’m interested in software development, and more. Why am I forced to pick one of those when looking for an instance to join?
This is, in fact, one reason why I self-host.

Instances should just be nodes in the network responsible for hosting accounts and handling messages. Communities, instead, should be an abstraction independent of specific nodes, but of course still with rules and community moderators who enforce said rules.
With this approach, moderation decisions wouldn’t mean permanently severing connections outside of the community’s scope. It would resolve a lot of the pain about using fedi.

@volpeon just to add my two-cents...

There is the problem that that admins and mods are also fairly trigger-happy with whole instance-blocks but we had that discussion way too many times on fedi.

People seem quite happy with that thing you describe.

I do generally like the idea proposed here. But you would likely need to implement the illusive fedi "groups" everywhere. Not gonna happen with masto.

And please, PLEASE don’t conflate this with a desire for more popularity of the platform. I couldn’t care less about that.

Moving forward also means making things better for people who are already here. And don’t tell me you’re happy with that sword of Damocles over your head that is “your instance admin didn’t handle this situation well.”

Your whole social graph shouldn’t hinge on the behavior of one person you may not even know.
In a way, this arrangement is even worse than Discord because a “server” admin messing up and getting a “server” banned you’re on doesn’t mean you’ll lose the ability to contact other people with that account ever again.
The whole point of a decentralized network is to be more resistant to this sort of dynamic.

@volpeon I feel like without that association of instances with communities that the concept of having separate instances loses a bit of justification and starts being “just a confusing detail that only exists because of decentralization or whatever”

like, even if things aren’t completely perfect the way they are now, I think that association at least helps make federation seem like an actual “feature” rather than something that only exists as a requirement for the network to function

(I do wonder how the new user ux could be made better tho)

@tromino Right now, federation also feels like an anti-feature in some ways. Your instance admin messes up and you suddenly can’t talk with half of the network? Your instance admin throws a tantrum, shuts down your instance and now you have to start from scratch? (This point is unrelated to this thread, but it is an anti-feature)
All of this needs to be solved, and I think keeping the instance = community mindset is a hindrance.

I do believe that even if instances became more abstract, there would still be aspects that make hosting one worthwhile. Custom emojis, for instance. But what we need first and foremost is the willingness to even change the status quo.

@volpeon I’ll be honest, I actually feel somewhat less vulnerable to the “admin messes up and destroys your social graph” scenario here than I do on proprietary platforms.

You can backup and export your followers and followed accounts and import them in any new account. You can migrate and move around, even if your server admin literally sets the datacenter on fire.

Compare it to a proprietary platform that effectively owns your social graph, your friends’ accounts, everything, and where making a new account can easily be a TOS violation.

I believe the problems with Fedi are much more social ( or even political) in nature than technical.

That, and backing up accounts could be made even easier, to put that safety of backing up your stuff in the hands of even more novice users.

@mizah Sure, fedi is better than proprietary platforms in this regard. But that shouldn’t stop us from fixing the problems we’re facing here.
And social problems can actually arise from the platform’s design. I wrote about this in the past: https://volpeon.ink/notebook/modern-social-media/

@volpeon@icy.wyvern.rip
i guess we have different wants/needs, but to me instance = community is the biggest appeal of fedi, which largely goes unfulfilled. i want more direct, human connection, town-square-type gossip.

the mindless scrolling of mostly-random people's posts feels dystopian to me.

@m Nothing would stop you from joining or creating a community for people you want to be close with and get exactly the same experience as before. All I want is for communities to be independent of instance boundaries first and foremost.

@volpeon@icy.wyvern.rip

Nothing would stop you from joining or creating a community for people you want to be close with and get exactly the same experience as before.

i think im just barking up the wrong tree tbh. the microblogging format fundementally isn't good for community forming and trying to make it conform to that ideal is a waste of time.

@m This is something we agree on, at least with microblogging in its present state. A lot of conflicts on fedi (Bluesky, Twitter) stem from the fact that everything is just happening in a global context that doesn’t support communities at all, yet people behave like it does. It’s a mess.*

I think that it should be possible to design a microblogging platform that puts communities in the center instead of a global timeline. But maybe you’re right and it would fail. There’s no way to know without trying.

(* I wrote about it some more here: https://volpeon.ink/notebook/modern-social-media/ )

@volpeon 100%. It's fine for instances to have some internal sense of community, but first and foremost they should offer good moderation and sustainable account hosting, and in most cases, access to the broader network. I don't know what the solution is to inter-instance feuding but it's quite a detractor on our network. Mastodon definitely needs a system for people to create instance-agnostic groups with their own internal community and moderation. This would go a long way towards bringing people into discussions, especially people who don't have a lot of followers.

@volpeon @m it's so frustrating that google+ had nailed this pretty much bang on and yet this network focused on being a shitty twitter clone instead :(

And another note: Please don’t take this as me wanting “less community”. That’s not only not what I’m saying, it’s the exact opposite. I want communities to be independent of instances, to empower individual users and give them more options to curate their experience than what they have now.

If people want the same experience as before, then by all means let’s add something that replicates it. Add blocklists to communities, curated by the community admins, which users can subscribe to. Why wouldn’t this be possible?
And unlike now, this would have so many advantages: People could decide for themselves if they want this by making it opt-in, and they could also have multiple “””instance admins””” with the same account. Isn’t fedi all about choice? Then this is it!

If you want to uphold the status quo, please ask yourself if you want it because “that’s how things have always been.”
Just don’t hold everyone else back striving for a better experience.

@volpeon Ok, to be honest i can see both the benefits and the problems with this sort of approach, though.

People here listen WAY too much to heresy and accusations without ever being presented with any sort of actual evidence. This would be devastating if it was reduced down to the individual. With instances you at least have the group of friends around you which are on that instance.

@catraxx I don’t understand. Right now, people already have personal blocklists they can populate as they see fit. Nothing stops people from the same instance from blocking you without any evidence for wrongdoing.

@volpeon Yes but that requires someone to have a personal blocklist. Those big instance blocklists only work between instances, not against individuals so much. If there are publicly curated blocklists against individual people, i think the power the people who curate them have would actually multiply.

@catraxx Ah, yeah, I do have my reservations about shared blocklists. Bluesky shows the problems they can cause, it’s pretty much what I expected when the idea came up on fedi years ago.

But 2 things: I didn’t specify how community-level blocklists would work. You could make it so entries in that blocklist also have to be communities so that all members of them will be blocked. This is how things are on fedi right now.
I’m also sure this approach has problems, which leads me to the second point: I’m not here to provide perfect solutions right off the bat because this is impossible without a shitload of brainstorming. All I’m doing is showing people that there’s this big problem and how it could be addressed.

@volpeon one day instance admins will learn the age old wisdom of IRC netops: do not interfere in channel politics

@volpeon Hmm… Like, that kinda touches upon what social media even is and what you wanna use it for.

Sometimes I’m like: “Oh hey, here’s a cool thing! I wanna tell my friends!”

Person-centered microblogging is perfect for that. I post it, my friends (followers) receive it, maybe they boost it, boom. Don’t like the things I personally find interesting enough to share? Just don’t follow me, that easy. It’s what I wanna use this thing for: sharing arbitrary things that my friends might probably like without explicitly declaring an interest in the topic.

But I do see the missing feature for some kind of “communities”, or “groups”, or other tools for scoping the spread of a post to a topic or something similar, like in the “insects” example you mentioned in the blogpost.

Like, I frequently miss that feature; especially for more kinky/horny posts for example, where I… Kinda wish that was opt-in rather than opt-out through CWs and keyword filters (which become a guessing game of what words to even filter for). Let alone topic and/or community-related moderation, with more focus on that community rather than just moderating abuse in a very general context.

And I agree, instances are not really communities; I never experienced them as such too, federation is so strong usually that most posts on my timeline are from outside my instance.

@volpeon Before I moved to a self-hosted instance I was worried that loosing my main instances would mean it would be impossible to effectively exist on Fedi in a lot of the ways you described here.

Since then I’ve found self hosting to be relatively easy and frictionless (albeit hard to get started with). This change in perspective has really reinvigorated my confidence in the FediVerse as a platform and it’s future.

For anyone with any of the worries described in the above post, wether now or in future, I’d highly recommend looking into self hosting.

@volpeon One thing that a lot of Fedi hardliners don't consider (I'm not calling you that; I just see the takes I'm gonna mention a lot in my home feed) is that many of the cool Fedi features are straight-up a deterrent for many normies or just less technical peeps.

The sheer friction of deciding which apps you want to use first and what instance to join second is already an obstacle to a lot of people who have varied interests, so having to hop in another instance because the one you joined just didn't match your vibes or you later found out is either defederated by a lot of instances or is defederation happy itself has caused some of my friends to just close up shop and stay on twitter until they got a bluesky invite.

Because EVERYONE is there, you can easily rebuild your community and you don't run the risk of losing dozens of friends because two admins had a fued, or your instance decided to use a flawed blocklist, and I've even seen for some people resisting Bluesky federation because they don't want fedi 2.0 (I still hear people mention Pounced when saying why they didn't want to join mastodon)