Starting with the posted link and in more recent discussions of Standardising on ActivityPub Groups I have been advocating for some time to make “Community” a native concept of the Fediverse. Something that better represents communities in the real world: groups and individuals with intricate social relationships between them.
Why?
The following toot by @cicatriz_jdr provides one reason:
“”… and these ‘instances’ are all on separate servers, so it’s totally decentralized. but posts on one instance ‘federate’ with other instances, except when they don’t, which basically half the time. now here’s where it gets tricky…“”
And the follow-up by @throwawaygiraffoid is more hilarious even:
“THERAPIST: And those ““instances”” are they ““federating”” with us right now?”
With a community-native fedi you can avoid talking on the INFRASTRUCTURE level…
Yea. I feel being able to clearly separate the parts of the discussion on why a typical traditional social media ‘user’ should consider to become a fedizen, and the follow-up to a still understandable and not-too-technical elaboration on how it works, and why it is important to make a switch.
The first part of your story is a good addition to the “Fediverse: Peopleverse!” storytelling, just like I also didn’t mention that all communities can interact with one another. But starting to talk about moderation is already part of the ‘deep-dive’ discussion. A typical user does not think “Let me check how it is moderated, before I install TikTok”. They are enticed by colorful screenshots and peer pressure of friends to install. And installing apps is a very low-barrier habit: “Oh, nice app” --> installs.
Except when they come from a right-wing spectrum, which seems to have put “moderation” (usually called “censorship” in hyperbole) very much into the mind of “normal” consumers of social media.