The Laboratory is the subforum for the construction of future gadgets. Whether the gadget is your website, a physical project that you wish to donate to the lab, or you just want to have general discussion about the smallweb, it goes here.
Issue with all your fedi-posting is that you can't improve social media; social media is fundamentally rotten. The fediverse in its most common form is fundamentally rotten, shackled to a timeline-and-replies format. What frontend do you use? I see it's Pleroma, literally inspired by Twitter!
I use the Bloat FE so to me Pleroma is just the backend. And I made it look like 4chan as you can see in the picture mostly just for the lulz and to see if I could make a stylesheet I liked more than the default one, but it turns out I actually did like it (and other people did too, surprisingly) and figured it fit my sensibilities in how I treat fedi more like an imageboard than social media. And that's an interesting thing to ponder right, aren't imageboards social media? I think people in Japan consider 2chan social media, and if the quantifier is being "fundamentally rotten" then I think it's hard to find evidence to the contrary, "/b/ was never good" etc.
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I believe timelines are decadent, presentist slop. Slow-paced communication like in forums or personal sites is the TRUE way forward!
I don't really know what that's supposed to mean. Like, if I stick this site's RSS feed into my reader then I have a timeline of all the posts. Mailing lists and Usenet are timelines. If you want something more spartan then there's FediBBS which is text only and at least one guy actually uses.
Even if I complained about it before, I feel deeper connections from randoms posting on my guestbook than I ever did shitposting on twitter (2014-2020) and my friend's fedi instance, because I know that people who read my site do it on purpose, not because it popped into their feeds. Effort more meaningful and thoughtful than just pressing follow on a bloated site that barely loads.
That's fine, I just think we have different perspectives. I follow people I like talking to and might consider friends to some degree and I can do it from several different interfaces; the interface isn't the big deal to me but the underlying thing. I also like big, drawn out effort posts. You can't do that on Twitter (or Mastodon.)
The right way to look at fediverse is -- it's an IRC channel (or "discord server" for the zoomers) but inverted.
Choosing who you follow is essentially building your own chatroom of people you want to engage with. Gyudon makes a good point that the view you see of fediverse is shaped by how you interact with it. And unlike corporate social media, the software will not try to force specific views of the service upon you based on spooky metrics.
Hashtags and threads split the difference between a big loud room where everyone is yelling about everything all the time and specific, focused, structured discussions.
I am a very heavy user of syndication (Atom/RSS) and even run several sources of syndicated information . When I want to consume data in a more serious context, feed readers are pretty good at filling that hunger. Fediverse is something in between feed readers and chatrooms. Similar with how imageboards and reddit were before the internet got got.
Sometimes I just want to snap random photos or share random links that I find. My blog is not set up for casual posts like that. But there's no chatrooms on my phone where random life photos or links seem appropriate. Fediverse is a reasonable place to throw random stuff at. Normies solve this instead via "stories" on "social media" but that's another conversation.
I think fediverse can serve nicely as a kind of "third space" online. People used to use webforums the way they now use fediverse but I think this was due to a lack of options instead of webforums being the best place for people to post everything that pops into their heads.
In the "glory days" of webforums where there were dozens or hundreds of posts an hour, most posts were easily forgettable bullshit. I'm glad that people can post low effort stuff to social networks instead now, so forums can instead focus on longer-form discussions, which is what they really do well, and places like fediverse, chatrooms, imageboards, reddit do poorly.
Small webforums -- ah, I went through a phase of preferring anonboards, but in practice they are inferior to webforums.
Very much agreed that imageboards sound great in theory but aren't as good in practice. The pure anonymity is often cited as the greatest strength of the format, and admittedly the cultural axiom of judging posts solely based on their textual content rather than who is saying it is a great one. But the problem is that pure anonymity encourages bad faith engagement since you can just troll and bait all the time without real pushback if you're a shit tier poster. Nearly every board on modern 4cuck has like 2-3 board schizos that run roughshod on the place, and the only way they are ever identified is via stylometry. This is by far the biggest problem with IBs because even the best gatekeeping in the world won't save you from another website/board going down causing an influx of stupid trolls or bad posters that ruin any high level of discourse or board culture that may have been fostered (ask me how I know..)
The anonymity also often leaves you devoid of context that go into posts. For example, if anon B says that he needs alternatives to an ingredient in a dish he's trying to cook, he might receive replies from anon A calling him a retard that should kill himself. So then anon B has to explain that he has an allergy to that food so he therefore cannot use it. That might not seem like a big deal but if you regularly talk about things on an IB, having to explain such contextual details every single time you broach a subject is rather troublesome whereas on a forum all of that often just ends up memorised if you read enough posts since people have names.
The things that are oft-cited as flaws with traditional webforums are not innate to the format in the same way that IB flaws are IMO. Commonly cited issues with forums tend for example to be a perceived cliquiness and overbearing moderators. I actually think that the former is usually just a result of the latter, because power jannies will be sympathetic towards their sycophants and give them unjust privilege over other users.
Meanwhile if your top janny barely moderates at all there aren't really going to be very many chances for him to favour certain users. In essence, I think that having a forum where moderation is viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism is the ideal. Such places possess all of the benefits of IBs without any of the downsides.
