Bloodbeech Forest

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  • 24 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I don’t think of the threadiverse as a link aggregation platform but as a network of communities engaging in threaded discussion. The federated model is an answer to the problem of platform lock-in, the network effect, and the lack of autonomy communities have on proprietary/commercial/centralised platforms.

    Each instance separately may fill the role of link aggregator but mainly for that community (instance), with that community’s values and moderation policies. The ability for an instance to federate with other instances with compatible policies is the benefit here.

    It may actually help if you view an instance as the community, with its “communities” as its topics.




  • While I agree with this assessment, I don’t think dictatorship (or authoritarianism more generally) is a solution to this problem. I don’t know what the solution is, but I can speculate about various properties a solution might have, and one of them is that citizens/members of a community should be encouraged to participate in domain-specific politics that they know and care about without requiring them to form opinions about things they don’t know much about.

    We are all ignorant about things we don’t spend time trying to understand and we should learn to respect that fact. This applies to leaders as well; no dictator or small group of people – no matter how many advisors they have – could possibly make informed decisions pertaining to all aspects of running a society. Glorifying or worshipping a leader or a party is madness we’re all prone to as we seek simple answers that are consistent with our preconceived notions of how the world works.


  • Some things I think are needed first:

    • greatly improved UX for handling links to content hosted on other instances: you shouldn’t have to use the inconspicuous search function to access it via your instance,
    • community collections: aggregating communities by topic each with a clear overview, their own feed and a nice, convenient way to create and view crossposts between them,
    • more polished and stable app(s),
    • ease of migrating between instances (massive bonus if we can have portable identities),
    • a change in how we present the core idea behind the federation model: it’s not about aggregation (this misconception leads to frustration over “fragmentation”), it’s about community self-governance/autonomy and error-correction (as in making it easier for communities to migrate if authority is abused).