Paco Hope on Nostr: This is insightful. You have identified a lot of true aspects of the fedi. At the ...

This is insightful. You have identified a lot of true aspects of the fedi.

At the risk of sounding like an inevitable reply guy, let me make a couple counter arguments. You say that interacting with people you disagree with is important and healthy. That’s absolutely true. People also need safe spaces full of those they trust and love, where they can let their hair down and be themselves. So what if the fractionalising is both good and healthy?

If we want to wade into a swamp drawn from the full breadth of humanity, we can. There are apps for that. That’s something other than the fediverse. They are full of AI slop and ads and manipulative algorithms and other things that the majority seem content to just live with. And when we want a safe space to recharge after dealing with stuff, we have our cozy corner of the fediverse.

A person’s healthy social life cannot come from one app, one online community, etc. It’s good to have multiple apps and different online communities. It might be bad for an individual to spend too much time in an echo chamber, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t let people self-select their communities online. Everyone makes their own healthy and unhealthy choices.

You write about being “sustainable” but growth makes sustainability harder, not easier. We know that no big social media platform with hundreds of millions or billions of users does effective moderation. Tiny fediverse servers do, but they do it at micro scale audiences, who you rightly point out don’t align and often simply can’t overlap.

Perhaps the cost of effective moderation is fractionalisation? No single set of rules can cover a huge population. We are self-organizing into communities of manageable (I would say sustainable) size.

Still, I respect your deep thinking on this and the really interesting conversation it provokes.