Syn(t)-ACK(tic) Sugar :facepalm: on Nostr: One of the most powerful things about the fediverse is the notion of instances and ...

One of the most powerful things about the fediverse is the notion of instances and communities, and on the whole I think that we've done a fairly terrible job about communicating that to those on the outside.

Probably the main reason that I left corpo social media was that I felt like I was just consuming, always being shouted at and never really having people interact back to me because my voice wasn't loud enough to get people's attention over all the other people in the same room. You have to find your communities based solely on the content of their tags and posts, and so it's really only a logical sub-conversation in a big-ass party room.

But here, instances can focus on specific subjects or ideologies or hobbies from the get-go, which means that there's already a "local" community of people that one can have a reasonably good idea that they'll fit into. Sure, they can still participate in conversations with everyone else and even move to different communities and explore those interests but when you drop into an instance comprised of people that already share some of those interests, you don't have to look very far to get good and meaningful interaction.

So I'm not a super-fan of these massive fedi instances (too many people with too much shouting), and single-user instances kind of seem to have the same problem - you're still shouting, but you're in the next room with the door closed. A nice, multi-user but still small(ish) instance is a great place to experience the actual "social" qualities of the "social media" web.

Built-in (but non-exclusive) communities are the killer feature of the fediverse, as far as I'm concerned.