Does anyone else feel like Kurzgesagt is describing the Fediverse in their latest video?
I'm talking about what they say at 8:20:
Bulletin boards, forums, blogs. The main difference to today was twofold:
For one there were no algorithms fighting to keep you online at any cost – at some point you were done with the internet for the day, as mind blowing as this may sound.
But more importantly: The old internet was very fractured, split into thousands of different communities, like small villages gathering around shared beliefs and interests.
These villages were separated from each other by digital rivers or mountains. These communities worked because they mirrored real life much more than social media:
Each village had its own culture and set of rules. Maybe one community was into rough humour and soft moderation, another had strict rules and banned easily.
If you didn’t play by the village rules, you would be banned – or you could just go and move to another village that suited you better.
So instead of all of us gathering in one place, overwhelming our brains at a townsquare that in the end just leads to us going insane, one solution to achieve less social sorting may be extremely simple:
go back to smaller online communities.
Or just forums.
Yeah there's not much that the Fediverse adds to the equation that a forum wouldn't handle. It's actually worse in a lot of ways, because on a forum you're not going to have seven different subforums dedicated to the same topics, like the federation does by having 200 servers each with generally similar and redundant subcommunities. Sports is a big example I use, because it's the most evident.
One of the most popular moderation moves on this platform has been to lock these excess communities and forward them to a central one that is actually active.
There's some growing pains, but within a federated system, I think there needs to be community aggregation at a certain point. There's no need to host 50 different identical communities, and it's arguable that it makes things worse. I'm hoping that someone will eventually be able to develope the tools to easily allow for community aggregation in the future.