twitter was awful! i’m so glad i left. now how can we make this place more like twitter?

look, all i’m saying is that before you go and copy features and design and look-and-feel and ux from something else, maybe consider that they have different design goals than you? maybe consider that services developed by companies trying to make money are quite possibly designed not to empower users but instead to make money.

honestly i am suspecting that for a lot of people who are asking for this stuff, the fundamental split is that maybe they actually don’t hate twitter. maybe they just want twitter 2. it’s just en vogue to hate twitter so they say they hate twitter but they’re just saying that.

well, some of us *do* hate twitter! we came here to get away from that. we did it years before it ever crossed your mind. i don’t think we are in any meaningful unity on this point.

@trwnh@mastodon.social it is questionable whether fedi is meaningfully different than twitter in any ways other than cultural from the current crop of people on it

and we both know that ship is sailing

@natalie yeah i kinda look at pre/post 2022 as a great cultural divide but honestly the writing was on the wall before that. the profile directory was innocuous enough, but trends was kind of the point where people *really* got mad

for my part i still think this wouldn’t be so bad if fedi had architecturally gone more the way of relays or appviews where mastodon.social was just an aggregator for Notes whose content was under 500 characters or whatever, and people posted to their website

@trwnh@mastodon.social im mostly just getting at how nobody can really escape the flaws of microblogging if they keep building microblogging with different coats of paint

the tension here is largely between people who want to import or recreate the culture they left, versus those who don’t.

the other tension is that “mastodon” (et al) cannot cater to both constituencies.

normally the second one wouldn’t matter, but we are in a situation where mastodon gets all the attention, so people try the “reform” option instead of making an alternative. because alternatives are hard to sustain. and it just leads to a struggle

@natalie i think it can be done but not by most people’s definitions of “microblogging”. the missing piece is context. does that make it magically transmogrify into a forum thread idk, but this is the web so it’s ok to blur those lines a bit. i just hate that everything is oversimplified but some types of complexity are okay but not the kinds that are actually useful (and align with reality).

the metamodel is busted, you’re right