i’ve said before that since a couple of years ago or so, i have had no idea which instances to recommend for friends of mine. i cant in good conscience recommend anyone sign up on any of the instances i know about. every single instance has some fatal flaw that compromises the entire experience of what fedi used to be. it’s all broken at a fundamental level from every conceivable angle — social, technical, etc. the “instance” model only works if they are small and well-connected affinity groups.

for the first 6 years of me using mastodon.social i would browse the federated timeline and curate it by filtering out and muting various accounts and keywords. this was actually somehow feasible, but then it overnight became infeasible when the overall tone and subject matter shifted or got drowned out, and the majority of it was coming from local users. and of course those local users followed remote users of a similar persuasion, and consequently i stopped using the public timeline.

@trwnh the push to make this Twitter 2.0 and the huge influxes of people running from twitter and bringing twitter culture along with them really destroyed a lot of what initially drew me here

@checkervest yeah that’s exactly it. it used to not be a big issue because people would adjust over time, but the last big move was notable because people refused to adjust since they were actually the majority this time

@trwnh they were really belligerent about it, deeply weird choice to make. I took a several months long break from mastodon because it was stressing me out so much

@checkervest i don't blame you at all! i still feel that from time to time and it's put a real damper on my activity here. since 2023 i went hard into trying to think of ways to prevent these kinds of outcomes, and all i can really conclude is that the affinity groups should be more explicitly organized as a sort of virtual third place. forums or guilds or whatever place you want to hang out. separate from your "home". but the architecture of fedi is not designed for that...

@checkervest like a public timeline should be a real thing like a chat room almost

@trwnh @checkervest

Am I reading too much into it, or are you wishing for some automated classifier to help you discover people globally?

@raphael no i'm more talking about explicit contexts and separation of concerns. it's less about discovering people (although that's part of it). the main thrust of this is that "globally" is the wrong way to look at it, and we should instead try to build more tangible localities. i don't *want* to talk to everyone on earth. in fact, i want to get away from certain people! the lines along which fedi are split are the wrong lines to be drawing.