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Four short-term wishes for fedi

The Fediverse, a.k.a. fedi, is a name for mostly-compatible implementations of a protocol that started as ActivityPub. Mastodon is probably the most well known.

One way forward, I feel, is:

Remove the “whole known network” tab.
Instead, focus on a moderated local timeline, and a home timeline of people you’ve selected to follow (from across all of fedi).
Make it even easier to interact with off-site posts and accounts (including “weird fedi” like Pixelfed and Lemmy), in addition to the “paste the URL in the search box” (maybe make something like that but more specific, faster, and more reliable), maybe a browser extension or share-sheet–accessible app?
Keep trying to fight the rando weird harasso instances that plague our mentions. Maybe use tech from email? The nightmare scenario for fedi would be an app that can churn out new, uniquely named, one-off harassing instances. Maybe we need to think of something preemptive for that scenario.

I simultaneously want each instance to feel more like a tight-knit, local community (by showing the local timeline, and having each instance have their own style of moderation) while also making it even easier to use one account to follow your favorite Lemmy groups, Pixelfed posters, and fave people from all over, to like and boost posts.

Best of both worlds.

Your own “home” timeline which is a sprawling eclectic selection of all your own faves from all over, and a local timeline that’s what’s going on in your instance right now, maybe the latter doesn’t even show boosts.

This list of four items are all my dreams for the relatively short-term horizon.

Longer term, stuff like Bonfire’s attempt to revive visibility circles is interesting. Making social media a little more social and a lot less world-readable.

Update: One year later

I feel that I’ve gotten all that I wanted from this wishlist.

I love how some fedi servers now have a “bubble” timeline and I also love that you can completely disable & annihilate the “whole known network” firehose feed.

It makes for a much, much cozier fedi.♥

Neither of these are any obstacles to people from other instances being able to follow, comment, be followed etc (of course the super gross instances are completely blocked). Fedi is still federated and interconnected.

Bubble doesn’t mean that other instances can’t interact at all. (That would not be OK.) They can, super easily! It’s just that they don’t show up on the front page. It’s perfect, it’s the best of both worlds. A small, local, cozy fedi that’s much, much easier to moderate and less stressful.

Baran’s classic image of how instances only have to worry about their immediate neighbors.

I used to be terrified when there was a “whole known network” feed. Someone would go to my website and they’d find this stream of super gross and weird posts that some friend’s friend’s friend once followed for a hot second but now they’re “known” to my network.

And I’d have to be on top of things 24/7, otherwise some weird creeper server might pop up and start showing up on that timeline when I was away. And I didn’t even want to use it. I am not that curious about what happens on the entirety of the Internet in any given moment. I have books if I feel like reading. 💁🏻‍♀️

I tried various hacky ways of turning the firehose off but in the end I gave up and made my whole web frontend be “auth only”.

And that wasn’t great, either.

People would be like “I went to such and such address on your webpage and it gave me this super scary error message.”

I replied: “yeah, I know, but the other option is to display that creepy whole-known-network timeline and that’s a no go.”

But now! Now there is a solid, well-implemented way to turn the whole known timeline off.♥

So I can turn the “auth only” setting off and just finally have a fedi server I don’t have to be ashamed of.

The other wonderful thing that happened was Static-FE for Akkoma. In other words, now if I link to a specific fedi post, people can read it from Lynx! I used to be sooo embarrassed of my own instance that I’d go to lengths through hoops to not have to link to it. Like, I’d link to the thread on Merveilles Town rather than on my own site (even though Merveilles Town didn’t work on Lynx either...). But now I can, without shame! Timelines doesn’t seem to work yet but at least individual threads and posts do.

Longer explanation

So fedi has two problems. One which is exaggerated (“how do I choose instance”). Same problem exists for mail and everyone has mail. But more about instance choosing further down, first I wanna get into the other huge problem:

I don’t follow that many accounts but as I browse around via web or RSS and I find stuff I want to boost or like or reply to and it’s technically on fedi one way or another, I can usually figure out how to do it. It’s easy but it was very difficult to learn. That is something that is hard to explain and teach also. It’s just so weird. The original mechanism for doing so (you’d sorta have to give your user name and password on the remote sites in some disgusting fashion) sucked and the more universally supported way is to instead search for the “fedi permalink” (it doesn’t even have a universally accepted name!) in your instances search box (and sometimes do it a couple of times in case it’s stuck in a queue and sometimes it just doesn’t work at all, if it’s from some very overloaded instance like lemmy.world).

The whole “all of these sites are working together” is difficult not only conceptually but practically. I have made a browser shortcut called “Interact with on fedi” so I can longpress any fedilink and instantly get a new tab with that post sucked into my own fedi. But most people don’t have that! So cross-site interaction is very clumbersome!

When “Digg” (and similar sites like “Twitter”) got popular, it was via “share links” (which I never had on my own sites because I didn’t wanna contribute to the silos success). But on Fedi something like that would solve a lot of issues in a decententralized way. And, more and more sites do have a “fedilink” equivalent now. On some mastodon instances it looks like three vertices with two of them connected by edges. On mlmym it says “fedilink”. On lemmy it’s a rainbow-colored network icon. That + a browser extension or app that works from the share sheet. That could make cross-site interaction a lot more easy. (Even many self-proclaimed fedi nerds now have different accounts for lemmy, the video thing [I forget what it’s called], bookwyrm, mastodon, pixelfed etc where they could get by with fewer. From Akkoma I can comment on and like art and photos on Pixelfed and I can [sorta, but it’s buggy] reply to threads on Lemmy.)

Back to the choosing-your-instance thing! The future I want for Fedi is to exclude the middle (probably better known as the zone of suck) where Fedi instances try to be like twitter and try to mirror or relay the entire Fediverse. That won’t work. That’s why Usenet died.

Instead, I want two things (and this brings it back to the instance choosing thing):

One: bubble up! Step into the echo chamber with instances that lean into being more cozy and local and have a timeline consisting of itself + allow-listed friendly well-moderated trusted instances of similar ilk. Annihilate the “whole known network” tab and discover features. Lean into Fedi being like the small mailing lists or phpBB sites of old. FEP-1b12 is great here since it fosters communities!

But also, two: Enable cross-bubble interaction! Regardless of which is your “bubble timeline”, you can have your own timeline of friends that you have choose to follow from across the fediverse (excluding instances that your server has completely defederated from or vice versa).

So let’s say you’re a cookbook writer and you’ve got an account on an instance for cookbook writers, which might have on its bubble timeline another cookbook writing instance, some other food sites, and a general writing site. That’s one place where you can go and find posts and that’s where your posts will show up. But then you have your own timeline where you can follow your cousin’s pixelfed or a FEP-1b12 group about flower arrangements and you can comment on them and you can even, via the cross-bubble share-sheet shortcut browser extension thing (maybe that level of support will even be built into browsers since the web has reckless scope creep), comment and posts on threads wholly unrelated to your cookbook writing thing and so can people who follow you there.

That is the dream. I’m already there but for a couple of bugs and unreliable queues and such but that’s because I mangled together my own browser shortcut thing.

The message should be: “See a community you like? Sign up for it unless you already have a Fedi account, in which case you’re good already and can just start interacting!” Mlmym is great there, with easy-to-follow threads (many people don’t even understand how to follow a conversation on X or BSky!) and easy-to-find “fedilink” links that you can paste into your own instance to reply.

Instances like kbin (or friendica, if they could stop mabling up my avatar🤬) that blend personal microblogging with group threads are wonderful, as is something like Bonfire if they can live up to the promise of reintroducing “circles” as Diaspora/G+.