Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

The entire world has been forced to act as diplomats. When coming from vastly different world views and experiences, being charitable in your interpretation of others is essential; it is important to distinguish disagreement, harassment, and true threat so as to avoid false positives and further degradation of the conversation. That charity requires having a very thick skin, and yes, it’s unfair when it’s not reciprocated and you are being targeted.

I think social media has taught us that most people are terrible diplomats. Which is to expected when a person’s threat response is engaged. Having a thick skinned and measured reaction to threat is still the best way to reduce that threat. And it requires a level of discomfort unprivileged people are generally much better at dealing with; the people who need to hear that advice most are those advantaged enough to be unfamiliar with dealing with discomfort.

I think a better solution than forcing everyone to become diplomatic or banning those who violate the norms of others is to have somewhat siloed social groups that are represented by open minded thick skinned diplomatic types that permeate the borders. That’s part of what’s appealing about a federated model; I think it better mirrors our social tendencies and historically successful political systems with diverse constituents (representative republics seem to be the only proven systems capable of dealing with lots of different peoples long term).

I’m of the opinion that the most virulent partisanship is actually due to the lack of silos rather than the echo chamber narrative. Before the internet, in group conversations stayed behind closed doors. That privacy allowed people who would be outraged at the contents of those conversations to get along in a diplomatic middle.

Now those conversations are public, and people seem to be fighting over control of one big room where all the walls have been removed.

I've used both kinds of forums, and I think both trees and linear threads - let's call them 'streams' - have their places.

If you imagine a forum as a large dinner table, trees are like conversations that start out at one corner of the table, maybe with a few people participating, and then usually split off into individual exchanges that don't interact with each other. When that happens late in the dinner after coffee and liquor, people usually move around and form little groups.

Streams are like shared conversations involving the entire table - one person at a time talks, everybody listens and replies. Sometimes people try to talk over each other, sometimes it's mostly two or three people talking and the others are nodding along for a while. But it's what makes the experience a communal one, and it's how you get to know the people in the group other than the few you directly spoke to.

It also acts as a moderating influence, since if two people are getting into a heated debate over some niche issue, other attendees will usually try to mediate for the sake of the event, instead of ignoring them and letting them fight among them.

Stream-based forums IME tended to form more robust communities where people recognized each other's names and avatars, whereas even in smaller subreddits I might recognize a couple of very frequent commenters but nowhere near as easily or as often. On the other side, tree-based forums make it much easier to establish a rapport with the couple of people you wanted to talk to and ignore everybody else.

(Potential objection: nothing's stopping a tree system from acting like a stream by having a "main" thread where most everybody pipes up. In theory that's true, but in practice I find that threads simply don't have the staying power of streams, because they fade off into the 'click here for the next 20 replies' purgatory where only the participants and a few lurkers follow. Streams keep all the eyeballs in the same place.)

> Their messenger doesn’t offer any server-side protection. In their case, a server-side party can directly access your data in cleartext—this is trivial.

I'm gonna need names.

> Contrasted with facebook (or a twitter with groups), if you join a group of motorcyclists, there's little to no risk that you'll be excluded from the Scooter group of-which you're already a member because a few bikers got into a spat with scoot-gang, nor will you be excluded from any of the groups that get along well with scoot-gang.

Are you sure? On Reddit, membership of one subreddit often results in bans from others, and Reddit is centralized.

Diaspora is not part of the fediverse and never has been. Diaspora is federated but has always used their own, separate protocol.