> So far, the most likely solution to the problem of a mass point-to-point communication system is to not have a mass point-to-point communication system. Shard it down until people are able to behave reasonably well, even if that means you can't communicate with just anybody.
Yes, that is one of the main points of the Fediverse. There are people from all sorts of viewpoints there, all the way from Gab to LGBT instances, but my home instance is my "window into the Fediverse", both via instance filtering/silencing/blocking and via organic reach (content that people on your server never interact with won't reach your server), which creates this organic sharding.
In essence, I interact with "a corner of the Fediverse", with a fuzzy/organic boundary, and I don't expect to be able to communicate universally.
Related article: https://wordsmith.social/elilla/a-futuristic-mastodon-introd...
QUOTE FROM ARTICLE (sorry, not sure how to properly quote on HN):
Note how this is all emergent behaviour. It’s not based on blocks, though blocks are important to weed off bad parts of the subgraph. But independently from that, each instance’s view of the fediverse is unique, and without anybody doing anything, it naturally converges towards a community that makes sense to the instance’s members.
In practice this results in a feeling of social cohesion and intimacy that I haven’t felt online since early Livejournal days.
Isn’t that a bubble? How do you avoid an echo chamber?
You can follow people with contrasting values if you want, nothing’s stopping you and you don’t need admin permission to do that. But why would you want to write to people who don’t want to read what you write? It’s no more a bubble than your circle of friends.
(MY NOTE: Also, you can create multiple accounts if you want multiple "windows into the fediverse". Or create your own server. Or join one of the "free speech" ones.)
I get a lot more interaction from a lot more of a diverse crowd here than I did on twitter, because a single shared space like twitter ends up creating a superstar vs. mere mortals dichotomy, and as a mere mortal not posting discourse bait, I never had anybody read my stuff in the first place. Here there’s a small group of people who always interact with my stuff, and I know everybody by name, and I love them all.
But how do I promote my toots to a large audience in a system like this?
That's the neat part, you don’t.
How do I make everything easily discoverable by a large audience?
You don’t.