2026-10-12 08:13 UTC
Replies (4)
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@16af93@wetdry.world 2026-10-12 08:56
@riverpunk@defcon.social Kind of like the analog of people on Tumblr and Twitter being mostly disconnected from each other -- except in this case, you could still search up and follow people from other "rooms", you just wouldn't naturally discover their account unless you made an explicit point to do so. isn't that how fedi already works? you only see what you follow or what your server knows about when looking in the global timeline/wheb following hashtags (which for bigger servers like defcon.social, mastdon.social, &c can be quite busy)
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@Drew@gamerstavern.online 2026-10-12 17:19
@riverpunk@defcon.social Honestly, I'd see that as a feature. The human mind is not made to be connected to so many people all the time. Our psychology is still inherently primitive in many ways, making tribe-like group behavior much more natural. The old internet of the 90s allowed you to migrate from tribe to tribe to find wherever you would feel at home. Modern social media thought that by connecting everyone with everyone it would improve our lives. It didn't. Instead it has increased the polarization of our societies. I believe it's because of this psychologically unnatural state of always being connected with all sorts of opposing views our collective minds aren't capable of dealing with that in constructive ways anymore. It's simply overloaded. Fragmented sub-groups would allows us to create these safe-spaces again where we can recharge without having to deal with the whole spectrum of internet denizens.
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@SeaJay@scicomm.xyz 2026-10-13 02:13
@riverpunk@defcon.social I think there are a number of smaller instances that are ideally meant to be like that. In that the "local" feed is much smaller and close nit than the federated global feed. That said, neither of the two instances I have been a part of have attracted much conversation through the local feed
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@internic@mathstodon.xyz 2026-10-14 04:05
@riverpunk@defcon.social I think it's an interesting question to which a good answer is probably complicated. If we take the web analogy seriously, then we'd expect to be able to connect to anyone (or almost anyone), just as there are very few web servers to which you cannot connect, except if you live in a limited number of totalitarian countries or the site is one who has had their domain seized. I think on the social web that's desirable too, to save you from having to have many accounts. On the other hand, I think you're absolutely right that it's not desirable to have one giant totally-connected graph that's a continuous culture clash. And if you want to have any moderation at all (and most sane people do), then you'll never be able to have one set of rules that all users on the net find acceptable. It will only work as a collection of enclaves with different norms (and even then moderation is quite difficult). It seems like the difficulty is in reconciling those, allowing a user to talk to all of their friends, even if they belong to different enclaves, without causing the culture clash to re-ignite in each of that users threads (where the enclaves would seem to naturally mix). I know many Mastodon users have the idea that each server will be its own community with different norms. Some servers even have an option to make local-server-only posts. I don't think this quite works, because individuals can belong to multiple distinct communities. But perhaps something inspired by similar thinking but a bit more de-centralized could work.