Pitch Background I read Johann Hari's Stolen Focus recently - this is really critical reading for anyone developing or running any kind of social media service. One part of it really stuck with me ...
The thing about mastodon is that it’s just a text sharing platform with activity pub. You can follow and like things. Share images. Hashtags are good because you need to search and the community is small. I think the positive message is KISS (keep it simple stupid). From there you can build what everyone else is building: instagram clones (just mastodon with an image requirement), tiktok clones (just mastodon with a short video requirement), blogs (just mastodon but without a character limit). All social media is really just multimedia posts in different UI’s.
I was hoping to just provide context for the question. I think it’s unavoidable that a given implementation/interface provides particular affordances (see https://erinkissane.com/the-affordance-loop - it’s a good read). I think half a century of communication theory would agree. So the question is “what affordances do you want your interface to provide?”
I know Mastodon can be forked. It already has, and I hope it will be more. But those forks will have to ask their own version of the question. But mastodon is NOT just a library for others to build on, it’s a whole package, which is most often used as-is, with maybe some very minor graphical changes. Those things you suggest are possible, but not best served by an unmodified version of mastodon (and also, other softwares already exist for those that do work better for those applications).
I just think mastodon is what it is, its a twitter clone. The category of twitter clones is old, well defined, etc. There’s not much more to talk about about it. The featureset of twitter clones is dead simple. I think twitter clones are toxic, that’s why I’m not on twitter let alone mastodon, but some people like them.
The affordances stuff is a great framework to enter into when defining a new type of social media. But there are few of those frontiers remaining. You might as well post this on some forum software’s github repo. They are gonna tell you the same thing: dude we already exist, the way we have existed since the 90s. We are what we are.
That’s more or less the point of the post though. The affordances framework can be applied retrospectively as well as in the design phase. And software grows and evolves over time, so there is the possibility of divergence from the original design, and that could include intentionally heading towards a different affordance set…
Mastodon doesn’t have a complete feature set, and I don’t think it aims to be a direct clone of twitter (otherwise there wouldn’t have been such resistance to retweets). Seems like the perfect opportunity to think about the problem, while it’s still growing.
An alternative is to not bother, and just rely on forking to produce software with different affordances. I think that’s a perfectly fine strategy. But there’s still value in laying out the mission/values and intended affordances, so someone doesn’t fork for a feature that would easily fit within mainline Mastodon’s mission (of course, merging a fork is possible, but it can be a PITA).
This is an interesting idea but a little preachy.
The thing about mastodon is that it’s just a text sharing platform with activity pub. You can follow and like things. Share images. Hashtags are good because you need to search and the community is small. I think the positive message is KISS (keep it simple stupid). From there you can build what everyone else is building: instagram clones (just mastodon with an image requirement), tiktok clones (just mastodon with a short video requirement), blogs (just mastodon but without a character limit). All social media is really just multimedia posts in different UI’s.
Which part of it is preachy?
I was hoping to just provide context for the question. I think it’s unavoidable that a given implementation/interface provides particular affordances (see https://erinkissane.com/the-affordance-loop - it’s a good read). I think half a century of communication theory would agree. So the question is “what affordances do you want your interface to provide?”
I know Mastodon can be forked. It already has, and I hope it will be more. But those forks will have to ask their own version of the question. But mastodon is NOT just a library for others to build on, it’s a whole package, which is most often used as-is, with maybe some very minor graphical changes. Those things you suggest are possible, but not best served by an unmodified version of mastodon (and also, other softwares already exist for those that do work better for those applications).
I just think mastodon is what it is, its a twitter clone. The category of twitter clones is old, well defined, etc. There’s not much more to talk about about it. The featureset of twitter clones is dead simple. I think twitter clones are toxic, that’s why I’m not on twitter let alone mastodon, but some people like them.
The affordances stuff is a great framework to enter into when defining a new type of social media. But there are few of those frontiers remaining. You might as well post this on some forum software’s github repo. They are gonna tell you the same thing: dude we already exist, the way we have existed since the 90s. We are what we are.
That’s more or less the point of the post though. The affordances framework can be applied retrospectively as well as in the design phase. And software grows and evolves over time, so there is the possibility of divergence from the original design, and that could include intentionally heading towards a different affordance set…
Mastodon doesn’t have a complete feature set, and I don’t think it aims to be a direct clone of twitter (otherwise there wouldn’t have been such resistance to retweets). Seems like the perfect opportunity to think about the problem, while it’s still growing.
An alternative is to not bother, and just rely on forking to produce software with different affordances. I think that’s a perfectly fine strategy. But there’s still value in laying out the mission/values and intended affordances, so someone doesn’t fork for a feature that would easily fit within mainline Mastodon’s mission (of course, merging a fork is possible, but it can be a PITA).