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 ...
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).
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).