Originally posted by Rambly
i'm super skeptical of the idea of federation anyway, i think it's an idea that sounds good and travels well but leads to its own weird problems and doesn't solve the core, core problems of social media.
The federation aspect is what sold me on Mastodon in the first place, but I've come to realize it's actually quite a bad idea. It sounds good, sure, be able to talk to people no matter what website they're using, but aside from very small instances with few users, your local timeline, or personal timeline are much better sources anyway. Once you hit a critical mass of people you're following, you only start to follow those who are already friends/followers of people you follow. At that point, we're kind of just mimicking the old forum model of friends inviting each other to private forums, just without the added friction of having to sign up. And that's a good thing, but...
There's just too much on the fediverse. Eventually you get to a point where you're only really paying attention to your pings. Yeah, a person will scroll the timeline for a few minutes, but you may miss a connection just because you weren't around at the time a great post was made, and it wasn't followed up on. That post quickly gets drowned out because the whole point of a platform like Mastodon is to just shout into the void.
Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is forums are better for good faith discussion, and if you want to die on that hill I will gladly follow you into that flamewar.
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