this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2024
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Funny, I am of the exact opposite opinion.
I don't mind topic-based instances for groups, but I really would not like to have my online identity tied to one specific, narrow interest of mine.
I mean... not a phone number, because that's not given out willy nilly, but emails? hell yeah. I don't use my work email for private convos, just like I don't use my junk email for coordinating group trips.
But just like you choose an email to converse with (do you have gmail? well that says something about you. Hotmail? same thing), you only communicate on the fediverse with that account. it doesn't mean your identity is that topic. It just means its your home base. Just like gmail or hotmail might be your 'home base'.
which is choosing a topic (yourself) as the root of your identity. Maintaining your own instance is hard. Maintaining a large instance even harder. Growing that instance and keeping it from turning into Reddit (isn't that why we're all here) means making choices about what you want to be. Programming.dev was never meant to be a catch-all. I was the main moderator of /r/ExperiencedDevs and frequently helped people on /r/cscareerquestions. I wanted a place to replace that, but that still had other things connected to it. A sort of in-between between HN and Reddit.
At the very beginning of the exodus, there were instances popping up left and right that had absolutely no connection to each other besides all saying "lemmy". We had
lemmy.net,lemmy.world,lemmy.newswhatever. Tying your identity to lemmy (or the fediverse even) is a losing proposition. The website should be able to grow no matter what tech it uses, and no matter if it's federated with this fediverse or not.The choice in making a topic-ed instance was a deliberate one and a very thoughtful one. You can't grow if people have no clue what you are or what you do. Reddit took literally 14 years before it was mainstream enough for people to start coming over from facebook groups. Whether that's something to be desired or not, you can argue about, but it is a point to make that when you tell someone "Oh I use reddit" they're like "what's a reddit". That doesn't happen with programming.dev. And it doesn't happen with other topic instances like solarpunk or mtgzone or literature.cafe. You know what you're getting when you go in (a programming forum), and you happen to be able to use that to communicate with other forums rather than having the diaspora that is Discourse or BB, which you can joyfully find out after joining. Needing to know that something is the fediverse before going in is terrible for discovery and honestly terrible as a website idea. Reddit grew because it happened to be a forum of forums which many people wanted. But a forum of forums where you can choose literally hundreds of sites (and you have no way of knowing which are good or even mediocre) or even host your own? That's too much for most people, even software devs.
it's actually not that hard to have as many phone numbers as you want
I addressed this in the final paragraph. It makes sense (to me, at least) to partition the communication medium based on the role or type of established relationship, but I don't think, e.g, that you use one account to talk to your friends from school and another to talk with your friends from the swimming club and another to send pictures to people you went camping last summer.
Hard disagree. What aspect of someone's identity can you infer seeing an email from [email protected]? Can you tell their political values? Their religion? Where they were born? Their lifestyle? Marital status? Even if you were to take a jab at their gender, you'd be relying on the user part, not the domain. Saying you can know anything about someone by their email provider is no different than claiming to figuring out someone's personality by asking them their star sign.
No. I don't have a personal domain because I want to talk about myself. I have a domain with my name because I want a stable presence and my name doesn't change, while my interests might. I don't like the idea of letting myself be defined by my interests.
Here, we agree 100%.
Are you sure about that?
Anyway, I just wanted to say I am glad that p.d exists and happier still that is one of the topic-based instances that is thriving. I know that I am part of the minority opinion in this debate. If I have my way, soon we will have "ActivityPub Group Servers" where people will be able to setup, moderate and manage an actor without having to be in the same domain. Then it will be easier for people to find and decouple the "community" from the "instance" and perhaps more people will be interested in using the dozen topic-based instances that I created last year.
Notice that your picture is set to All, which gives you all the communities people on programming.dev subscribe to so naturally it will not be restricted to just programming topics, because as you mentioned, a lot of people use one Lemmy account for a lot of different interests. Setting to Local will give you only the communities hosted here, all of which are programming-related. I browse by Local here and my feed is gloriously full of programming to the exclusion of all else. I feed my other interests on other accounts, which leads to…
For my real life identity, I am definitely more on one account. But for talking to strangers online, my approach is a lot closer to one-thing-per-account. And because of that…
What are they? I might sign up.
If I browse by "subscribed", I'll see only the things that I care about as well. I don't need to sign up to different instances to filter my feed to suit my interests.
No, you may not. Registrations are closed on all those instances. They are not meant to be the home of people, they are meant to be the home of the groups.
I fully understand I can just use Subscribed to only see what I want, and that I can subscribe to many different communities with different topics with it. I splinter my identity off per instance as a choice, which is why I brought it up, not as lack of knowledge on how to use Subscribed.
Curious what topics those instances are, then, then, unless you do not want to share that.
Right, but then it goes back to my original post: why?
I could maybe understand someone arguing "I don't want to be connected with only one instance, to avoid putting all my social presence in one basket, but then this is still not about identity anymore, because we could do that by using different "generic" instances.
It doesn't seem to be a matter of convenience. If anything, it seems to be more work.
Is it about keeping different personas? Having different styles of writing and interacting with others based on the audience? I could understand that, but it feels a bit weird, as if we are not allowed to be ourselves.
Football, Basketball, American Football, Tennis, Self-Hosting and system administration, Fashion and Style, Cars... The whole list is on [email protected]
Privacy paranoia, after seeing someone get doxxed and part of the process was "hmm, these accounts all express interest in the same specific things". If two accounts express interest in programming, they are probably not owned by the same person. Programming and swimming, still probably not be the same. Programming and swimming and winemaking and [insert 7 more hobbies here]? A lot more likely to be owned by the same person.
Yes, I am a little nobody. Unfortunately, some nobodies have had people stalk their comment history during a disagreement and send harassing messages, or have had to get a restraining order against a crazy ex—does not take being a celebrity to want to be careful and wall off information about me and what I'm doing in case I get one of those types in the future trying to find me. And it makes me feel safer and doesn't add much extra friction to my life.
I have expressed this sentiment before which I worry could be identifying (really, I should worry more about what else I'm leaking: smart enough to not say "Jane Smith from 842 Street" but reading my comment history might still give away more than I want) and I regret the fact human courtesy and a niggling worry you are judging me (come on, you're an online stranger, I should not even care) is convincing me to reply, especially since I am worried you'll just say my worries are unfounded and my reason is stupid and bad, but in a more polite manner. I tend towards wanting to explain the why of why I do things but purposely left out the explanation this time for that reason, until you specifically asked for it.
I don't want to be myself, Jane Smith from 842 Street, age 32, with a specific social presence and identity online. I want to be another anonymous person in the void. Of course, I do realize I do technically have a presence, my username and post and comment history, I am not fully anonymous. I guess I want to be closer to anonymous than a specific person with a specific social presence, or at least I want to have my social presence segregated from Jane Smith. I don't mind if people notice I tend to contribute to X community or make Y kind of comment, if they recognize my username. I do mind if people go explicitly digging to try to figure out that I am Jane Smith. Some people might and this is part of how I try to deal with it.
that's why you use different accounts and email for every service...