Fediverse

What, the VC funded tech firm makes lots of noise about not being evil before eventually just becoming evil yet again pattern? Yeah I don't like it either.

I guess there is a hope that if more people join the Fediverse existing instances and communities won‘t just become more bloated but people create their own alternatives. However I have to say that I have no interest in running one myself. I‘m mostly here to discuss things that pique my interest. Running a community just isn‘t what I‘m here for and I‘m afraid too many people are just like me in that regard and we‘ll create an environment that‘s all too similar to Reddit.

I also don‘t think it‘s good for the platform when people leave a community with a grudge to create a competition „with blackjack and hookers“ style. I want people to come and just create communities because they want to. That‘s where I see a future for the Fediverse.

But I also wouldn‘t want to subscribe to 5 communities about the exact same topic because that would just spam my feed with the same threads probably. However I would actually like to hop between them easily so I don‘t stick around the same few people or have to abandon one for another. A lot would have to change about the way we interact with the platform (UI) and how it‘s connected for this to work though. I‘m thinking about subscribing to topics and it shows you a good mix of communities where overlapping threads are kind of stacked or something and you could swipe cards to see comments from different communities about it or something. This is a tough one to figure out. Might not even be possible at all.

I fear communities are lacking resources and structure to handle the masses. It‘s something corporations already struggle with but they house like 10000 times more active users. One way to go around that was mentioned above and suggested that new users may keep creating new instances and communities so a few places don‘t just explode in size. But from my experience, if a community already covers a topic, there won‘t be much competition and we end up with a power mod environment (Reddit) at best and instances going dark from overload (hug of death) at worst.

But I don‘t want to sound too bleak about all of this. In the end these are challenges that someone might already work on.

Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, or even Google. They give a shit about your wellbeing, as long as they profit.

That's delusional. The try to cater to what will keep you engaged, so that as much of the data you can generate can be milked. That's like saying that agrobusiness cares about livestock's wellbeing.

Echo chambers are okay, no even necessary to stay mentally sane, as long as people share their honest takes without large scale agendas and manipulation.

You're using a different definition of "echo chamber" than I've ever heard of. What you're describing is groups of people sharing opinions that can differ with one another in good faith discussion. If differing views are being introduced its, by definition, not an echo chamber.

An echo chamber is when only one set of opinions are voiced, and all responses are in support of that opinion, hence the "echo" portion of the term.