Removal of global federated feed and/or local instance feed
walking mirage
Public
Seen by 43
I am seeing varying opinions on whether we should remove the federation feeds, or both the local and federation feeds. I will update this thread as we collect pros and cons; my own opinion is in a comment, and I am starting based off that and recent conversation in Discord.
Pros of allowing federation feeds:
Having a global view of the network would enhance discoverability and allow a larger audience for people with few followers; having a view of the network as a whole might make it feel more alive, especially for people new to the system.
People used to Mastodon may expect them.
Cons of allowing federation feeds:
Global feeds have presented a harassment vector in the past. For Cohost, the opt-in global feed tag was used to harass others by tagging them into it; staff had to place restrictions on the tag system as a whole to prevent this.
Global feeds create an artificially connected overlay in the social graph of the site's userbase. On Mastodon, if you post something, there is a 100% chance that people who don't know you and don't know anyone you know are going to see it; if any of them have a problem with you or your post, they are free to start conflict over it. Without the federated feed, they would never have seen the post and been bothered by it.
In the same fashion, any conflict that is caused by a post's visibility on the global feed by necessity becomes an inter-instance conflict; while intra-instance conflicts can be resolved by moderators, inter-instance conflict would necessitate the involvement of the Stewards, and presumably whatever conflict-resolution process we come up with, potentially increasing our workload significantly. (Side note: we will need to come up with a conflict-resolution process regardless.)
Cohost didn't have them (having identified them as a dark pattern), and we said we'd be avoiding dark patterns in the same ways that Cohost did.
Conflict spreads rapidly and uncontrollably when everyone can see everyone else's posts
Pros of allowing local (instance) feeds:
Could be a choice given to instance moderators; if a local feed causes problems, they can be disabled.
Might work well with the nature of an instance as a small community, promoting local social connections; the League is a collection of small communities, not one big community. Allows users to see what else is going in in their instance, and affords some degree of discoverability.
More likely to work well with the "reasonably small instance" norm we appear to have been trying to set.
Making an instance feed viewable to the public would allow users to get the vibe of an instance, or of the League in general, while deciding if they want to join and where they want to go.
Cons of allowing local (instance) feeds:
Could still increase instance moderator workload somewhat should they cause conflict or be used for harassment.
vis Wed 25 Sep 2024 11:58PM
I am strongly against the inclusion of global feeds. I weigh the potential for harassment and conflict much more heavily than I weigh the increased discoverability. Discoverability is not impossible on less-connected platforms, it is just slower. It takes more care and attention. And it requires people sharing things, creators, people that they like with each other. These, to me, are positives. I would like a slower-paced network, and I would like a network where people are encouraged to share the things they like.
Alyaza Birze · Thu 26 Sep 2024 12:26AM
obviously we'll have to do some practical balancing to accommodate people, but i do agree with explicitly factoring in the potential benefit of a slower-paced network that has some friction built in, and how that design philosophy influences how people interact