Removal of global federated feed and/or local instance feed

@sirocyl i believe so; in Tusky i can no longer retrieve my local feed with the patched version. Granted, I'm a node of one, but if it's happening to me it's going to happen to others as well.

@Cyril Arcilla This is concerning local feeds, not federated, right?

after trialling viv's fork of GoToSocial with WL patches, i discovered that users actually want the feeds right now and disabling them will be harmful to the experience. so i cannot support this policy at the moment, but i'm not sure when the "Okay We Can Kill Feed" time will come

No federated. Local can be nice

Worth noting that "Unlisted" / "Quiet Public" is an option (basically public but doesn't show in timelines or on gts for logged out users) and we could set it as people's default visibility so group timelines are opt-in

just chiming in to pretty much agree with everyone: global feed hard no, local feed up to the node.

if some nodes wind up particularly large and it becomes a problem we might want to revisit this with an upper limit, but TBH it seems unlikely that a node running into moderation problems over its local feed would choose to keep it in the first place; doesn't seem necessary to preempt that. if it does become a league-wide problem, we can address it then (which would inherently also give us a better idea of what the threshold should be before instituting one).

(wanted to get some thoughts out. hope to add more another time)

Global feed: Against. Something that became important for me on cohost was the barrier to communication; it required effortful and intentional decision making to find, connect, and then communicate with others. Global feed is antithetical to that; low barrier and low intention in interacting with others.

local feed: if given the option, I would want it turned off on my viewer. If we are committed to small instances, then there’s a probability that most instance members are following each other and the local feed is redundant. Still feels like a dark pattern to me, so leaning more neutral/against. A compromise could be giving people the option to turn it off or set it turned off by default. I guess also asking what role or affordance does local feed offer and then asking if we can provide that through alternative means besides a local feed?

Federated/global feeds: absolute "no" as implemented on Mastodon or as ended up occurring on Cohost; open to considering proposals for mitigations that would effectively eliminate the hazards in them. Whether such mitigations are even possible is another question, but.

Local feeds: should absolutely be an option for nodes, but specifically an option. If a node determines that even its own local feed is causing too much trouble, they should be able to make decisions about how (or whether) it operates as appropriate.

Federated Feed: No, no, no, a million times no. Absolutely not. The downsides to having a League-wide global feed far outweigh any potential benefits that it could bring to user discoverability. The high-volume, unfiltered firehose of content is a really good way to put content in the faces of people who do not want to see said content - and no, CWs, tags and user-side blocking are not viable solutions to this problem. Sandbags only reduce the amount of damage caused by a flood - they don't prevent it, so let's not give users a "flood your timeline" option. The inclusion of federated feeds in the League is something that I an very strongly against, and it will take very good arguments as to how they can be explicitly beneficial for me to move off this stance - discoverability is not good enough.

Local Feed: This one has more nuance to it. Overall, I stand neutral-to-somewhat-negative on these. The local feed is still a flood - but it's a contained one (usually). I'm still not the biggest fan of them, because even though it's necessarily smaller and more local than a federated feed, it is still a feed of content that you did not explicitly sign up to seeing. Cohost encouraged feed curation, where you decide exactly which users and exactly which tags you want to see in your feed - I'd like to see this spirit carried forward into the League. I worry that local feeds may act as a crutch that users rely on to view posts from users, instead of taking the time to intentionally think about and create their own feeds. That intentionality is, to me at least, one of the reasons Cohost felt so much healthier than most social media - it encouraged you to actively think about what you wanted to see, and ignore the things that you didn't like, so they don't have a negative impact on your experience with the site. Given that, I still personally view local feeds in a generally negative light.

However - I am aware of the limitations of the technology that we are using. The nature of federation makes discovery more difficult than it was on Cohost. Users on other instances are hard to find unless someone else on your instance has found them already, and tags don't always present a full overview of posts across the network - only limited to the nodes that your node already knows about. In particular, this is a big problem for personal nodes - tags in particular will be almost completely non-functional to a personal node, because having content on tags there is predicated on the user having already found people posting under that tag already, severely limiting their utility there. Having other people on the node doing their own independent discovery will help improve the situation sometimes, but not always. Given this, I see the utility provided by a local feed - providing a place to find interesting posts when looking for tags and users fails. That's why I'm nowhere near as hardline as I am on the federated feed here - the impact of the flood is much weaker than in the case of federated feeds. Assuming one joins a node that they feel has a community they'd be welcomed in, local feeds have a much lower risk of presenting posts to members that they don't want to see. I think for this reason, it's something best left to node staff discretion. While I don't see them being as entirely harmful as federated feeds, there are valid arguments both for and against local feeds in my eyes, and I don't think node staff should be locked into a decision between one and the other.

@viviridian i figured that since it was a conversation that keeps happening, it'd be important for us to talk about it here so we could all get our thoughts together in one place (which can be consulted later also)