Removal of global federated feed and/or local instance feed
walking mirage
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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.
ruby Thu 26 Sep 2024 2:36AM
@kouhai on “the mastodon[.whatever] administration clique’s personal global PVP feed”, what are you referring to with this? I'm largely unfamiliar with the broader fedi culture, so just trying to understand the concern being raised here
kouhai Thu 26 Sep 2024 12:33AM
my opinions are reasonably well known and documented, as one of the people who initially advocated for local feeds.
so: “will majorly object to any unconditional restriction on local feeds”; “neutral on federated feed”
what i have to add is this:
we must be very careful to avoid the existence of “the mastodon[.whatever] administration clique’s personal global PVP feed” and i wish i were joking.
useful decentralized tool, yes. harassment vector, also yes.
meta (derogatory) tends to spread anyway, via subposts. these days my meta (derogatory) knowledge comes from sub posts
i am guilty of this. however, the pace is (as people have said) much more reasonable. i also believe that the existence of dedicated forums (consensus) will help reduce the need for this terrible back channel
kouhai Thu 26 Sep 2024 12:34AM
@sirocyl honestly in a lot of clients, the instance local and federated feeds are kinda hard to get to
sirocyl Thu 26 Sep 2024 12:29AM
Absolutely Not re: permitting federated, public, global feeds. That's like filling a firehose with gasoline and setting it loose on a dry plain surrounded by woods in August, to ape the analogy by @walking mirage above. It'd serve to hurt us and our users far more than any consequential gain of discoverability, visibility or reachability in the network.
Instance-local feeds, toggled on by the instance admins, hopefully with users able to individually opt out from seeing, or being seen, however: I'm okay with it, no major objections otherwise.
muffin j. lord Thu 26 Sep 2024 12:21AM
I've never found the global feed on Mastodon all that useful for anything other than letting it wash over me. I don't really need my presence any more felt than it usually ends up being, and if the global feed stayed around it would probably be more useful than anything just as a curiosity to tune into every so often, like daytime cable.
I feel strongly that local feeds, however, should exist, to give prospective users a good idea of an individual instance's vibe as well as making it easier for admins to keep tabs on their own population when necessary, for moderation and as a "health check" of how much use their instances are seeing. That said, I don't think it should be a hard requirement, but maybe it should be declared in the instance's guidelines? If you're looking for a local feed, you're not going to want to choose a feedless instance, after all.
walking mirage Thu 26 Sep 2024 12:19AM
Remembered one more thing: global feeds are one of the main dark patterns identified by the Cohost staff, and Cohost users would probably not be big fans of seeing them after we said we'd stick to cutting out dark patterns.
walking mirage Thu 26 Sep 2024 12:18AM
Remembered one other thing about global feeds: both on Mastodon and Cohost, the presence of a global feed allows a conflict people feel strongly about to take over what feels like the entire website, before any sort of moderation action or conflict resolution can take place. Without a global feed, conflict grows more slowly as people see posts by people they know, and the intensity can be damped down.
It's like a low-intensity surface wildfire in a healthy forest, versus a crown fire in a forest that's had fires suppressed with no controlled burns. The former might scorch trees and burn brush, but it makes a forest healthier, in the long run; similarly, low-intensity conflict can be a way to expose important tensions that can be resolved via other mechanisms. In the latter, there's enough readily available fuel that spread is rapid and destruction is total; everyone feels foul about what happened, including the people responsible for moderating the conflict or fixing the issues inspiring it.
isomorphism Thu 26 Sep 2024 12:17AM
Federated / global feed: Hard no on my end, at least not without a lot of convincing. I do think it means we need to consider other ways to discover each other and encourage them - that's a challenge I welcome!
Local/instance feed: neutral/unsure on this one. Seems like a decent place for people without technical skill to find people, but if instances ever get to 30+ people they could have (on a smaller scale) the same issues as a federated feed. Since I'm unsure, agreeing with froggebip that it should be a call on an instance by instance basis.
walking mirage Thu 26 Sep 2024 12:26AM
@sirocyl bluesky is our evil mirror universe clone with a goatee
viviridian · Thu 26 Sep 2024 12:57AM
afaik I'm the one who reopened this can of worms on discord. I'm pretty convinced by all the arguments posted here so I mostly just want to thank everyone for taking the time and effort to write in here.
The federated feed is not a feature that I found particularly useful on my (small) fediverse instances, so I was kind of more coming from an angle of "is it worth spending our limited time and energy on removing the federated feed from server implementations if there isn't an easy toggle", and I think my answer to that is now "yes".
I found the argument around how having federated feeds impacts moderator workload to be especially convincing, since one of the top things on my mind is "how do I avoid overextending myself and the impact that my burnout would have to those on my node".