Removal of global federated feed and/or local instance feed

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".

@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

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

@sirocyl honestly in a lot of clients, the instance local and federated feeds are kinda hard to get to

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

@sirocyl bluesky is our evil mirror universe clone with a goatee

@Alyaza Birze while bluesky doesn't have a "the global feed", what it does have is an API firehose to every user's every post or action on the network, and people acting either out of malice or naive cluelessness, to build web-based tooling to scrape the firehose with queries, enabling even relatively private individuals' posts, block actions, likes, follows, all to be in the global abuse domain. somehow I think that's worse than a "global public algorithmic feed" imo

@alyazabirze
>a way for people to shop for confrontation
this is a very good name for the phenomenon i have struggled to put a name to

local/home feeds

my general feeling is that local/home feeds are fine, and i don't see much of an argument against them as a principle of the League (nodes can turn them off individually if they desire). they seem like pretty basic networking/community building/discovery features, and given that one of the big issues people had with Cohost was discoverability, i think we'd run into similar problems with a prohibition.

in terms of how i could be swayed: i would need to be convinced there is some sort of crippling flaw in the implementation of/oversight in the safety of these feeds to want to actively exclude them.

global feeds

conversely, i have almost the opposite opinion on global feeds: even in a confederal closed-system context where i'm going in with a baseline of trust in everyone else here, i am not fond of the idea and think it's likely to cause a lot of trouble. if not now, then certainly once we get bigger and more complicated, and we can't all know each other at least passingly.

most immediately i would need to be convinced that we can somehow prevent this from being a harassment vector, a way for people to shop for confrontation, and a feature that generally induces what people jokingly call the "mortifying idea of being known." Bluesky doesn't even have a feed like this, but does have a culture of people doing the first two things by way of the search feature, and i find my frustrated comments over there about this to be apt in this context:

"social media" as in "we are at a block party together but barely know each other because we're not neighbors [...] you would think it'd be kind of obvious that, unless very clearly prompted, random strangers may not be super interested in hearing just anything you have to say under their posts, and that what you say should have some pro-social/constructive/informative purpose... but evidently no, it isn't.

and the result of feeling this way is the third thing: i don't really want to talk about anything on Bluesky that could ever conceivably be weaponized against me, because people will be incredibly fucking weird about it and make my presence in the space unenjoyable.

the point about confederation-wide discourse being started by a global feed is also a serious one, and almost a given with how federation protocols are structured. pretty much all federated systems have a serious context collapse issue, created by both the social splintering that federation allows for and the technological/UI/UX splintering that federation protocols facilitate. Mastodon suffers truly catastrophic problems just as a byproduct of the first thing; we would, presumably, be dealing with both the first and the second things (either now or later) because we allow for people to use different federated services to be in the confederation. maybe it is possible to fix this or manage it in some way, but i am pretty skeptical, personally.

in short: i'm not absolutely against global feeds but i would be pretty tough to win over on this. i'd probably want an explicit roadmap on how we can mitigate these identified issues in the short-term and overcome them in the long-term—and i don't have good answers for you on how that'd be done, because again i'm pretty skeptical it can be done.

@walking mirage manually curated account that shares the good shit has worked really nice on some fedi instances. that could be a per-node optional thing. and hopefully someone would just ... do this organically!

@morine i think that "public list" thing will be fine, no matter what

another option: manually curated account that shares the good shit

I am:

• Very strongly pro giving operators the choice of having local feeds (at least for small instances, but probably all instances). I think there's a lot of value in instance-local communities, and I suspect many members of small-to-medium-size instances will naturally want to find each other.

• Somewhat against a global feed, but I understand the need for some sort of way to discover users on other instances. If all else fails I could live with a global feed.

• I think allowing instances to choose to make their local feeds public or... perhaps maintain some sort of public list of people to follow that instance members could opt into? might be a good alternative to a global feed.

@viviridian I think there might be opportunities to rectify this. If we have a central instance that's federated with everyone, it will have seen every tagged post, and we can do something with that.

@walking mirage I think one notable difference with cohost is that cohost has tag-based discoverability. Searching on a node for a tag does not give you all the posts that were ever made on the network that have that tag. It can only show you posts that your node has seen.

On a newly set up node, search will not be able to find anything, only posts that reach it. I don't know for sure how proactive instances are about sharing public posts for each other, so users may have to also have an account on an older instance that they can use to find posts by tags.

Perhaps a relay mitigates this to an extent. I haven't used one so I don't know.

I am strongly against the inclusion of a federated feed (for the "con" reasons above), and neutral-to-mildly positive on the idea of instance feeds. I think with the smaller number of people who'd be present and interacting in a local feed, and the high likelihood that some of them will know each other, there's much less of a problem.

Not having a true global feed worked okay for Cohost. A lot of people found the exclusively tag-based discoverability annoying or insufficient, but instance feeds might rectify that.

Federated feed: neutral to negative. I agree with all of the listed cons, and furthermore don't think they're that useful anyway.

I don't see them as a huge negative at our current scale, either. As we learned through testing, if nobody on instance A follows poster B, none of poster B's posts are even visible from instance A. Of course, posters from other instances could boost "bad opinions" for dunking purposes. Overall it seems like there's little upside, balanced against risk that will only grow as we do.

Local feed: strongly in favor of instances having the choice. I think being able to see all the public posts from your instance will help with community-building. There are risks, but I don't feel they're all that substantial compared against the Federated feed. I see little downside to allowing local feeds.

@vis 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.

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

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.