Sadly, Mastodon to seems to be subject to the same principles. I think in the long tail of followers, there are people who just want to lash out, people who not only don’t give the benefit of the doubt but go out of the way to construct the worst possible interpretation, people who do the above while misreading the original posts, people who have an unrelated ax to grind, but want to grind anyway, etc.

Despite the large majority of wonderful responses, it makes the experience unpleasant.

The fact that this happens here, too, as well strengthens my conviction that social media can only be truly social at scales where we are used to interacting. Offline we know and interact with at very most a few thousand people personally.

I am increasingly thinking that we need to dry distinction between social media that is truly social, and what I’ve been calling broadcast media for the masses.

Without endorsing the platform or it’s ownership, I think that post.news is a good example of what I have in mind when I think of broadcast media for the masses. Anyone, not just journalists or celebrities can use it to write to their followers, so it is for the masses in that sense, but it’s really not set up to be a conversation. Replies are very much in the comment section rather than on parallel ground with the original post. It’s fundamentally broadcast media.

I think a truly social platform might have to be limited in scope. I could imagine a platform that would let you follow at most 300 people and, critically, be followed by at most 300 people.

Following would be reciprocal and by mutual consent. You would then have to curate both the people you follow, and the people you allowed to follow you. This would differ from forums with limited membership, because the networks would overlap and information could eventually move from end to the other.

I wonder what social dynamics would be like in a place like that. Could it recapture some of the magic of smaller-scale social media experiences?

People used to running big accounts would of course have to get used to using social media on a different time scale. Responses would trickle in over the span of a day. But I think we would get used to it. I was really enjoying the circles feature on Twitter, with a circle of 50, in the brief time that I used it before I departed that platform.

@ct_bergstrom I like the rest of your thread, but a social media site limiting friends to 300 and operating on daily timescales sounds very similar to something that already exists: the inner circle of folks with whom I exchange personal emails.

@debivort @ct_bergstrom my worry would be more the issues of stagnancy and exclusion. one of the things I found twitter amazing for is establishing new contacts who then became colleagues in many ways and even friends. My circle of 300 would fill quickly and make entering that circle for someone new much harder and conditional on someone else being excluded.

I worry this would result in it being simply a tech for communicating with people one already has a relationship with.

@richardsever @ct_bergstrom 300, but you're forced to drop and replace 10 per month.

@debivort @richardsever @ct_bergstrom That's quite the high stakes game. Like Bell Labs firing the bottom X% every year while recruiting anew.

What could be explored instead is limiting the rates. The rate of posting (make you think what you say), rate at which a user can reply to another (again make them think; but could be bypassed by edits–so rate limit those too), and the rate at which a user can be followed (X per month). The goal is to encourage thinking before posting or replying.