What brings value to message boards and forums is the quality of the conversations contained within. I'm not the first surely to recognize the conflict between this utility for #threadiverse and #fediverse (specifically #mastodon) norm for anti-discoverability? Norms-wise, alienated and dispossessed people's interests will probably bend towards searchability rather than keeping turtle as an opsec habit but it does mean individual risk assessments may produce enough emergent behaviour that makes federation an irrelevant benefit. #RedditMigration
I don't think it's really a norm for anti-discovery as much as discoverability is a legitimately difficult engineering problem for a distributed system, one that hasn't been sufficiently solved to make it an option in the first place.
I suppose some may prefer it that way, but I'd say the norm is mainly due to lack of a really viable alternative option.
It's like, it's not that I'm anti-fusion power; it's that there isn't a fusion power option available yet.
@volkris
In terms of the technical challenges, i agree - for me, i don't know how to resolve the issues but in terms of objectives a tiered access system has got to be in place to balance the needs. But I do think it's a matter of cultural values (ie norms) - Even the fact you have between followers-only or public (plus local instance if you're on Hometown fork) as your only options and not one more at least for mutuals feels deliberate and the conversations I've managed to follow hasn't convinced me otherwise (since it was presented as an all or nothing; very telling of a mindset that's never had to codeswitch until one axis of their identity is made alienated, imo - that's me being generic without saying outright the earlier culture is white(European)-plus-something and the something is either a executive functioning disorder or sexuality and gender)
Ha, honestly I find the audience functionality of both Mastodon and ActivityPub to be such a mess that I wouldn't read into it.
ActivityPub makes it pretty complex on its own, and Mastodon adds another level of complexity on top of ActivityPub, making it that much messier.
You can see the overview in the link below if you're interested in the technical background.
Basically, public and followers-only are the super simple tags for Mastodon to add to posts with anything else being orders of magnitude harder for them to debate and then program, so I wouldn't be surprised if they stopped at those two out of pure laziness... errr... lack of time to get around to it :)
@volkris
Fascinating! Thanks for sharing the link, I'm gonna try and get through it and have a good chortle
That being said, maybe more to your point, the head developer guy of Mastodon shows himself to really want the platform to be the way HE wants it, regardless of others' requests.
His statements against QT is one example of that. And looking into audience a bit farther I came across this comment of his that also reflects his kind of closed-minded shutdowns of others' ideas.
And so, as he insists on having his way for his project (not entirely unfair), it's going to really reflect his own values and attitudes, including not feeling the need to put priority into audience selection.
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/8950#issuecomment-428748943
@volkris
Oh yessss that round of discourse did at least (slowly and painfully) got him to a different position on QTs, but you're right. Good thing the whole point of federation on the same programming language is the opportunity to fork or develop a different suite of features 🤣🤣