[sneak]

> Mods can block other instances. If you don't like what the mods do, change instance or start your own community.

Doing so costs you all of your followers. This is one of the main issues with the culture of heavyhanded instance operator censorship: you can’t simply switch like you would an email host with your own domain, because few/no AP implementations support bring-your-own-domain virtual hosting.

This is like saying “well, if you don’t like that the mail admin simply doesn’t let you email certain domains, just change your email address!”

[klntsky]

> Doing so costs you all of your followers

This is not true anymore. You can "transfer" your account to another instance, and all the followers will not need to refollow.

[lainsoykaf]

This is sadly not quite correct. You can send out a 'Move' activity from your old account, notifying other servers that you have moved. There's no guarantee that they understand that activity, or, if they understand it, that they actually follow the new account automatically.

[vertex-four]

In practice, nearly all your followers will be using fediverse software that understands and supports Move{Actor} in a similar way to Mastodon. There's not a massive amount of fediverse software - it's not like IndieWeb where everyone does their own thing - and the microblogging-focused software largely implements the same feature set.

[kick]

Most Mastodon instances currently running today don't support it.

[cptskippy]

It seems like virtual hosts would be reluctant to support it because it allows clients to move away from them. Vendor lock-in and such...

[kixiQu]

Most people aren't getting paid for running their instances, and are doing it for the kind of goodwill that is only amplified by enabling features.

[nenolod]

That depends on that software being deployed in a timely manner. There's plenty of instances out there still on Mastodon 1.6 and 2.0 because the admin installed it 2 years ago and hasn't updated since.

[grishka]

I probably need to look into supporting this in my federated social network thing. It does work with Mastodon and Pleroma right now, but it certainly could do better.

[sneak]

Even if the move notification worked perfectly, the people on instances your local admin has defederated with will never receive it as a result of the defederation. I don’t think this is a solution.

[jhauris]

This is good to know. One of the things that holds me back is choice paralysis on picking an instance.

[alfiedotwtf]

I would love if social media platforms could stop letting people know who followed who, even to the followers themselves... I think it would make places less vain and toxic

[zimpenfish]

I can't see how it would make it less toxic - a lot of the toxicity I see comes from accounts where it just wouldn't be possible for them to know who followed them because they're well into the 100ks, if not millions.

[CaptArmchair]

Not quite. It's not a bug, it's a feature.

Going back to the original quote: "The fediverse is like interconnected villages instead of a large metropole. There's no need to shout." and I think it's quite apt.

The fediverse is far closer to early online fora, bulletin boards then it is to e-mail. Maybe you were deeply entrenched in a particular online community, establishing an online identity, a reputation, visibility,... connected to your name. But outside of that domain? Well, you have little social credit on other discussion boards.

This approach models closely to how societies work in reality. And how individuals prioritize their own social connections. First family, then extended family, friends, co-workers, and society at large - an online audience - way down the road. Each of us will subconsciously look at people starting from the implicit question "Who is part of my tribe, who's an outsider?"

Now, the important part here is that you may feel compelled or forced to leave a group, family, tribe,... So, this implies giving up your locally established social credit and hope you can rebuild that elsewhere. For most people, that's an extremely expensive and risky proposition.

So, what do Reddit and Facebook do different, then?

Reddit is hugely successful because it provides a platform that can sustain thousands of small communities. Much like how online fora - but also e-mail based newsgroups or BBS'es - used to work in earlier days. Facebook's killer app is not the wall or your profile - contrary to what you may think - but... facebook groups. The same is true for Telegram or WhatsApp. These are tools that allow you to establish small communities.

And then you have the entire "followers/following" thing.

What Facebook and Reddit did was successfully merge the idea of a portable, persistent identity - a profile - between local communities by building a platform that also made migration and establishing new communities really easy and cheap (just a few clicks: bam! new group or subreddit!)

Now, followers / following: that's NOT a social network. That's an audience. And there's a distinct difference between those two. (even though there's an overlap too)

For all the talk over "engagement", communicating towards an audience is mostly a one-to-many one-way street. You may reach hundreds of thousands on Twitter, but you may only directly engage - and establish a meaningful relationship - with a handful of people.

If you want to directly and presently reach a large audience, then either e-mail newsgroups, the fediverse or online fora are the wrong venues. Arguably, even Reddit is the wrong platform if you directly tap into millions from a single or a few publishing points (accounts).

If you're looking for small communities in which you want to get entrenched, then the fediverse is the right place to be. Even though that comes with the perpetual yet very real trade off of establishing social credit locally which you can never carry with you if you migrate away.