On fediverse culture
I was recently asked about "fediverse culture" - whether there's one, or many? Where the technology stops and the culture starts? I have turned my reply into this not-very-refined blog post.
The short answer, in my opinion, is that there is definitely no universal culture on the fediverse.
There are certainly lots of people who have ideas about what the "fediverse" is or should be. Note that the fediverse is not Mastodon alone; Friendica and GNU Social also interoperate with Mastodon to degrees, and that there are different frontends for Mastodon available that might impact how people feel about their community and interact with the system(s). And other non-twitter like sites that also interoperate - peertube, pleroma, pixelfed - and that very small customisations to the normal Mastodon software done by server admins can have an impact on the usage and expectations of that server. And I'm just talking about the UI here really, not even moderation tools/rules. That's a whole nother blogpost/thesis.
For example: when I joined toot.cat, many thousands of years ago, the UI was customised to read "boop" and "bap" (or something) instead of "toot" and "boost". It was my first time on a mastodon instance (pre-ActivityPub, can you imagine?!). I posted something like "what is the difference between bap and a boost" and had a lot of responses from people on other servers along the lines of "what are you on about". Only people on the toot.cat instance understood, and as a new user I didn't know that every other server did not present the same experience. It's a tiny example, but scale that up across thousands of different UIs, norms, and contexts.
That line between technology and culture; I posit: no such thing! I find this whole thing absolutely fascinating, and tried to write about it in my thesis, but it was more of an afterthought than a focus at the time. Thinking about the circular relationship between UX and human behaviour - how they shape each other. The affordances of the system determine certain usage patterns, but people subvert those affordances, turn them to unexpected ends, and the system is often changed (if not directly by the designers, then indirectly through reinterpretation by the users) as a result.
I don't see how there could possibly be anything like a uniform culture across the fediverse. There isn't a uniform culture on twitter, and everyone is using more or less the same UIs/apps to interact with it. Anyone who says there is is actually just describing the part of it they've experienced - which might be significant - but there's no way it's "all" of it.
Related tangent: Most of the focus in terms of development has been on the federation - server-to-server APIs. Which is all well and good, but I've always been more interested in the implications of standard client-to-server APIs. Mastodon doesn't implement the ActivityPub client-to-server last time I checked, which hampers my dream. The dream: is as many options for your posting apps as there are for todo list apps, or, I dunno, raincoats. Posting clients would fall along the spectrum from highly specialised (do one thing - eg. individual photo sharing - and do it well) to very generic, and along the spectrum of highly personalised for your specific context to super generic everyone's is the same. We have a lot of options for raincoats, from really fancy high tech water repellent ones, to basic plastic ponchos, to ones that are cosy and warm, to ones that keep the wind off best or are lightweight and optimised for hiking, and you can usually get them all in a range of colours and sizes, but they're all recogniseable as raincoats. Federation in that world is to me extremely exciting - it probably opens up a lot more questions than answers, but I'd love to see how it played out. It would necessitate 'reader' applications (whether or not these are integrated into posting applications) to be a lot more able to gracefully handle post formats they weren't specialised in (fortunately(?) we have standards to help), which probably mostly means being able to fall back on a plain text representation for everything as a minimum.
I'd love it to be normal and everyday to not assume that when you post a message on your social network, every person is reading it in a similar UI, either to the one you posted from, or to the one everyone else is reading it in.
I love it because it embodies the fact that everyone really is operating from a different perspective, in a different context, a different mood, with a different set of life experiences, than everyone else. I see a lot of people forgetting this when they're discussing/arguing about stuff in general (in 'normal' life, not even web standards!) and find it uniquely frustrating.
Post created with https://apps.rhiaro.co.uk/no-ceremonies-are-necessary
