i am more and more taking the position that we should have forums, and we should have blogs, and nothing in between. “social media” carries inherently poor ergonomics and a lack of clarity of purpose. you’re never clearly “publishing” anything when you post on social media, unlike when you post on your own blog or website. you’re never clearly “discussing” anything either, because threads aren’t actual topics or conversations.
so my ideal flow is kinda like
- you make a “post” to your website/profile
- it may or may not be “in reply to” some other post. this is just metadata
- it may or may not be part of some “context”. this is a moderated conversation or logical grouping owned by someone
- the “audience” is up to you, completely arbitrary. it might be only visible from within the context of some other webpage, or it might be given a permalink on your website/profile
fedi dropped the ball hard on those last two…
we could realistically move toward something more context-and-audience-aware but it’s gonna be a bit rough for the existing “instance” model because of structural limitations. you’d basically be building a new fediverse in the shell of the old. but i think it can be done…
one prong is to support actual “publishing” with articles and a more fleshed-out web profile as a website. add webmentions as an optional thing.
the other prong is to support “discussing” within walls/forums/rooms “context”
eventually this kind of “posting” we have today would be split up and merged into the two new things. the UI would give you an option: do you want to publish a Post, or do you want to start a Discussion?
in my mental model. i have the following areas mapped out:
- Publishing (posts)
- Reading (feeds/timelines)
- Discussing (forums)
- Messaging (chats)
all of these are types of communication, and naturally some apps are going to expand to cover more areas. but it’s all dependent on context and presentation. a “chat room” and a “forum topic” and a “social media wall” are all just collections of objects, really.