The last week or so, ive been working on a social media project called The Website League. It’s a closed federated social media site intended to minimize dark patterns, proactively fight harrassment, and operate democratically. In short, it’s a project for a new social media, with a decidedly leftist bent.
It’s going well. We have roughly 50 users, and we’re slowly opening up to more as we find moderators and stress-test things. You can join, if you want. I’d take ya.
It’s built on existing fediverse software. in my case, akkoma, which I chose because it had the featureset we need to operate (allowlisting, removal of numbers, and a few other things) and because it offers a built-in web frontend, which I believe is necessary.
But it’s ultimately a twitter-like platform, and it comes along with all of that baggage. for one, replies appear in your timeline without context, making the experience feel pretty busy and confusing at times. but i think the thing that bothers me the most about it is something that i’ve never really felt was solved by any social media site: the portioning problem
Chips
i can’t eat chips from a bag. or, i can eat chips from a bag way too well. if i have a bag of chips in front of me, and i’m eating from it, it’s almost guaranteed that i will eat the whole bag. chips aren’t filling, and i like chips.
but, if i get a bowl and put my chips in there, put away the bag, and eat my chips that way, i will only eat that bowl. something shifts in my brain that allows me to treat the bowl as my portion, and when that portion is eaten i’m done.
when i’m on a social media site, most of them have a little notification that pops up that tells you that there are new posts in the timeline. when i reach the end of my timeline, suddenly seeing posts that i’ve already seen, i refresh the page to see new posts.
on cohost, this wasn’t a problem, because i only ever followed 150-or-so pages, and after one refresh i was done. but on tumblr – partially because i was a teenager with poor impulse control and partially because tumblr offers more discovery features than cohost did – i was following ~2000 blogs, of various activity. my timeline would never run out of posts. i had an endless bag of chips, and i ended up addicted to it.
this is why algorithmic feeds scare me. there is no end. there is no way to create an end. the only person with the ability to moderate your behavior is you and we are doing our best to give you a hard time of it.
but simple chronological feeds don’t exactly solve the problem. i do have the ability to create an environment that helps me moderate myself, but if there’s always a little light popping up telling me that something new is happening, i still get an urge to keep going, keep reading, keep finding new interesting things to entertain my silly brain.
i really don’t like that
akkoma
akkoma has a little “show new” button that appears at the top of your feed when you have new posts to read. i find myself waiting for it, and frantically clicking it when it appears. it’s like a cat staring at a laser pointer. i don’t know if it’s good for me.
but i also don’t know if it’s a problem that can be solved with an individual instance’s UX. on some level, it’s a problem simply with “how many posts there are”. because of the dominance of mastodon, fediverse software broadly encourages microblogging. people post a lot of small posts, with no tags, and usually no edits. this means that no matter how you design your frontend, if other instances built things differently, things won’t work right.
adoption, and What Do We Do
if you federate with a bunch of stock akkoma instances, while your instance has a UX designed to encourage slower, more deliberate posting, there is going to be a behavioral split between your instance and the rest. if your users don’t see replies, for example, half of the conversations that are happening on their timelines will be invisible to them. if your instance has a UI that presents quote replies as a reblog chain, then other instances will have to click through every quote to get the full context. i’m not satisfied with that.
self-hosted frontends look like twitter because akkoma looks like mastodon, which looks like twitter. akkoma looks like mastodon because mastodon is by far the most widely-adopted server software on the fediverse, and if you change anything significant, you are going to cut a huge number of users out of the people that your users can follow and interact with easily, which will prevent anyone from wanting to use it.
the website league looks like GTS and Akkoma because those are the servers that implement allowlisting well. GTS and akkoma both look like twitter. so the website league looks like twitter.
and i wonder how we deal with that. people have started to work on planning a new website league frontend that will fix some or all of these problems. but it needs to be robust. people need to adopt it, league-wide, if it is going to significantly affect the culture. it needs to be accessible, and hackable, and themeable. people need to make it work for photography, for blogging, for memeing, for css crimes. that’s not an easy task, but i dunno, i’m not a developer.
i have hope, though. i think we can do it. there are always complications, but i’m confident there is a way for us to handle them.
i wrote that last part before i finished the rest of the post, because i have to remind myself sometimes.