I have never been an "online community first" person. The internet is how I stay in touch with people I met in real life. I'm not a "tweet comments at celebrities" guy. I was never funny enough to be the funniest person on Twitter.
So when Twitter was accidentally purchased
It’s not the point of the article, but I think it nonetheless speaks to the power that the community-of-communities model provides.
The algorithmic content surfacing models are what primarily rot online interaction. Having all-encompassing sites is another cause. Letting people join communities with shared values, and those communities collectively deciding who they interact with, is a fundamental working model of human societies since prehistory.
What are you saying here? Lemmy has algorithms too, and while it has some good points, it’s disappointing in lots of ways too.
Added: the article is mostly about Mastodon which is more pleasant than Twitter because it lets you listen to just your own selected coterie, also not entirely good.
For algorithms, anything that isn’t a straightforward scrutable way of presenting user content is bad, IMO.
Algorithms that promote engagement, monetization, and sycophants are bad.
As for community of communities, that’s how the Fediverse works — you have a home instance which communicates with other instances. An instance has (nominally) rules, and expected conduct, and is often centered around a particular interest (game dev, programming, cities or countries, etc) then these communities interact with each other.
Having home instances with shared values and a subset of the entire userbase allows for recognizing and connecting with other “local” users. The same way people would trust their immediate neighbors more than random people from the city over. It helps form webs of trust, and establish natural networks.
This is how human society has functioned up until very recently — it’s what the brain evolved to do.
We can see the consequence of systems that don’t respect that fact, sites that try catering to everyone and put us in the same tent, it destroys social regulation, you cannot possibly hope to explain yourself to tens of thousands of angry people on the Internet, nor should people be exposed to such vitriol.
Those are very basic algorithms and they are public. You can see exactly how they work.