Kyonshi <
gmkeros@gmail.com> writes:
Would a group for the fediverse (Mastodon, pixelfed, etc., but lately
also Threads it seems) be of use for people?
I do not think so.
I think it would be good for discussing things in a less ephemeral way.
En contraire!
The Fediverse loses articles much faster than Usenet. By design and by "accident".
Message self destruct is a feature at least in some of the federated
systems (Mastodon). My Fediverse posts are set to self destruct after a
week, that's a bit extreme, but I saw others mention using 1 or 2 months
often. Some just see it as a slow chat.
Additionally I've seen nodes pop up and (others) disappear. This may
have been by getting hit with a "Fediban" or the owners just may have
lost the fun in running them.
The decentralised not coordinated administration in the Fediverse may
amplify such differences ending in bans over political and social
topics. Some nodes seem only to exist to annoy others.
Additionally the Fediverse is not suitable at all for discussions by
design. It probably is even worse than those single company driven
"Global Noise Media" (I do not use those $$$-GNM, so I have to guess
that at least they only run feature-identical nodes) because of the
feature diversity of the federated systems in the Fediverse.
Some still only allow 500 character long posts, while others allow
massive walls of text.
Some allow no choice of markup, others use MD by default, Mastodon's
GlitchSoc fork allows plain (auto reflowing, no markup), MD and HTML.
The lack of a commonly accepted markup lets the longer posts just appear
like unstructured blobs. Nicely formatted tables or even ASCII art like
graphs or images are possible on some nodes, but are not portable.
Some nodes respect #tags some ignore them.
Most users don't use tags or use them inconsequently.
Even trying to consequently use tags does not emulate having cleanly
separated newsgroups good enough.
The attention span of the Fediverse is minuscule.
They only have really local timelines (e.g. GlitcSoc) or global noise as alternatives. In all cases without groups. That really is not helpful
for discussions staying focused, "drive by comments" happen often and
derail topics much faster and more often that this happens in Usenet.
The Fediverse is full of stuff to block. In my 1st 14 months there I
blocked ~1.5 accounts per day. My Usenet score file only contains eight individuals and their messages just get visibly marked differently than
the others, so not even killed/blocked by default.
Usenet is centrally administrated and globally replicated. Robust like
a tank.
Usenet is the best choice for long living posts in well separated
groups.
An at least halfway well formatted plain text via Usenet is much easier
to read that those reflowing blobs of text in the Fediverse.
Usenet is stable over decades. Newsreaders have evolved to much more
powerful tools than the GNM's clients.
--
Solid facts do not need 1001 pictures.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)