Since when did I claim to be “passionate” about anything? My proposal concerns new users, it’s in the title. I’m not a new user any more and I have a bunch of post and comments to my virtual name (not that it’s important, sure). But I now see that it would have been better if I had been pushed to another server when I signed up. Hence the proposal.

You’re an argumentative fellow! I’m still not sure exactly what it is you’re disagreeing with. My proposal is pretty boring and inoffensive. Everything’s in the post. But if you disagree, that’s fine.

Servers are communities.

No they’re not. Communities have “c/” in front of their name. I’m sure you know that already.

You’re just saying I should practice what I preach and get off LW, is that it? Can’t be bothered, but fair enough. My proposal here concerns new users.

Everyone can do what they like. I just believe we have a small opportunity to strengthen our offline communities, and we should take that opportunity.

Seems to be a misunderstanding. My proposal concerns servers, not communities. It would do no more than responsibilize users (“your virtual home here has people who may be your neighbors”) and encourage them to join local communities where they might discuss local issues (rather than, say, US politics).

What youre asking for, IMO, is for the fediverse to work more like facebook and twitter, which HEAVILY bias their feeds towards local matters. The US would not have been so easy to turn into a xenophobic ball of angry people if their social media were MORE international.

Corporate social media is only biased towards local if you count the whole USA as “local”. Again, seems to be a misunderstanding. In the US case “local” would mean state or town.

Since when am I proposing a utopia? I’m proposing that people talk to people in their physical communities. Nothing more ambitious than that.

People not wanting to see hate speech or propaganda does not mean they are in echo chambers.

You know that bad guys are now calling your ideas “hate speech” and “propaganda”, right? And they believe it as much as you do. How do you propose to get out of this mess if not by talking?

That’s exactly what they’re saying - and believing - about you. Meanwhile they have the power. Good luck.

Well, if the true nature of the fediverse is to encourage people to silo themselves into echo chambers where they never have to deal with others who don’t already share all their values and opinions - if that’s truly the point of this thing - then yes, apparently I’m wasting my time here. I still hope there’s a better way.

This - IMO - is the kind of thinking that has got US politics into the state it’s in today.

Yes and I answered that argument

There’s only one mexican instance

Join it and make it better.

it uses a whitelist and it fucking federates with grad

Change that fact, or accept it, or use blocking features (which are not lacking).

Sure, these won’t be popular suggestions, but IMO social media should not be just another form of shopping, where we pick exactly what agrees with us best, and annoys us least, and then lock the door to keep everything else out.

So the recommended unit can be the nearest server with any critical mass. If you’re in Greece you get pushed to whatever’s the leading .gr server. Ultimately it doesn’t matter much since we can all interact with everything via federation. My point is that this might responsibilize users more, and encourage communities to overlap with the offline world a bit more - a place where community is very much needed right now.

As a support structure providing more open communication, the fediverse might help with that. It in itself is not, and is not supposed to be, democratic

This was not my point. My point is that social media will always encourage “niches” (as you hint) and that it would be better for our politics if these overlapped with real-world communities than with, say, obscure hobbies (neutral politically) or political affiliation (the original sin of this new medium).

Putting aside your insults and arrogant tone, I’ll just stress that my suggestion is political, it has nothing to do with technical factors.

As a bubble-ensconced expat you’re likely in a different category!

But sure. My proposal is that if you sign up from a Czech IP, you get pushed to whatever’s the most local server with more than X active users, or X recent uptime ratio, for example.

Yes indeed, but partly the problem with those places is that their bias towards conflict and toxicity is fueled by ad-based algorithms.

This need not concern the physical location of the servers, just their purpose and audience.

Was not aware of the latency issue. But that’s something that can surely be overcome. Apparently it’s been fixed.

By “reviving democracy” I mean just that. Democracy is in a bad way and it’s partly because of the changed information environment. The crisis of professional journalism has decimated local news. People don’t know their neighbors or what’s going on in their communities. This is not an original observation.

To counter my own argument, that’s partly because that instance is less likely to go away or suffer downtime than one run by a single person and with 10 active users. It’s partly why I signed up to it (also because nobody was telling me to do otherwise).