@volpeon

Volpeon

@volpeon@icy.wyvern.rip

1y

@trae Floof

Volpeon

@volpeon@icy.wyvern.rip

1y

@sun I would love if tagging was the default here instead of CWs. Oh well

Volpeon

@volpeon@icy.wyvern.rip

1y

@Houl omg he's nomming a feesh

Volpeon

@volpeon@icy.wyvern.rip

1y

@Houl omg he's nomming a berry

Volpeon

@volpeon@icy.wyvern.rip

1y

I overhauled my post about social media design. I improved phrasings and changed the focus to include both posters and followers equally.

volpeon.ink/notebook/modern-social-media/

---

I grew up with forums. Forums were focused on an overarching topic, split into categories with threads about more specific topics. If you were interested in participating in a forum, you registered. If you were interested in reading about certain topics, you visited the right threads and checked them out. You could subscribe to threads, too.

It's a design centered around topics — and it's absolutely nothing like modern platforms such as Twitter, Bluesky, or the microblogging side of the fediverse. They put the focus on individual people by establishing profiles as everyone's own space where they can express themselves and interact with others as they wish. This freedom doesn't exist on other kinds of platforms where you are bound by an overarching theme, a context, rules, and so on.

The main mechanism these platforms have in common is a personal feed comprised of posts by people you're following.
You're given some possibilities to curate it, such as lists, tag filters, keyword filters and muting/blocking.
Usually, there's support for private communication via direct messages, but apart from that, everything takes place in one global space.

This design disregards everything about how relationships and interactions normally work.

People only share certain aspects of themselves with others, depending on their relationship with everyone involved in an interaction.
For instance, you're probably willing to share personal information in a conversation among friends, but not so much on a public medium such as a podcast.
The context of our interactions plays an important role.

On social media, conversations are usually displayed as a structured view separated from the global context. Your replies will typically not show up in the feeds of people who aren't directly involved, and usually there are DMs as a truly private channel. This makes these local contexts a well-supported use-case.

Communities don't get this privilege. They do form implicitly through everyone's connections, but there's no external structure to support them. You can't enforce community rules and they aren't separated from the global context.
Sure, there are hashtags, lists and other features, but these are just filters over the global context that won't establish new, isolated contexts. The consequence:

- As a follower, you'll be exposed to every interaction in communities you aren't part of and may even dislike. Options to curate your feed are there, but not reliable or too severe.

- As a poster, you're lead to believe that all interactions work like outside of social media. You make posts intended for specific audiences while acting within the global context, allowing your posts to "escape containent". This leads to responses that feel intrusive and inappropriate.

As I said above, reality doesn't work like that at all. It's extremely rare for you to know every single aspect of someone and likewise to share all of your aspects with someone.
On social media, however, it's an all-or-nothing deal.

This results in conflicts following the same pattern over and over again. Followers are annoyed because they keep seeing posts bothering them with no good means to fix it, and posters are annoyed because strangers keep barging in and telling them what to do.
Once you know about this pattern, you will notice it all the time.

For example, on the fediverse, a user from an insect-themed instance once expressed his fristration at people telling them to put photographs behind a content warning. From their perspective, this doesn't make sense because they specifically joined this instance to be among like-minded people. It would be absurd to hide photographs primarily intended for other enthusiasts. And why care about outsiders you didn't invite in the first place?
However, it's true that these posts can easily reach people with a phobia of insects. Just one repost by someone they follow is enough.

Needless to say that no side in these conflicts is objectively wrong.
Each community has a different set of rules and conventions so that certain behaviors can be acceptable in some places, but not in others.
This works fine outside of the microblogging sphere, but here, communities are just a vague construct living in the global context where all of these rules and conventions clash. And because a "correct use" can't even be determined, it's impossible to come up with consistent social measures.

This situation is a complete mess.

## Appendix 1: Feed curation features and their flaws

Lists are subfeeds capturing posts by specific people. Unfortunately, lists ingest all posts by their members, so they share all of the same problems as the main feed, limiting their use.

Tag filters require appropriate and consistent use of tags by others. On a platform where tags are optional and nobody enforces their proper use, this is simply not happening.

Keyword filters can match posts that are actually fine while also missing posts that aren't. Sometimes it's outright impossible to find useful keywords, and they won't work for media-only posts either.

Muting or blocking is the nuclear option. It's the most reliable in terms of getting rid of unwanted content, but it also isolates you from people and conversations you may care about. It's like cutting friends out of your life over the smallest of disagreements.

Volpeon

@volpeon@icy.wyvern.rip

1y

@neia It's a WebP image and I think WebP is basically just a single-frame WebM video file, so that makes sense in a strange way

Volpeon

@volpeon@icy.wyvern.rip

1y

@IceWolf They're logical properties. For instance, block-size usually stands for height, but depending on some language settings it can also mean width.

Volpeon

@volpeon@icy.wyvern.rip

1y

I figured out how to implement a footer that's also at the bottom of the viewport if the page isn't tall enough:

html {
    min-block-size: 100%;
    display: flex;
}

body {
    inline-size: 100%;
}

.footer {
    position: sticky;
    inset-block-start: 100%;
}

Volpeon

@volpeon@icy.wyvern.rip

1y

@nytpu I want to see life's manager

Volpeon

@volpeon@icy.wyvern.rip

1y

Intel survey about AI usage
"Many AI users spend a long time identifying how best to communicate with AI tools to get the desired answers or response"

Maybe don't make everything a chat bot? It's not a matter of education (like Intel implies), it's just that regular user interfaces show you immediately what's possible at all times, and chat interfaces don't. You wanted "natural" interactions, and that's what you get.

Volpeon

@volpeon@icy.wyvern.rip

1y

@vel

Volpeon

@volpeon@icy.wyvern.rip

1y

I've been browsing it for inspiration for my own website and it does give you cool ideas! But the CPU-intensive animations, scrolljacking, and outright incomprehensible UI patterns? Don't even think about doing that.

Volpeon

@volpeon@icy.wyvern.rip

1y

If your website ends up on Awwwards, that's not a good thing (if you care about it being actually usable)

Volpeon

@volpeon@icy.wyvern.rip

1y

I don't know what's going on inside the Firefox developers' heads, but the viewport dev tool has become utterly pointless. It now zooms most websites instead of changing the layout. Who needs this? The viewport tool is explicitly there for testing how the layout changes. Resizing the whole fucking browser is more useful now than this nonsense.

Volpeon

@volpeon@icy.wyvern.rip

1y

A story

Volpeon

@volpeon@icy.wyvern.rip

1y

@vel