Random social media musings
I'm seeing some posts in my timeline by people who are fed up with the Mozilla drama, and I get it. Microblogging and this "we YOLO everything into a global context" is shit. It's pure and utter garbage that makes it impossible to avoid things that annoy you.I kept mentioning forums lately because I'm on some kind of nostalgia trip, and if you're expecting me to say that they didn't have this problem, then you'd be absolutely right. HOWEVER, they do have disadvantages.
What makes microblogging so enticing is the way lower friction. You can just post whatever comes to your mind, and that's it. I don't think you could lower the barrier any further since it's already lying on the ground.
The reason why it was easier to avoid unwanted topics on forums is that they had structure. Structure that's completely missing on here. We have hashtags at best, but they're too ad-hoc to be of much use and they won't fix the "everything is global" thing.
How could microblogging be fixed? I'm not sure. The fact of the matter is that any attempt to add structure means pushing up the barrier, and people are amazingly resistant to improvements if they mean extra work. If we add the ability to have multiple timelines, you can be sure a lot of people will set up just one called "everything lmao" and defeat the whole purpose.
Structuring in forums only worked because there was a staff to firmly enforce it, but the volume of posts with microblogging is orders of magnitude higher. We can't expect moderators to look at every single post and make sure it has the right metadata. So what could even be done?