@grin

Ok, by the numbers. 😀

1. Yes.

2. Well, your "village" will and someone may decide to share it with their friends, who would share it with theirs and so on.

3. Actually not, because of #1 & #2 -- my exposition to external news is limited and filtered through people who share content. So my contacts (on the mutual basis) are my content curators.

4. I would rather think that users are not interested in back-end. Front-end integration is what an average user experience. As for having it or not, there are platforms that are designed for it (#hubzilla and, while crudely, #friendica) and those that are not. And people choose according to their diversity of needs.

5. You sound vague here. In #fediverse, the abuse and inappropriate content is handled at the instance level. Rules are defined and enforced there. If an instance is perceived (by others) as a regular and intentional source of inappropriate content, it simply gets ostracized through blacklisting. Police-wise, it only concerns the instance, where the content is generated. No central choke point, no problem.

6. The question is open indeed, and interesting. I hope to live long enough to see it becoming a practical problem. As for now, do not think it will, for three reasons:

6.1. The majority of users will still be happy with centralized and AI-driven media. Simply because of carefully crafted habit/addiction.

6.2. I do not expect celebrities to be very much into fediverse, exactly because it is not suitable for their kind of PR.

6.3. Finally, my frame of reference assumes that we are experiencing the All-crisis and within next decade or two we will see Internet "Balkanized". Even having 200 million users will then mean that they will mostly communicate in local/regional clusters, with global communication ratio dropping.

This is, BTW, the reason why I am also working on various topics related to #NetCommons and low-power/low-speed networking for local communities.

999. I respect your perspective, even if I do not share it.

@Petros Kanenas Outis Polonos Thanks for the reply. I try to react.

2. My problem is the huge gap between theory and practice. In theory the mass of people re-share stuff and it become "global", while in practice people only echo their opinion #bubbles which leads to more segmentation, not less. #Global streams would have the positive effect of multitude points of views.

3. Yes, the question is moot when there is no way to pull information, only to subscribe and wait for it to be "pushed" (while I know the pull/push analogy isn't true, but the results are like that). If there was a way to follow thousands of people it became a problem. (Happened to me on #Diaspora where some people were moderate in the beginning then they started to push dozens of posts daily. I had to unsubscribe, since there was no way to auto-prioritise them.)

4. That is, again, just the theory of possibility. There is no such #UI existing, and most of the "AP" services aren't pure AP, and they need specific UI features. I do not see any system trying to get them together. Users can't use a system planned to be started to be written in the non-specific future. The system is capable but it's not been done anywhere.

5. This does not work in reality and does not scale in practice. Admins have different thresholds of rejection and different speed of reaction, and instance admins don't have the granularity to handle this: they either accept high level of abuse or reject whole instances with huge amounts of users. Apart from that there are no useful admin tools or coordination around despite the network exists for quite long time now.

6.1 You are biased against #Facebook and this makes you ignore the possibility that people actually find the feature useful. Automatic filtering and prioritising is not a demon to be killed, indeed it's being used in open systems all the time. (My peertube would be filled to the rim with porn and fake news without it.) Trending_whatever is the same "AI", used even in mastodon.

6.2 This is a limited viewpoint. #Celebs need viewers and when there are enough people they start using a service. When paid services are expensive for them or they get restricted (like maximal hits or traffic amount) they may move over somewhere else.
What is true, however, that they actually earn money from the business structure of those services provided by these companies, and they are not incentivised to do it for free, unless there's some feasible micropayment connected to it. There exists no such thing as of now, and the "not so feasible" payment operators are closed source and scattered all over.

6.3 I respect your perspective, even if I do not share it. 😉
But indeed local/regional communities will became more and more important. It's just AP does not seem to be the fitting format for it.

It seems everyone critically underestimates the importance of UI design.
Open source is often not worse, it just looks worse.

There is a point in gathering money for people to
1. find the fitting technology
2. integrate them
3. create an attractive, easy to use, featureful UI [to replace whatever $$$ service you want to]

I run plenty of public services and I am not satisfied with their UI. Most of them was designed by programmers, not UI designers, graphics people, usability experts. It shows. I still gladly provide the resources to make them running but without the pleasurable UI they will never attract the masses. It is wrong to think people use Facebook only to purposefully enslave themselves: it is a carefully designed, and redesigned, mainly usability driven interface. They waste huge amounts of wealth to design it that way, and indeed: it's a good method to keep their users.

That is my theory.