Annalee Newitz 🍜May 7, 2023

Based on two unscientific polls I conducted here, people's biggest fears about the future of the Fediverse are: 1) volunteer moderator burnout; 2) too much defederation causes fragmentation; 3) people are driven away by racism; and 4) Mastodon.social gets too big.

Here are the polls:
https://wandering.shop/@annaleen/110318754714238485
https://wandering.shop/@annaleen/110318806416458197

Annalee Newitz 🍜 (@[email protected])

What is your biggest worry about the future of the Fediverse? [ ] mastodon.social gets too big [ ] Tumblr federates & sells ads against Masto content [ ] Bluesky [ ] too much defederation causes fragmentation

The Wandering Shop
Show threaddr2chaseMay 7, 2023
@annaleen
I fear that 4 choices is too few for a poll. Like, will we run out of bits if we let people have 12? This is open source software, you'd think that we (while still not implementing quote-post) would get our choice of voting systems for our polls (approval, ranked choice, range, ...) and a choice limit of something like 16.
Show threadAnnalee Newitz 🍜May 7, 2023
@dr2chase sure that seems like something you should implement
Show threadllewellyMay 7, 2023
@annaleen @dr2chase
I don't know the specifics, but there is other fediverse-compatible software out there that allows polls with more than 4 options. I don't think the 4 option limit is part of the the ActivityPub protocol; it's just a mastdon-specific limit.
Show threadGreg Scallan 
@llewelly @annaleen @dr2chase It's Mastodon specific. I changed the limit on flipboard.social to 14 and it seems to work well. Here is an example use I did for what was everyones favourite Star Wars movie.
May 7, 2023 at 11:10amWeb
Show threadllewellyMay 7, 2023
@greg @annaleen @dr2chase
Thank you for the confirmation. That's rather what I expected.
Show threaddr2chaseMay 7, 2023
@greg @llewelly @annaleen and "Multiple choices" is approval voting, so why was I complaining? Stupid me. Sure wish they'd bump the default up, though, what's the point of tiny polls?
Show threadllewellyMay 7, 2023

@dr2chase @greg @annaleen
I don't know.

Mathematically, if the choices are set to exclusive (the default), having more than 2 choices results in spoiler effects, making polls with 3 or more choices unfair in some sense. If the choices are set to allow multiple selections (can be done with a click in mastodon), you can get false ties. But for non-serious polls, neither of these issues really matters, and for serious polls, mastodon shouldn't be used anyway, for a thousand other reasons.

Show threaddr2chaseMay 7, 2023

@llewelly @greg @annaleen I'm not sure "false ties" are really a problem, and approval voting is robust otherwise. We could get range voting with a 0-1 slider instead of a check box or radio button, that would be amusing.

And of course not serious voting on mastodon, but I'd love to get people thinking, sometimes. Also might be amusing to map range voting onto other voting systems to demonstrate how outcomes might (not?) change.

Show threadllewellyMay 7, 2023

@dr2chase @greg @annaleen
I don't know if false ties is anything other than a mathematical issue.

I would like range voting with a slider, and the ability to map range voting onto other systems sure would be nice. But it's not that important to me.

Thank you for bringing these things up.