Really hoping that proliferation of instances will lead, in time, to divergence in modeling (at the software level) the parameters of "community" and sociality.
GNU Social/Mastodon shares features with SMTP, IRC, Usenet (surprised not to have seen that mentioned by others), with BBS networks before that, and even such antiquated systems as postal newspaper exchanges. In this history, "social media" giants are distinct only in their resort to centralization.
The organizing model is unchanged.
What GNU Social/Mastodon may afford is a decoupling of network application from network effect. In particular, Mastodon builds on the network effects set down by GNU Social, in the same way that gmail and MS Outlook build on the network effects of SMTP.
This means that the network application instances can diverge, in how they model and render the underlying network, how they integrate and leverage tools and tooling, so to present different use cases for participants.
@dgdas9 There are two points here. First, in what way are the social networks in one instance totally different from the social networks in another? I would suggest both fundamentally build on the same underlying model of universal addressability, for instance.
Second, consider how you can *do* email in one application versus another. Gmail categories and Outlook calendering offer markedly different experiences of message flow. Granted, underlying models were not challenged, yet they diverge.
@beadsland Let's pick a few social networks, such as Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook. I don't know of the constraints of GNU Social, but I'd make an uninformed guess that it'd be able to 'copy' all of these platforms in an acceptable way. And, while these networks build on the fundamentals of human interaction, they are very different in nature.
Email is not. The core product, the paradigm of email communication, is fundamentally the same across apps, though I'm not very knowledgeable here.
@dgdas9 I agree, all three networks you name could be emulated over GNU Social, just as Twitter already has somewhat been in the form of Mastodon. Facebook would be the most divergent, as it would require degrees of separation to be incorporated into the model, but it could be done.
The reason such emulation would be possible is that these three platforms are, at their core, very similar in nature. Not that they build on fundamentals of human interaction, but on a shared model of sociality.
@dgdas9 Likewise, the core of email is not a "paradigm of email communication". Rather, SMTP via TCP/IP recapitulates models that were first developed by pre-industrial societies to successfully transport letters and packages across geographic distances.
Email was not a new paradigm, it is merely a new implementation of pre-existing network and transport models—only abstracted and formalized by OSI and CCITT (i.e., Open Systems Interconnection), very late in the game, historically speaking.
"You do you" is Eu-gen-ics.
David Gravanita