Post #2308172

@imacrea@mamot.fr In many ways, the Fediverse reminds me about some of the things I loved about Usenet, but that I didn't realize until years after I'd lost them. I won't say that there's no one here posting performatively, mostly because I know I've done it too. But it has never dominated here the way it has elsewhere. Usenet lacked the ability to follow people, so you had to simply watch for them to say something. Between that and the slower propagation of posts, it rewarded us for saying something interesting and finding people with something interesting to say. It was accidental or coincidental. It took the rise of social media to show me, slowly, that much of what made it great was what it didn't do. And Usenet was federated. It took the Fediverse to show me that that was a feature. It wasn't automatically identifiable by a set of tropes of how social media and engagement worked. It was neither a hero nor an antihero because we didn't yet have a social media shorthand for those. Yet there were people filling the role of good-hearted sidekicks, talking about netiquette, and being the touchstones of what they wanted in the world around them. It's tempting to say the Fediverse is an antihero in this analogy. But it isn't. It isn't the deliberate addition of flaws to throw the good within it into sharper relief. It isn't even the underdog in the sense of tropes. Part of what it eschews are the mechanisms that support the tropes. Perhaps the best analogy is that where the rest of social media arrives to be a blockbuster franchise, the Fediverse is a thousand indie bookstores. There are treasures in each, waiting to be found and discussed, person to person.