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That's a way of adapting the fundamentally public design of the Twitterlikes to be like a listserv.

I'm not convinced that this is where we should be starting if creating a 21st century listserv-alike is the goal. You're taking a technology that was fundamentally conceived of in a "push-to-public" mindset and trying to fit it into a "push-to-the-group" mindset.



> You're taking a technology that was fundamentally conceived of in a "push-to-public" mindset and trying to fit it into a "push-to-the-group" mindset.

The benefit is you get to create one account that you can use in many groups/circles, while still posting things to the public and interacting with random users who are not in any of your groups.

It's like an inverted WhatsApp - the difference being that Whatsapp is private by default, and doesn't allow you to post to the "public". It also lacks features (e.g. threading).


> The benefit is you get to create one account that you can use in many groups/circles

Like an email address!

More seriously, fair point about the comparison to Whatsapp. But that gets at why I think this is the wrong direction to start from.

My gut instinct is that if you want what I think people want, then neither Twitterlikes nor Whatsapp/Telegramlikes are where to start (they do, however, serve as a series of lessons in UX and much more).


> Like an email address!

Except I cannot send an email to the whole world, as I angrily learned after switching to email from BBS's ;-)

Also, there is a reason every explanation of Mastodon says something to the effect of "your handle is like an email address - it's tied to a provider" :-)


But email addresses are not inextricably tied to a provider at all.

Mine - paul@linuxaudiosystems.com or paul@ardour.org - have no relationship to whoever handles my email.

The fact that everybody got conned/tricked/was too lazy to NOT use @gmail.com doesn't really change that fact.

By contrast, Mastodon handles are truly tied to a server.

As for sending email to the whole world, let me know how to toot to the whole world, I'd like know :)


> But email addresses are not inextricably tied to a provider at all.

Details, details. They are for 99% of people on the planet :-)

> As for sending email to the whole world, let me know how to toot to the whole world, I'd like know.

You send a toot, and anyone in the world can see it. Sure, it doesn't show up in their inbox, but email doesn't have an equivalent.


If a toot lands in a forest, and nobody hears it, did it actually land? :)


Now that Twitter doesn't let anyone see anything without being logged in, the concept of a "anyone can read, a permissioned few can interact" is growing on me. I still find useful information from listservs archived on Google groups, if we can keep something like that going for the next century we'll be better off than the timeline where everything happens in a discord or slack, and when it's gone it's gone.




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