this post was submitted on 01 May 2023
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I respectfully disagree with some of your points. The benefit of a Twitter clone that is federated (or more precisely, a Twitter clone that supports activityPub) is that the users of said Twitter clone can see content from and interact with users who aren't on said clone, but another platform that supports activityPub. And conversely, I can see content from said Twitter clone without necessarily having to be on it, as long as I use some activityPub platform that fits my taste.
This provides a lot more choices. I can choose a platform with the best user experience for my taste, without any regard to privacy and moderation. That would be completely fine. Conversely, another person may choose to search for an instance based on their specific moderation, topics, privacy, or other preferences. Another person may even self host their own instance. All of those can interact with each other, and that is what makes it nice.
Sure. I'm a big fan of federation. However, I switched to Mastodon (the ActivityPub application) because I liked its style better than Twitter. Turning Mastodon into Twitter to attract a larger audience and placate the complainers isn't necessarily what everyone wants. Just my personal view on this. But it honestly doesn't bother me that much.
The signup/moderation issue feels somewhat similar. Yeah, it would be way more Twitter-like if signup defaulted to Mastodon.social and that mega-instance hired a content moderation team to rival a professional social media site. But that's not quite what I think is currently good about Mastodon and Fedi...
On that part, I do agree with you. I do not like mastodon just because I'm not a huge fan of the micro-blogging-focused user experience, but I do agree that there's value in a platform not imitating Twitter but having some of the UX. Likewise, I think that there is value in another platform that would attract Twitter users. I think it could just be a separate mastodon instance that is modified to fit said user base.