I've been thinking about online communities a lot lately, and had an idea about a new Masto instance, but maybe it wasn't such a good idea?

I've been ruminating on what the perfect online community looks like for months. Does the perfect online community actually exist? What are we currently doing wrong? What do we do well? How can we fix them?

Thinking back to the what I consider was the glory days of Fosstodon; it was when the instance was much smaller. I could peruse the local timeline without being overwhelmed, and along the way, discover a new person or 2 to follow.

They were fun times.

Because of this, I've been thinking about starting a new Mastodon instance that would try to emulate those early days a little bit. It would be:

• A general instance (no topic in mind)
• Be limited to a maximum of 500 users
• Require a subscription of around $1-2/month to join

I've been thinking about this a lot. So much so that back in April, I registered the domain 500.social. After talking with Manu about it recently too, I decided to post the idea to Fosstodon last night:

The feedback

True to form, the fediverse community stepped up and gave a lot of great feedback. Some of the recurring themes were:

• A niche would be better than a generalist instance as it's more likely to pull people together
• Many people have already found their home on the fedi, so they probably wouldn't be motivated to join
• In principle it's a good idea, but there's no guarantee that by keeping things small would equate to a strong community feel

This is all great feedback and I agree with it all. Of the few hundred people who have voted so far, only 10% have said they would actually join. That's fine - 500 people is the maximum, not the target. If it ended up being 50 people, that would be great too.

As for the niche, if I were to choose a niche it would be very loose. More like a guiding principle than anything else. Maybe a general tech niche (but certainly not limited to tech), or possibly around blogging and the IndieWeb.

I think there's a lot of food for thought here, and I need to keep stewing on it. Overall, I don't think it would be too painful to give this thing a try.

I dunno, what do you think?

I wanted to end with a quick note about Fosstodon - this whole idea is totally separate from Fosstodon. I love what Mike and I have built with Fosstodon, but I personally think it's too big. If I do decide to go ahead with this idea, nothing would change with Fosstodon.

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I’m gonna keep this brief as you need to click that link above. This post is absolutely brilliant - Sara’s parody is fantastic in its own right, but then Robb and Keenan come along to turn it into a video.

Go there now!

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I have a love hate relationship with social media. In some respects it's great, but in others it's a nightmare. I'm wondering if I could give up social media entirely...

I've made no secret of the fact that I've struggled with social media in the past and I've taken some steps to try and make my social media experience a little more pleasant. But I dunno, social media is still a bit...shit.

It's full of politics, hot takes, and lots of other stuff that I don't wanna see. But here's the rub; it's also full of interesting posts from people that I do wanna see.

It's a quandary.

I envy people like Manu and Nicolas, who have just fucked social media off all together.

I'd love to be able to do the same, but I think I'd miss it. As much as I hate to admit it, I would miss it. I enjoy the daily interactions I have with cool people on Mastodon.

I don't enjoy having to deal with the troves of dickheads, however. But I think that's par for the course for any space where lots of people congregate. I'm under no illusion that many people would read what I post and think I'm one of those dick heads.

Everyone is a dickhead to someone. :)

Having thought about whether or not I could give up social media, I think it's the wrong question.

Yes, I could give it up. But would I want to give it up? Right now, the answer to that question is "no".

What about you; could/would you give up social media?

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