People are Starter Packs

[mradcliffe@nokoto.org]

I think that my comment on GitHub that Group Actors acting as Starter Packs really comes from how I approach my social network.

I rely on my friends and peers to discover new topics and meet new people.

Friends and peers as Starter Packs work great on a small microblog instance like Mastodon, Misskey, or Sharkey because the federated feed/bubble lists topics written by the amazing people that they are following. This approach is ideal for small instances, but flagship, large and relayed instances make it much harder as the topics are much too diverse. 

When a small instance I was part of shutdown, I was really at a loss because I relied heavily on that feature without following people myself i.e. I'm lazy. And so to figure out who to follow, I went back to my peers’ and friends’ following Collection. Note to self, I need to remember to continually discover more people from people I follow now that I am on my own single-actor instance.

This is why I come to the conclusion that people are Starter Packs. Or in other words, Actors are Starter Packs. And more specifically, anyone or thing with a publicly-available following Collection is a Starter Pack. 

But making a public directory of everyone is not a good idea and discoverability is hard.

Starter Packs should be (Group) Actors because

• Consent is built-in with the Follow Accept/Reject.
  • People that want to explicitly allow followers already have this option.
  • Implementations should use Mastodon’s discoverability property to also limit who a Starter Pack may follow.
• Revoking consent is mostly built-in with either Remove Follow, Block Undo, or Reject Follow.
• Discoverability is built-in:
  • The following Collection is available.
  • Group Actors can make posts when their following Collection is updated.
  • Amazing UX designers can make the following Collection more usable in their software.
• Starter Packs that are used in bad faith can be defederated like any other bad faith Actor or instance.
• The barrier to implementation is much lower than tacking on anything new to the specification.

[julian@activitypub.space]

mradcliffe@nokoto.org apart from the technical details, this approach also is extremely easy to explain to laypeople.

"Follow who this person follows" :heavy_check_mark:

[mradcliffe@nokoto.org]

Thank you, @julian.

One thing I am concerned about is how that affects forums and communities.

But then I think, so what if a NodeBB forum or PieFed community wanted to highlight people because those people represented the values of that community (even if they were not necessarily a part of it)?

This is something that no forum software that I am aware of does because we always think of forums as only something we join into.

And it is so amazing to me that the FediVerse and the social web movement could provide a forum or group the opportunity to grow in the opposite direction—sending people outwards for new shared experiences.