kechpaja on Nostr: Increasingly, I don't think social networks based on _friending_ are or ever were a ...

Increasingly, I don't think social networks based on _friending_ are or ever were a good idea.

As always, this isn't a technical issue so much as a social one. People don't just have "friends" in the generic sense — they have multiple different circles, sometimes overlapping and sometimes not, composed of people whom they feel widely different levels of closeness to. Trying to collapse all of these relationships down into a single "friend" category is a gross oversimplification.

Instead, a combination of following and access controls makes for a more flexible social network platform that takes into account the real-world complexity of human communities. With following, you still get bilateral, balanced relationships if you want them (= mutuals), but you also have the option of building an _audience_ on the same account without extra work.

Similarly, the ability to restrict the visibity of a post to a certain set of users lets you keep your circes separate. Mastodon really isn't there yet on this (the best you can do is "DM" a set of tagged users), but we at least _know how to do it_.

I'm not sure where else I'm going with this, other than that I'm glad not to be on Facebook anymore.

#SocialNetworks #community #Mastodon