Link: John Gruber Doesn’t Know What He’s Talking About. Good to see Gruber being challenged over this kind of fairly common, wrong-headed interpretation of the fediverse.

@leonp Tilley really nailed it, in a number of ways. I don't expect Gruber — or much of his audience, or any of his same-thinking friends — to understand the ways in which he is wrong. Not that I think it's important to change the minds of people who are so fully set in their ways.

@SimonWoods A lot of these criticisms of the fediverse really belie a lack of imagination, or even their satisfaction with the centralised, for-profit foundations of Facebook, Twitter et al.

@leonp Really like the article, and I think it articulates its point of view beautifully. And it’s one I have a huge amount of sympathy for.

Really hate the hed, though. The piece doesn’t really nail Gruber on any points of fact. They just have dramatically different points of view.

@adders Yes, although judging by the interest the link got on Mastodon, it worked :-)

I dunno. They maybe disagree enough to warrant the headline: they’re both opinion pieces, after all.

@leonp I just have a professional interest in weaning the world off clickbait heds. And that was certainly one.

@adders Fair enough, I get what you’re saying, and yes it was.

I think there’s a fair amount of (justified) frustration in the fediverse at people like Gruber ponitificating over things they don’t really understand, or refusing (or simply being unable) to view the fediverse through anything but the lense of west coast tech (it won’t scale, users don’t care about decentralisation, why don’t you want 2.3bn new users?). Because of this, I think it was justified.

But yeah, it’s also clickbait.

@leonp While I understand that, I also understand that expecting everyone else to see things through the current set of priorities and focuses of the fediverse community is also a problem.

And I wonder if some people are confusing “average user perspective” with “Silicon Valley perspective”. I think an awful lot of average users are pissed off with Silicon Valley right now, but some of the opportunity to capitalise on that is being missed because of the UX issues that really need fixing in the fediverse world.

@adders Yes, that is true. I’ve been thinking about this very “the UX is terrible” problem for a while.

I think there’s a conflation of the UX being poor (which it absolutely is when it comes to, say, boosting someone else’s toot using the Mastodon web app) and a kind of passivity that Twitter, Facebook etc. engender (which I’d maybe term frictionlessness).

Valuing that frictionlessness means you value what big social media offers: the fediverse requires a bit more agency. Centralised Social media makes “average users”.

Another part of it is that the fediverse is meant to consist of lots of small, independent nodes, which does make it more difficult to communicate. To use a flippant cliché: that’s a feature, not a bug.

Like I say, I am thinking this through and it may not make any sense at the mo!

@JohnPhilpin cool, I didn’t know Gruber was on here. I suspect there’s already been plenty of debate over it 😄

Interesting where micro.blog sits in this, which I don’t think is seen as a “failure” in the way, say, Mastodon is (which is quite right: it’s not).

@leonp I think ‘on here’ is strong … not regular .. but has an account and has thrown in a comment or two on occasions.