Thinking About Online Communities
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.
Want more?
So you've read this post and you're still not satisfied? Ok then, here's some other stuff for you to do: