Friends in the Fediverse: Are Mutual Follows Enough for Fulfilling People’s Desire to Connect?

Convener: Gilles Dutilh (@DePemig@social.coop)

Notes

• GD: Twitter and Instagram have a directed graph, Facebook and LinkedIn have an undirected, bidirectional graph

  • Twitter and Instagram have the almost exact same set of rules, mostly enabling broadcasting

  • LinkedIn and Facebook have a different but also almost exactly equal set of rule, where, on top of the broadcasting model, there are connections

• EP: we could enhance the Follow flow with something that says we are mutual, or have a different flow

  • https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#connections

• BP: we have some overlapping ideas:

  • groups of connections

  • endorsements

  • mutual follows

• EP: type of relationship: sister, colleague, friend

  • group of relationship: colleagues from Microsoft, colleagues from Wikimedia, friends from college, friends from Montreal

• BP: can have good relationships on LinkedIn

• GD: networks are closed and are characterized separately: the words “facebook” signals the type of relation in “facebook friend”. This kind of “fenced garden”-label is just absent in the fediverse. Someone you connect to may understand the relation you have different then you, because they are on a different platform (e.g., Mastodon vs Friendica)

• EP: Does the Fediverse want the intimacy of bidirectional relationships

• BP: We have different personas in different contexts, you can make those choices

• ZS: Different instances can have different social norms, do instances fulfill that role?

• JB: Development of friendships/relationships is such a complex thing to navigate and IRL it’s often wordless, based on behaviours. We struggle online because we don’t have equivalent unspoken ways of recognising a relationship

• https://profile.stone-soup.ca/johannab Fediprofile as an example of a way of representing identity across fediverse platforms, one aggregated feed and really cool badges for engagement with different fediverse things

• BP has worked on an FEP describing levels of trust. This would allow, e.g., Person A is trusted by someone you trust. Or: Person B is a third-level trustee of yours.

• GD: Still, such trusts may be interpreted differently across platforms.

• A person in discussion who remains anonymous noted that friendships do not necessarily need to be defined as in well-known bog-tech socials (e.g., facebook), as a static two-way connection. Instead, in real life, relationships are dinamic and depend on the frequency and quality of our interactions.

• JM: perhaps we should loop in some sociologists to delineate the various types and qualities of relationships, in the ways it’s relevant here.