Pondering the idea of native Mastodon groups; CW: long (over 2,300 characters), Fediverse meta, Mastodon vs non-Mastodon Fediverse meta
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About time that Mastodon introduces groups. That'd be the only way to actually discuss stuff with Mastodon users.
Sure, Mastodon users can discuss in groups already, namely on Guppe, Firefish, Lemmy, /kbin, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams)... But seriously, the vast majority of Mastodon users never looks beyond Mastodon. They don't know that discussion groups/forums exist outside of Mastodon, or if they do, they find them too cumbersome and inconvenient to join because they can't do that with one click or tap. And not few don't even know that there's a Fediverse beyond Mastodon.
On the other hand, if there were Mastodon groups, they'd probably be populated by 99.9% Mastodon users, so there wouldn't be any insight from non-Mastodon users. Especially the users of projects that have their own group/forum functionality would be absent because they wouldn't need Mastodon to join a group. So next to nobody would even have a vague idea what the Fediverse outside of Mastodon is like. If I wrote about what things are like on Hubzilla, for example, that'd be totally unimaginable for most users. And I'd constantly be fighting "Fediverse = Mastodon" windmills.
So it's actually about time that
groups started becoming compatible to one another and federating across the Fediverse, along with Mastodon introducing that feature. Just imagine your Mastodon app listing Lemmy communities, /kbin magazines and Hubzilla forums next to Mastodon groups. But not even Lemmy and /kbin are really sufficiently compatible with one another yet. These two are too different from Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams). And Mastodon is probably going to re-invent the wheel and intentionally make its own groups incompatible with everything else out there.
P.S.: The reason why this post is so long is because I had a lot to say. And it didn't matter anymore. I had a nice draft with 499 characters. Then I realised I needed a whole bunch of extra hashtags for those who use them to filter out any Fediverse meta discussions. And as I had to go over 500 characters anyway, there was no reason to limit myself.
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