[antigonemerlin]

You're absolutely right. I think the problem is that connecting everyone to everyone is a mistake. As John Oliver (I think, I can't find the source of the original quote now), puts it, "Facebook is the Walmart of social media." Yes, everyone and your mom is on there... but that means every post is going to be seen by your mother. That is frankly, terrifying.

Building on your analogy, it'd be like if in the real world your local pub mates and your business friends met. These are two different communities that most certainly cannot be welded into a single forum.

>I suspect (maybe hope?) we are going to start seeing organic social start happening as groups start trying to increasingly assert their own identities and moderation policies that are incompatible with a global standard.

I think this is exactly what you're seeing. Of all the different social media models, personally, it's reddit and discord that won out for me, along with a smattering of more niche like Hacker News and the discussions page on Github.

You can't and shouldn't build a community that satisfies everybody.

[charcircuit]

>but that means every post is going to be seen by your mother

This is solved by people just make another profile to keep it separate. It is okay not to add your mother on your hobby account.

>These are two different communities that most certainly cannot be welded into a single forum.

But sites like Facebook are not just a single forum. Each group can be it's own community. People can keep two discussions separate.

>You can't and shouldn't build a community that satisfies everybody.

I don't think this is impossible. It is hard to scale a community to billions of people, but large social media sites are an existence proof that it is possible. Though at that scale it is more of a meta community compared to smaller subcommunities that are made which are more comfortable for humans to interact with.

I don't think it's impossible to find a set of rules that a billion people would be willing to agree to.

[mattgreenrocks]

> I don't think this is impossible. It is hard to scale a community to billions of people, but large social media sites are an existence proof that it is possible.

Large social media sites are a pale shadow of an actual community. These sites love to throw that word around to get you to sign up, then act like properly moderating their sites to actually feel like a community is impossible.

[tsimionescu]

> This is solved by people just make another profile to keep it separate. It is okay not to add your mother on your hobby account.

Note that Facebook and many other social media sites go out of their way to prevent the same person having two accounts. It is against their terms of service, and they do try to enforce it in various ways.

[Dah00n]

I doubt you could even get English and American communities to agree let alone Chinese and Swedes. A lot of what we see is steered by extremely Americanised morality and laws. As a Dane it feels off and I'm sure for people from China, India, and other places very different than here it must feel even more so.

A "baseline" where, as mentioned above, misogynistic, racist behaviour isn't allowed sounds easy. But is it though? You take what Nazis and racists have said for ages and put "Russian" instead of their victim of choice and suddenly most Americans will agree that's fine behaviour "because Ukraine".

How about age limits, alcohol, sex? Hell, even Americans couldn't agree on a baseline in those.

I don't know if you're American but as I said I'm not and the internet has teached me how to behave as one online to not be caught in strange Americanised moderation rules. That's not agreement but enforcement that's caused this and if asked I would vote No to those rules.

[virtuous_sloth]

Google circles FTW

[smazga]

Everybody likes to laugh at google+, but circles were the most intuitive and useful abstract for sorting social groups that I have ever used.