@scottjenson Or maybe this is all already possible, and I just have never heard, seen, or been told about it ever! With big enough software, you never know.

@scottjenson A potential solution (with a probably huge cost that makes it impossible to achieve), is to essentially have the data of each user saved to the federated server they are on, but have extremely easy to use connections and timelines that folks can set up between them.

For example, so that while there are 2 major game development servers, we both subscribe to the same 'timeline', on which we then all see our posts, and share our posts. But our account data is saved to separate servers

@scottjenson Just thinking out loud here, so this may be incorrect:

I think the 'federated' part is technically very neat, and resolve the potential issue of yet another social media service dying out, which Mastodon cannot do as it is FOSS. As long as someone wants it to exist, it will exist.

But, I think federation was incorrectly used as part of the user experience, rather than the technical lifeline it should have stayed. Thus creating echo chambers by default, and rough onboarding UX

@scottjenson Similarly, if I do find someone on a different server who I would like to follow, this is sometimes easy and I can just hit 'follow'. Other times, it immediately asks me to write out my full mastodon server account, which I do not even know what it is, because when I am logged in all I see is '@RYStorm', not 'mastodon.gamedev.place/@rystorm', if that is even what I need to type out

So the technical ability of the federation is neat, the UX to make it not an echo chamber is missing

@scottjenson Sure: I use the 'deck' view of mastodon. I have a home column, a local timeline column, and a notifications column.

I do not have a simple + button on the right side of these columns to then add more columns such as timelines from other servers. I know there is another gamedev server out there, and I would like to read their posts too. And I would like for them to read mine. But there is no way for either of us to easily do that, so we just stay blind and confined.

@scottjenson @carnage4life To be clear here, I am unhappy with both Mastodon and Bluesky, but they are both the best options out of all available. I wrote about Bluesky's issues here: https://bsky.app/profile/rystorm.com/post/3lq2n5oahs22y

@scottjenson @carnage4life Bluesky on the other hand resolves this (partially) with its starter packs. The user experience being that you essentially subscribe to 'sections of interest' (e.g. as if federated, but technically not so), but still see the overall system of all posts from anyone ever, if you would like to.

@scottjenson @carnage4life I do not think it is becoming an echo chamber as much as it was literally built to be one. We're all on these separate federations, and only if you put particular effort into it do you see posts from other federations.

I bet if I posted to mastodon.social, I would get more traction on some of my posts. But also, I would not be able to have any kind of readable local timeline.

I bet I could manually edit a deck together for both but... even I don't, because UX.