Hi {name},

What does it look like to imagine the fediverse as a digital space? 

A website like jointhefediverse.net imagines the fediverse as a central place, with various different types of software platforms such as Mastodon or PeerTube functioning as access providers to that space. An illustration on the website makes this understanding visually clear: the fediverse is the central point (the purple circle) to which all software connects, and through which the data flows. 

You could also tell a different story about the fediverse: it is not a single place at all, instead it is a collection of many places, which are all (mostly) connected with each other. Each fediverse server is its own social network, its own digital space, with its own identity and culture. The fediverse here consists of some 25000 spaces.

I think both views are true, and both views are useful in the right context. The first view, the fediverse as a central space, is mostly correct from the perspective of how a regular person perceives the fediverse when they log in. A user logs into Mastodon and sees posts from many different places, all presented into one single feed. This is the fediverse to the user: one social network that just has a wider variety of software support.

The second view, the fediverse as a collection of independent spaces, is more correct from a technical perspective. At its core is the fediverse a collection of different softwares running on different computers that are all their own little social media sites. These sites might talk with each other using an open protocol, but the core building block of the fediverse is the server.

It is this double view of the fediverse that leads to interesting challenges on how to talk about the fediverse. Tim Chambers wrote a 2-article series about "Seven Deadly Fediverse UX Sins" recently, which lead to quite some discourse and conversation on the fediverse. In part two, published this week, Chambers suggested ways on how the fediverse UX could be improved. The challenges that this two different understandings of the fediverse bring is quite visible in the article.

One of the suggestions by Chambers is to build an onboarding system with the goal of making it as simple as possible for people to join the fediverse. The idea is to skip the step of selecting a server to join, as that decision gets made under the hood semi-randomly for the user. Joining a server is confusing for many people, as it asks the person to make a choice that is impactful without clearly explaining how their choice will impact them. The idea here is that there is a curated set of servers that are trustworthy, and a new person gets randomly assigned to one of the servers to join.

This proposal fits well with the understanding of the fediverse as a single central space, where servers are portals to access that central space. It is hard to chose the right portal to access the fediverse, so the goal make it easier by doing the portal selection for the user.

From the perspective of the fediverse as a collection of independent spaces the proposal fits less well. In this view, fediverse servers should be different and separate. If a bunch of fediverse servers are similar enough that it does not actually matter if a new person joins server A or server B, why have separate servers at all anyway? If spaces are interchangeable, why not treat them as the same space instead? Servers often want to be their own spaces with their own culture and policies, but treating the servers as functionally the same for new people is to minimise what makes each server unique.

But the view of the fediverse as a single central space also runs into another problem that this proposal brings to light. As there is no central actor who has a say over onboarding to the fediverse, there is no way to actually make the "onboarding easier". It is of course possible to provide another onboarding experience that exists next to other ways to join the fediverse, and have that new experience be easier. But such a system can only exist in addition, and as a result, also increases complicity in a manner: someone looking to join the fediverse has to choose between joining a server directly and joining via an onboarding tool.

All this is not to say that this is thus not worth it and we shouldn't bother building onboarding tools. There is clear value in helping people make choices when it comes to joining the fediverse. Choosing the right server is a difficult process, as it asks people to choose between a large variety of options without having all the right information needed to make that option. It is also often unclear for people on what grounds they should determine which server is a good fit for them. Onboarding tools can help with that, and the system that Chambers proposed can help facilitate the process. But I also think it's worth asking the question: what fediverse is the tool helping people onboard to? A fediverse that is a place with many portals to access the network? Or a fediverse that is a collection of many places?

Thanks for reading, and until next week!