Fediverse and parasocial relationships

  • Shouldn’t the fediverse discourage patterns that create parasocial relationships?

  • Wouldn’t it be better if the standard was a symmetrical relationship between users instead of the asymmetrical follow model?

  • Most big social medias thrive on parasocial-relations, is it necessary to emulate that model for success?

  • Shouldn’t we focus on community building and mutual friendship instead of forcing everyone to be a mini-celebrity?

  • Aren’t communities/groups better for discoverability than the public feeds of mastodon, pleroma,etc

  • smallcirclesM
    6•3 years ago

    I had to look up parasocial relationship, but I strongly agree with your points. Though in some cases the follower / following relationships may be needed, it presents a very poor basis for rich social interaction online.

    For some time I am advocating for an ActivityPub extension that allows for social networks that are more representative to the complex social interactions we have in the real world. I call it the “Community has no Boundary” paradigm, and it basically allows application designers the ability to define Groups with arbitrary relationships to other Actors.

    It is just a vocabulary extension, and optional. Can be part of a growing pattern library of building blocks for federated apps. With a Community concept in place one can model additional functionality on top, e.g. Moderation or Governance, etc.

    Here’s a draft model that depicts the idea:

    Conceptual model of Community: Group actor has a Collection of Relationship objects to other Actors