Table of Contents
Learning openweb behaviour
The huge influx of people from the #twittermigration did not go well for our fluffy spiky debate project at the #OMN. About 80% of the sign-up are dormant. 90% of those left are off-topic for a grassroots, direct action instance.
People should self-select an instance based on it's subject - in our case activism and campaigning - they did not, for various reasons. Perhaps it is confusing that some instances are general-purpose, or maybe people are just too used to centralisation.
The mass movement away from twitter is a great thing, we all have some learning to do if we are to make something better.
Time to reorganise
The #modteam are going to spend a few weeks talking to active people on the instance, asking off-topic accounts to move to other instances (see the-federation) - there are over 4000, covering every different subject to choose from.
If it looks like a better fit, we will also ask some accounts to move to our other instance at https://campaign.openworlds.info. A few of you have already been asked to move here; think only one has made the effort so far.
For those that move, we recommend instances that have a maximum of a few hundred to a thousand members, so you can help build a functional local community. Don't forget, the fediverse is flexible - small instances still give you full access to all other instances (via the global timeline), unless the instance actively chooses to isolate others or themselves.
Mastodon itself facilitates moving between instances: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#migration
Reach out to #modteam if you have any questions.
Warning
If nothing changes in a few weeks we will have to remove a few thousand accounts that are dormant and/or off-topic. If you have an opinion on this, please tell us what you think we should do.
Further federate
If there are techies among you, who are on-topic and are able to setup and/or host an instance yourselves, reach out to us and we will advise or help however we can.
A deeper look
Activism and Campaign were set up to bridge the "fluffy" and "spiky" sides of a strong social challenge community which is generally referred to as "activists".
A core problem grew from this divide; there is too much in-fighting which prevents both aspects of the larger community from progressing in their positive efforts. We believe that by providing separate spaces for both forms of discourse and behaviour, they can more easily thrive, focussing their energy where it's needed and actually getting shit done. By having both as sister instances within the fediverse, they remain able to communicate with each other, but hopefully in such a way as to lessen or ideally prevent the debilitating in-fighting. Campaign represents the "fluffy" side and is suited toward NGO's, ... Activism represents the "spiky" side and is more for the protest camp, direct action crew, the people in these videos http://visionon.tv.
Our intentions have always been to run small subject-specific instances - we are not a more general instance like mastodon.social. We aim to build strong and focussed communities of 500-800 active people, so stay if you would like to be a part of this. Ideally, the growth period would be a time to discuss how to further add more instances to scale horizontally.
Over recent years, the line has been thoroughly blurred between campaigns and direct action. When we say "spiky", the closest example we have in the present day (western world) is XR, or at least groups within it.