How many social network accounts should a person have?
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Evan Prodromoureplied to Aaron Lord :csharp: last edited by
@devlord why
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@etherdiver why's that? Do you really believe that managing 100 different accounts, say, is good for people?
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Evan Prodromoureplied to Johnydon :TheCDN3: he/him last edited by
@Johny28 I made a new FAQ page for you.
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Evan Prodromoureplied to Evan Prodromou last edited by
So, first of all, people got *really* hung up on the word "should" here. I added the question to my poll FAQ: https://evanp.me/pollfaq/#should
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Evan Prodromoureplied to Evan Prodromou last edited by
So, on to number of accounts. First, I think the idea that each person should have one account per social network service is bullshit. I should be able to follow people on any social network from whatever account I currently use.
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Evan Prodromoureplied to Evan Prodromou last edited by
Second, it's also broken to have one social network account per type of content shared (images, video, audio, documents, ...). We've had social networks that can handle different kinds of content since the mid 2000s. Segmenting networks on content is also bullshit.
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Evan Prodromoureplied to Evan Prodromou last edited by
So, I lean toward having just one account. However, I recognize that with other communications media, like email, we tend to have a small number of accounts: one personal, one for work or school, then a couple of throwaways for dating or selling furniture on Craigslist. I think with the roles a person can have a small number, like 2-5, makes the most sense.
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Evan Prodromoureplied to Evan Prodromou last edited by
Some people suggested having different accounts for different topics you post about -- music, tech, family, etc. I think this is better handled with addressable lists (send this post to my close friends and family, this one to my electric car friends, this one to my Linux friends, ...). More generally, hashtags can manage this, too. So, I don't think you need different accounts for different topics, unless you need to be able to disavow any connection to the topic (e.g. political or sexual).
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Michael Bishop ☕replied to Evan Prodromou last edited by
@evan we need a better way to buy and sell than Craigslist or Marketplace that is part of the Fediverse.
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Matthew Boothreplied to Evan Prodromou last edited by
@evan This is my main problem with Pixelfed and Peeryube. What I suspect I really want is different operating modes for my Mastodon client.
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Evan Prodromoureplied to Michael Bishop ☕ last edited by
@MichaelBishop Agreed! I wrote about this in my ActivityPub book.
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@evan hashtags don't work very well at preventing flooding friends' feeds with things they aren't interested in.
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@evan This is the exact use case for why I set up this account. It turned out, the thousand or so followers on my "main" account aren't interested in esoteric posts about Tottenham Hotspur, and with there being no algorithm, I felt it better to create a separate account I could post "freely" on.
Using (guppe) groups works quite well when added to a list and excluded from main timeline. Can't add hashtags to lists, though.
Would love smthg like the old Google+ Circles if you remember those?
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@lakelady Our friends need to be nicer and more supportive about things we are interested in.
That said, having addressable lists (Diaspora* aspects, Google+ circles, Facebook friend lists) means you can proactively select just a few people to share with.
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Evan Prodromoureplied to Matthew Booth last edited by
@mattb Agreed. Support for the ActivityPub API in more of our fediverse platforms would make this kind of interaction easier.
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@evan Women and queer people often have to worry about safety, this is another very important reason we sometimes choose anonymity to avoid making ourselves easy to track and abuse. I think a lot of cis men still underestimate the amount of quite extreme abuse the rest of us can be subjected to online and how that can easily move offline if we're easily identifiable.
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@fifilamoura Agreed! I think personal safety is a big reason to keep separate accounts. I wonder how many more accounts make sense in that scenario, though. 1? 10? 100?
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@evan I also quite like the idea of hashtag contexts. So you switch into, say, gardening context and all your posts have a user-defined set of hashtags automatically added until you switch context again. Very useful for current events (e.g. a sports match) in particular where it is easy to forget to add your hashtags.
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BeAware :fediverse:replied to hallenbeck last edited by
@hallenbeck @evan I've been wanting something like this ever since I joined Fedi.
I've been begging third party app makers for a "Hashtag Drawer" where I could save a group of hashtags or even individual hashtags to the composer for easy re-use.
Your suggestion seems very close to that.
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Tom Casavantreplied to BeAware :fediverse: last edited by
@BeAware @hallenbeck @evan I was thinking about building something like that client-side for NFL content. So it shows you all the current games and you click on one and it's just a feed of people using some predefined hashtags for each team. Then when you send a message to the feed it just appends the hashtags to your post