Unlisted, an imaginary social network with no lists & no followers, but rather interests & associations

Social Experience Design 🎭 Human Web
#1

Unlisted has been an imaginary social network I re-consider occasionally. My opinion is that numbers and lists are bad in social contexts. Number of followers is rarely important. A list of followers is by far more useful for surveillance than any end-user story.

Do you manage your followers? I barely do. I don’t want to. I want to show up in social contexts where something these people say could be interesting to me, and/or something I say could be interesting to some of them. That’s it. Lists seem like a really poor tool for this.

Yes those people had been saying interesting things at the time they were added, but if you take that bit of info and think how else you could use it, you’d probably try to find content similar to that content, and you’d probably track the whole network engaged in that conversation, not just the one, and you’d probably include people who joined after you left or left before you joined. Lists don’t do any of this, they just create busy work.

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#2

On numbers, I have been experimenting with hiding interaction counts on Mastodon feeds. The results have been promising for me. I feel less inclined to pay attention to “hot”/“viral”, less “FOMO” effect, too. It feels essential in the feed-driven social networking to reduce informational overload and overstimulation. In the words of Christine Lemmer-Webber: “We are drowning in the contents.”

Let’s look at multiple scenarios where follower management might be of use:

Dealing with harassment/witch-hunting

A follower gets a constant stream of your posts. That means they are able to interact with them as quickly as possible. People would like to have control over that. For example, on Bluesky, if you block a person they are still part of your followers list. Giving them a way to exercise antisocial behaviour on your expense.

Privacy

Preferences vary. Boundaries vary in many ways as well. The follow model has a mode to post to followers only. Making them have special access to content. Being able to manage that list, whether through an allowlist or a blocklist, would be an important control to achieve this.

But to your main point: I do believe that the ‘follow’ model needs to be revised and not replicated in every social interface. Some have had their takes, including more recently Bonfire’s boundaries. There is ample room for flexible models and for purposeful ways we can shape relationships that do not necessitate a “follower” unequal relationship (could be appropriate in some situations, but shouldn’t be the default.)

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#3

A follower gets a constant stream of your posts. That means they are able to interact with them as quickly as possible. People would like to have control over that.

Yes, control is important, but I want a less individualistic method for moderating bad behavior, between the moderator role and the individual block list. (Perhaps without doing away with those functions entirely, if they are truly needed.)

In this age, there is a lot of history and research into filtering, categorization, and targeting (even before “AI”, needless to mention it). I think these tools can be delivered to users in a unified interface under personal control, in such a way that daily socializers may shape their experience extensively, and also new or periodically transient socializers may quickly adopt a presence in the social web that suits the context and nature of their needs and intentions.

This is the main point I want to emphasize: An ideal social platform shouldn’t turn into an in-club. New and old socializers should both feel like they are at home on the social web. In fact, I think the necessity of investment in a profile and following inexorably produces a game of social influence that, at worst, turns a community toxic, and at best, eventually results in an echo chamber of originals.

The alternative requires eliminating functionality in social software that looks like collecting, cultivating, and pruning. Binary operations like follow/unfollow and blocking or muting need to be replaced with continuous functions of attraction and repulsion that may be applied broadly to all kinds of activities, and quickly balanced for the moment.

That said, what someone could then save and collect are the ways they tune the parameters of those attractive and repulsive formulae. If they find good conversations with the right people, they could bookmark their settings and “go back there” to find the same kind of people (maybe the same people) having the same kinds of conversations, if they are around, or try to start it up again.

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