One of the main features of Darius Kazemi's Hometown, a fork of Mastodon from 2019, is that it allows "local only posting". This gives the users an option to post their content only with a small, limited group of people instead of spreading it widely outside of their social group. In addition to helping to tummel a smaller conversation this also prevents those who are more likely to suffer from context collapse of the groups social norms from engaging and potentially souring the conversation.

This feature could also be well leveraged for small private classroom conversations between teachers and students without leaking their personal/private data or conversations that ought to be small as they learn.

Could also be fun to limit the level of federation to the level of an academic department, academic discipline, or even a university. How might one define a group or groups of publics within Mastodon so that one could choose a level at which to share their content?

Tunçgenç, B., Zein, M. E., Sulik, J., Newson, M., Zhao, Y., Dezecache, G., & Deroy, O. (n.d.). Social influence matters: We follow pandemic guidelines most when our close circle does. British Journal of Psychology, n/a(n/a). https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12491

Je parle avec mon ami.

(Note: it says "walking with" but should say "talking with" -- might've been fixed by the time you read this!)

maa -- me.

ngiy -- I am.

waxtaan v. -- conversation, chat, interview. 💬

ak -- and, with.

sama -- my.

xarit bi -- part of a split set; friend. 👯

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQiWG98Bsys

Fowler, J. H., & Christakis, N. A. (2008). Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network: Longitudinal analysis over 20 years in the Framingham Heart Study. BMJ, 337, a2338. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.a2338

Hickok, A., Kureh, Y., Brooks, H. Z., Feng, M., & Porter, M. A. (2021). A Bounded-Confidence Model of Opinion Dynamics on Hypergraphs. ArXiv:2102.06825 [Nlin, Physics:Physics]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2102.06825

Fareri, Dominic S., Joanne Stasiak, and Peter Sokol-Hessner. ‘Choosing for Another: Social Context Changes Dissociable Computational Mechanisms of Risky Decision-Making’, 21 September 2020. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dr42a.

Scott, S., Rivera, K., Rushing, E., Manczak, E., Rozek, C. S., & Doom, J. (2020). “I hate this”: A qualitative analysis of adolescents’ self-reported challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/4ctb7

Chambon, M., Dalege, J., Elberse, J., & van Harreveld, F. (2020). A psychological network approach to factors related to preventive behaviors during pandemics: A European COVID-19 study [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/es45v

It's interesting to see how FB incorporates the asymetry that other social networks (like twitter, tumblr, Instagram, et al) started with. You can see how the initial symmetrical relationships (born in large part within the metaphors of "friending" as Brown mentions here) determined a certain kind of future for FB.

It's fascinating to see FB try to work against that initial framing to redefine its ethos/habitat.