Speak of G+, I personally really love the idea: You have a personal space to post private stuff, you can set permission on who can read and who can't, and beyond that, G+ supports group where it functions like a forum where you can do your forum stuff and meet new people (Yeah... just like Facebook).
However, the implementation was rather poor. It's slow to load (under my network), it's unfriendly for long contents, it's almost impossible to have detailed discussions, and you still need multiple accounts to separate your personal and professional profile (Just like... you know, Facebook).
I'm not actively using Mastodon, but I'm a fan of their general idea where they're trying to let the information to flow from one site to another. However, if I got it right, Mastodon is trying to be "(just) another Twitter" if you look beyond the aspect of decentralization.
Now, if I put my Hat of Imagination on, personally, I think what the Internet really need, is a place/service/network where people can gather, explore and then got inspired. Those "web 1.0" forums are designed to do exactly that. So if it was me who's designing these kind of system:
- I'll put discussions related features as the utmost priority, and follower&following comes the second or third
- Not just a "forum-like" flat page discussions, I mean a structured discussions that lets you trace all conversations to figure out "Why we're talking about this now?" quickly and allows you to filter out "non-important" replies, that's the core of the system
- The "Twitter-ish" feature can be build on top of that discussion system
- I'll make it so everybody can host the system. You can put it on a 128MB memory router for you and your family, or a cluster of servers to provide service for the public, all the same good experience
- The systems exchanges data automatically between sites based on user interactions and follows etc. That also means the user can read contents from remote sites all on their local site.
I made heavy use of G+, circles and whatnot. It was genuinely a pretty decent experience. And there's quite a few more people on there than you'd expect.
However, the implementation was rather poor. It's slow to load (under my network), it's unfriendly for long contents, it's almost impossible to have detailed discussions, and you still need multiple accounts to separate your personal and professional profile (Just like... you know, Facebook).
I'm not actively using Mastodon, but I'm a fan of their general idea where they're trying to let the information to flow from one site to another. However, if I got it right, Mastodon is trying to be "(just) another Twitter" if you look beyond the aspect of decentralization.
Now, if I put my Hat of Imagination on, personally, I think what the Internet really need, is a place/service/network where people can gather, explore and then got inspired. Those "web 1.0" forums are designed to do exactly that. So if it was me who's designing these kind of system:
- I'll put discussions related features as the utmost priority, and follower&following comes the second or third
- Not just a "forum-like" flat page discussions, I mean a structured discussions that lets you trace all conversations to figure out "Why we're talking about this now?" quickly and allows you to filter out "non-important" replies, that's the core of the system
- The "Twitter-ish" feature can be build on top of that discussion system
- I'll make it so everybody can host the system. You can put it on a 128MB memory router for you and your family, or a cluster of servers to provide service for the public, all the same good experience
- The systems exchanges data automatically between sites based on user interactions and follows etc. That also means the user can read contents from remote sites all on their local site.