> Reader died because people were switching to social media.
Which especially sucks, because its friend-of-a-friend model for making comments visible on shared items was better for discovering interesting people, constructively limiting the social impact of popular posts, reducing the dangers of unintentionally poor posts, and disincentivizing trolling than any social network has implemented since.
For the few people who even knew Reader had a social network—a group which certainly didn't include Google—it was a better social network than any of the ones credited with killing it.
I think it was just as much that the people who wrote blogs were switching to writing in the walled gardens of social media as it was the consumers. But yeah, I greatly prefer the days of blogs and RSS readers.
Now you have Substack and Medium and such, which are pretty decent.
The Fediverse is a bit like that. Anyone can post replies on things, but they don't spread through the whole network, only to people who are following the replier, and people on the replier's server, and the person who posted the thing being replied to.
It doesn’t seem to work quite like that. I don’t know the technical details, but I definitely see replies from people I don’t follow, from other instances, on posts of people I don’t follow on different (again) instances from mine and the replies.
Perhaps it could be that I’m seeing replies from people that others on my instance follow? Or perhaps there’s some other mechanism to fetch replies.
Probably that. Actually if your server receives the reply for any reason, it displays it, usually. There isn't a mechanism to fetch replies, so this is a kind of accidental filtering, while ATproto is the opposite and tries to make everything globally visible.
I use my own server with only me, so it only receives replies because I'm following the person who replied or their whole-server feed.
Which especially sucks, because its friend-of-a-friend model for making comments visible on shared items was better for discovering interesting people, constructively limiting the social impact of popular posts, reducing the dangers of unintentionally poor posts, and disincentivizing trolling than any social network has implemented since.
For the few people who even knew Reader had a social network—a group which certainly didn't include Google—it was a better social network than any of the ones credited with killing it.