Only close friends and family, no companies and bots, chronologic feed and mass adoption. I know this isn't features, but the problem with social media is not the lack of features.
Definitely, you should connect to your family and friends, but there should also be a way to connect to strangers. I guess you would want to find people who shares your values, and maybe even those who don't. But if you are talking to strangers, you'd want to know that the normal decorum we keep in face to face conversations would be respected online.
But definitely no companies or bots or addictive feeds or status chasing.
I think numbers should be done away with when it comes to upvotes, it feeds the ego too much, and we judge too quickly. Instead maybe use concepts like hot and cold, or some other relative qualitative measure. The system could use numbers behind the scenes, but they shouldn't be visible to the user.
I like the idea that one person pays to set something up for their friends and family. No way am I going to get my mother-in-law to pay for something, but something like the Discord model could be great.
On Mastodon (or X) I still have the problem of putting together a persona for a feed: I am interested in photography (posting photos I take but also stuff about gear, technique and other people’s photos), anime, decarbonization, political science, sports, nature, science, software development, and some other things. (What I don’t do is as important as what I do do but is not a visible, you haven’t seen me call any crypto enthusiasts “blockheads” on this site for months because I find other people’s name-calling on Mastodon offensive and I want to be consistent.)
I definitely worry that people who might follow me because they like what I say about decarbonization might not want to get spammed with anime and sports in their feed, I felt my identity was really fragmented when I set out, it feels cohesive to me but what do other people think?
I do not see the way people think chronological feeds are so wholesome, when boosting or retweets get involved they measure vitality instead of predicting it and if you build a “discover” feed of “most boosted” you will get posts with an image with some provocative text (e.g. you’d think pride month was about pissing people off, not having pride…)
One reason I quit using the iOS Mastodon client was I could not turn off a very angry “explore” feed that didn’t respect my user blocks and keyword filters.
Two complaints people have about Mastodon arem (1) unreliable stats about visibility (keeps brands away like garlic keeps vampires away) and (2) insufficient discovery for new users (didn’t bother me, it was just like Twitter at the very beginning.)
I can't agree with that. I signed up for social media to keep in touch with friends and family, not listen to the crazed rants of their distance acquaintances and marketers. By the time I left, all the actual organic friends and family content was buried by the mountains of irrelevant spam.
I'd totally pay for a service that's limited to only people I care about and know. I can get my outside engagement elsewhere. I want an intimate space, not a town square.