Agree. Instances are well-suited to smaller communities of people, but the idea of a broader town square with people that are sufficiently different from us I think requires rethinking the medium a bit. What we have doesn't cut it, and we keep assuming clunky and sometimes counterproductive tools like blocking (or blocking instances) are going to fix it this time.
For a town square product we need to build from the assumption of it not being small community, which I think is unlike how twitterlike products are designed today. That requires encoding different conventions & assumptions of how we interact into the product, because we've brought a UI (the tweet/reply box) that assumes familiarity with the people we're talking to, when there likely is none.
Something I've been doing as a hobby is putting together different ideas for how to improve this medium, and especially around this problem. We're squeezing the expansiveness of human beliefs and behaviors through tiny little tweet-shaped holes, and a lot is getting lost.
For a town square product we need to build from the assumption of it not being small community, which I think is unlike how twitterlike products are designed today. That requires encoding different conventions & assumptions of how we interact into the product, because we've brought a UI (the tweet/reply box) that assumes familiarity with the people we're talking to, when there likely is none.
Something I've been doing as a hobby is putting together different ideas for how to improve this medium, and especially around this problem. We're squeezing the expansiveness of human beliefs and behaviors through tiny little tweet-shaped holes, and a lot is getting lost.