Among the many problems with modern social media there is the incentive to create engagement at any cost and the bad and toxic culture it nourishes. Federated social media such as gotosocial and pleroma put the user in control of content curation, which in practice leads to no algorithm and raw feeds. A step in the right direction but still not perfect, as one can attest by spending 5 minutes on them. For some time now I’ve had in the back of my mind that maybe the problem is more fundamental, something intrinsic to social media and perhaps web forums.
Dunbar’s number or layers is an hypothesis with some supporting evidence asserting that there is a biological limit to how many people one can maintain stable relationships with. It was first hypothesized by Robin Dunbar who observed a correlation between primate brain sizes and the social groups they formed. The layers are:
- 5 people are your close circle, those are family and very close friends;
- 10 additional people are cousins and close friends, for a total of 15 people;
- 35 additional people are normal friends, for a total of 50 people;
- 100 additional people are individuals you can claim to know somewhat, not just their names, for a total of 150 people.
Those 150 people are everyone you could claim to have any meaningful relationship with, your “tribe”. After that it’s only people you know of.
Incorporating Dunbar’s numbers into federated social media could lead to an healthier user experience. Having well defined Dunbar layers could help with feelings of social isolation and being overwhelmed by a stream of content. All controlled by the user, not imposed by some benevolent algorithm.
When I left fedi in 2019 there was nothing like this, only local and federated timelines. I was pleased to discover that mastodon now has lists and that my server of choice, gotosocial, is looking into implementing them. I think pleroma has some kind of group functionality too but I haven’t used it in many years.