If PieFed is so great at replacing chatrooms (like Discord), why are we on zulip and Matrix?
I asked this as a rhetorical question, and then I realised the answer, at least for Me. Chatrooms are harder to miss information on than forums. And PieFed does have a feature to address that, which is that you can make a community notify you of all new posts. But the trouble is, chatrooms do better at getting others’ attention, because not everyone sets a community to notify on all new posts.
Which is why I have a new feature suggestion: a setting community moderators can toggle that makes all new subscribers automatically ring the notification bell. They can still turn it off if they like, but by default, it’s on. For communities where the usual way to engage is that everyone sees every post.
Oh no, please, not more spam. I don’t need notifications, for anything.
I will look at communities when I have time to read and write replies, not when the buzzing rectangle in my pocket tells me to.
The only notifications I have on is for phone calls, even that not all the time.
Also, those notifications are what makes traditional “social” media addictive (among other things), we should not do that, for ethical reasons. We know that it has mental health effects and causes other issues.
The time of people matters. Having people get info unless they opt out is a dark pattern.
I wonder how many health effects this would cause for many people.