The “groups are bad” commonplace is well established, and it makes sense. Groups that serve to circulate misinformation and disinformation are quite obviously bad for any number of reasons. But is it “groups” that are bad? Or is the problem a set of social media companies that conceive of groups as singular, disconnected spheres? My sense is that it’s the latter.
The federated model allows for groups, but it also allows for those groups to decide together how they are connected to other groups. This is clearly not the focus of the Facebook model (or of Discord and others, at least as far as I can tell).
But it’s worth pausing over the “groups are bad” commonplace in order to think about what implementation of groups might actually be good. Groups allow marginalized groups protection (among other things), so insisting that they automatically lead to misinformation/disinformation, echo chambers, etc. is not the whole picture.
