yeah, i guess i can see that. personally i never really grokked goodreads but honestly I feel that way about most social media platforms so its definitely a me issue

I’m curious, what would a federated IMDB add to the experience for you?

it only serves to bias us and disort reality.

Ehh, i mean it definitely does do that, but political discussion is also important to guide action. We can see plenty of political action that gets nowhere and does nothing, because the people instigating it do not have a solid theory of how political change is accomplished. Political discussions are how that understanding emerges.

That being said the internet, especially platforms like mastodon that encourage short posts, is rarely the best place for productive political discussion.

There is a powerful network effect to overcome here, and I don’t think “being federated” is enough to overcome it for most people. Reddit and tumblr and discord offered us “what if all your forums/blogs/chatrooms were in one place” which is massively convenient, and why people flocked to those platforms. Thats a transformative user experience. being federated is transformative, but the change to the user experience – beyond a larger barrier to entry – is minimal. The point of mastodon is that its functionally equivalent to twitter without being centralized. But there are no decentralized places left on the internet, beyond those holdouts who are either very attached to their old technology or want to maintain their unilateral control over their platform, and who are unlikely to federate.