Anti-goals

Aside from the set of goals that nbsp aims to achieve, there are also a set of anti-goals nbsp aims to not achieve.

Mass appeal/adoption

nbsp will deliberately be designed against mass appeal and against mass adoption.

It is not the intention that nbsp will replace any social media platforms as they exist today or in the future. Instead nbsp will be designed to let admins carefully control their community’s growth, the interface will not be designed for maximum interaction, and users will be encouraged to spend less time engaging with the website.

People thrive when they are a part of other spaces as well, being the one-stop shop is not the way.

A mobile app

There will not be an “official” mobile app for nbsp.

Primarily because I have exactly zero experience with mobile development (though it would be fun to learn). Secondarily because I’d like to make the web interface as good to use on mobile as any app could be.

The reason for “official” being in scare quotes is that third-party apps will always be possible to be made by anyone with enough motivation. A structured API is not yet in the plans for nbsp but should there be a need for it by third-party app developers then that’s something that could be looked into.

Federation

nbsp will not implement federation.

It is my understanding that the federation protocols that exist today are both complex to implement correctly from a software perspective and also complex to administer from a server hosting perspective. Either of these things are enough of a downside to federation to not support it, but combined they make it clear I don’t want to head in its direction.

Besides the technological challenges, there is also the social impact that federation adds. Connecting many different instances together comes with a large burden on admins and moderators to keep the peace between all the instances.

Maintaining a healthy community requires, among other things, having a good grasp on who is let in to the community and kicking out those who cause issues. Implementing federation makes this significantly more difficult.