Hmmm … seems my response from mastodon didn’t federate (sighs) …
copy-pasted (sorry, for whoever federation did work, this is likely making things worse):
Personally, I’m there with you I think. I only use default web-UIs on all fediverse platforms I’ve used, and advocate for that.
But should multi-protocol systems and multi-platform clients become normalised, I think this goes beyond “to app or not to app”. What I’m talking about could likely just be a web-app.
The issue is more around aggregation and creating something “greater than the sum of its parts” out of open alt-social.
A useful lens I find is whether a social media system is good at creating, facilitating and hosting genuine communities.
Alt-social right now is struggling with this I think and, IMO, has plenty of room to grow in this regard.
The difficulty though is that it requires more features in our platforms, some likely non-trivial. That’s a big ask for an open non-profit ecosystem.
An effective means of aggregating multiple parts into a unified view could alleviate this.
To go on about it … I don’t think the browser does much at all. Unified feeds and notifications, with helpful filtering, sorting and organisation? Helpful account management? Making it easy to cross-post or copy across platforms or protocols?
Why have an RSS Feed reader if you could just visit each of the web pages individually? Obviously one can, but the feed reader is still useful.
While I think I understand where you’re coming from, I fear it’s coming from a position of habit and app fatigue rather than from a general consideration of what could work well on alt-social (where my position is that it isn’t really working well enough (yet)).