My experience so far here is not terribly different from Twitter, to be honest. I'm here because most of the people I care about moved. But a substantial fraction of my mentions are people interpreting my every word as uncharitably as possible and telling me what an awful person I must be.
When blocking them gets too exhausting, I'll probably just drop off, and you'll have to tell me how awful I am via email or USPS. In person by appointment only,
It's entirely possible this is happening because, in fact, I'm really awful, and people are simply reacting to my awfulness. In which case, I'm sorry I'm ruining this place for you, and I'll try to do better.
But really, I think it's scale. At peak, I had about 90K followers on Twitter. Here I already have about 12.5K. At that scale, people want you to fit their expectations.
That said, the Nazis and election crazies aren't here (yet), and that's really nice.
Just to be clear: While I appreciate your support (*blush*), I know that there are people who enjoy what I have to say - and I enjoy interacting with you, too! And I also have friends in real life.
I'm just trying to explain what the experience here looks like from my end, and the ways it's a bit broken for me.
I don’t think that it’s bad that there’s a tension between “what was” and the expectations of the influx of new users. This is how things evolve.
One can’t want an existing open, federated social media experience to win out against closed systems without answering the question “if network effects draw more people here, what does that mean?”
Time will tell.
@mattblaze Well I always appreciate what you have to say.
Mastodon feels like a fleet of vast empty spaceships that millions of people fled to from a war-torn planet. The ships are apparently running on automatic but nobody’s managed to get into the ships’ respective bridges yet to find out for sure. So we just walk around like dazed refugees, trying to figure out who’s here, communicating with people on other ships, looking for things to do, and wondering where we’re all headed.
Matt Blaze
Bill Plein🌶
blurbfly
Brian Dear
Disappeared News
𝐁𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐆𝐮𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐢
Patsy Macpherson
Eli Rivera 🍉