Christina WarrenIt really does feel like 2007/2008 Apple Twitter right now and I love it.
Joe Fabisevich 
@film_girl It really does, but this time around we all get how the service works. There are real benefits to the platform growing and it staying small but a big part of me hopes it stays on the smaller side this time around. 🥲
Shantini@mergesort @film_girl unfortunately I think diversity is suffering at these current numbers
@shantini @mergesort for sure. Small is good but small can be too much do an echo chamber too. It’s that weird fine line between too small and too big, you know?
@film_girl @shantini I definitely agree about diversity, but one thing that's been a little different about Mastodon for me is that I think of it as *a* place in my life, not *the* place in my life. I'm worried about losing many voices in the conversation, but the freedom from having one singular place to try and find it (in a very flawed manner) has allowed me the space to go seek those voices elsewhere, places which may [or may not] be better suited to let nuances come across.
@mergesort @film_girl alternative take: the cognitive load of having to find separate places for diverse content and tech content is pretty destructive to a person who is brown and in tech. It’s isolating. I feel isolated.
@shantini @mergesort that’s very fair and I’m very sorry you feel isolated. That’s not OK and we don’t want any place to be a place that isolates people. That’s why I ultimately hope we do see a more centralized normie approach to this that can bring in more diverse groups. But be interoperable with the other communities who want to interoperate.
@mergesort @film_girl but also, not everyone is going to try as hard as you! A big barrier to people being anti-racist is the amount of effort one has to put in.
@shantini @film_girl I very much get that, and was actually having the same conversation with a friend tonight about how we miss a lot of what #BlackTwitter brought. I don't think there's a good answer here that would suit anyone or everyone, it's a series of tradeoffs. The things that made Twitter feel vibrant are also what led to very toxic dynamics, and the absence of them can lead to people feeling isolated. My long bet is on the open internet breaking down barriers, but… that's long.
@mergesort @film_girl I mean, yeah. Mastodon is a new, relatively untested thing and black people especially have had some bad moderation experiences. I think this is a really complex issue that we don’t have enough data about to figure out how to fix. But in the meantime, when people call out how much they prefer this place it’s hard not to ask the tough questions, such as is do people enjoy it because it’s very class- and race-limited.
@shantini @mergesort for sure. I definitely don’t “prefer” this place — but my Twitter experience is so degraded b/c of technical debt/bad decisions, I’m personally hedging my bets and being in both places.
@film_girl @mergesort why has all this technology only given us two options, is the real question
@shantini @film_girl I don't think it really has though. That's why I mentioned the open web, I'm a big RSS person, Tumblr is an amazing place for many underrepresented folks, etc. I think my question is subtly different, why don't we generally have the imagination to think of something that isn't one big space of ideas and debates when only 15 years ago we only had these decentralized means of spreading ideas. Making that better *for all kinds of people* seems like the best path to success IMO.
@shantini @film_girl Yeah, that's totally fair. There are a lot of reasons to enjoy it (it's small, it's novel, etc), but you're not wrong that there are questions about diversity. I've explicitly noticed how much less diverse my feed is here, and I'm hoping over time it changes, but the other dynamics (quote tweet, no algorithmic timeline affecting chronological users like me, etc) timeline are really what I'm enjoying. https://macaw.social/@mergesort/109656093466389033
Joe Fabisevich :verified: (@[email protected])
A very cool thing about Mastodon is that I’m not constantly seeing the dumbest of debates like “is SwiftUI production ready?” I didn’t even use the algorithmic timeline, but since those tweets performed well the algorithm would rank those tweets highly and inject them into the timeline of anyone I followed who used the algorithmic timeline. Then the people I followed would tweet their own takes, which meant I was constantly being bombarded with the dumbest of takes even though I used Tweetbot.
Michael Brown@shantini @mergesort @film_girl this post makes some very valid and uncomfortable (for me) points: https://momentum.medium.com/fleeing-twitter-the-twexodus-is-about-white-liberal-fragility-3631cb2ac317
@mergesort @shantini yeah, I think a good lesson for me is to be more judicious with the time I spend on one place, as high said.