i think, if anything at all, we should be looking at this as the marginal difference between toxic user experience design and healthier approaches and mindsets about use. and how small that gap is.

it's like taking massive amounts of anabolic steroids and other performance enhancing drugs for years, and then realizing it only gave you a tiny bump in performance. like... sure, it effected a statistically significant difference, but could we POSSIBLY justify the amount money we spent on drugs?

@ali
Mastodon look and feel is based on Twitter and it might have accidentally copied some of their shady tricks.

But people are great anyway.l!

@ali
It's the people. Just that.

I say this as someone with a patchy social media history... Meaning I hate that shit unless it's FOSS. All in on #diaspora back in the day, but #NeverTwitter, never a #Qwitter ... That shit was noise and embedded links on real news sites for me. Usually ignored, because it's Twitter, and that devalues the opinion and makes me question whether it's really "news".

I don't trust corporate social media. Period.

@ali

I find being on this platform very relaxing, the opposite of twitter. I spend less time on here, but enjoy it far more.

It actually doesn't matter how many people are joining or leaving various instances, because it's not run for profit, no one's getting fat off trying to get you to stay.

Our society has so few ways of measuring success, other than wealth/greed or status/power, so I suspect that this is what is happening in the media, simply put, they just don't understand what is happening unless it's in terms of something/someone beating someone/something else, or someone getting rich off the backs of exploiting others.

Sad, but this is the world we live in.

@ali

This.

But tbf, Mastodon et. al. probably *do* incorporate elements of Twitter's UX just by osmosis. Everyone knows Twitter's UI so well that they naturally clone elements of it just because it seems like the obvious thing to do.

@ali the problem I see is lack of sufficient critical mass. Only some of my friends are on Mastodon and I am a bleeding edge adopter for tech.

The mistake here is to see these processes in a fatalistic way as if nothing can change them. The Web didn't just happen because everyone thought it was great, we spent a great deal of time thinking about adoption strategy.

Whitehouse.gov didn't just happen, we pushed Gore's people to look at the Web as the means of delivering his Information Superhighway. And we did that because I had seen how the IBM PC legitimized the micro-computer.

We have to look at how to extend Mastodon and make it 'sticky'. One way to do that in my view is functionality that integrates legacy Web Forums into the Fediverse so that we get the Facebook groups type functionality.

I am on a half dozen Facebook robot building groups (yes, the dalek in my avatar is one I built). I would much rather they moved to a different site so I don't get banned for 30 days for mentioning someone once made an actual musical of 'springtime for hitler' again.

If there was a Mastodon robot building interest group and prop builders were there, I would be there and so would most folk in the community. While there are people who only build daleks, most serious folk will build a dalek and then maybe R2 and then maybe a Robby or a B9.

There is a distinct community but it is fragmented across a dozen different forums and some (e.g Dewback Wing) seem to have gone. And none of them are really much good for structured discussion.

@ali This angle about addictive aspects being "baked in by design" is emerging as critical in understanding this digital scourge of our times, and something that very few people appear to consciously care about because they can't wean themselves off of the associated dopamine rush.

In that sense there is something very Darwinian about such predatory behavior by social networks on unsuspecting users with low self-awareness but historically that's how 'the carrot and the stick' has always worked.

@ali could a chunk of that be people creating accounts on one of the '"bigger" servers then moving to a self hosted or smaller server.

Are all severs counted in these numbers?

@ali

I really like this take, for a number of reasons. The least important is that the last line reminds me of Soylent Green.

But I digress.

I noticed a number of commentors using the phrase, "Twitter is shooting itself in the foot." Yes, and the users have made a great pastime of shooting each other in the feet.

I didn't come here from Twitter. I don't know much about the gestalt or the weltanschauung here, but I know what I like. I like here.

@ali I sailed away from Twitter last November. Don't have as much to now fight about but do find a wide range of very interesting comments, ideas, art, politics, etc.

That gives me the opportunity to make a half assed intelligent response.

More importantly it makes me think more in depth about the issues I am exposed to.

A fair wind and a following sea to my fellow Mastodonians.