So. Three folks I follow are echoing pretty much the same sentiment I've been trying to express and are spending less time here.
I'll preface with a reminder that you may very well feel my opinions are bunk. I am a successful YouTuber, after all, with all the privileges that entails.
But here's the brass tacks: it's harder for me to be here comfortably than it was on the birdsite. And to be honest, I think Mastodon's always gonna be this way.
Whenever I encounter problems, I am inevitably told I should try different instance. Whenever anybody has problems, people say "maybe you should move instances"
I do not know why so many people fail to grasp this, but we are experiencing mastodon between instances far more than we are on our own. I hardly ever look at the home tab for mas.to, I look at who I'm following on the Home feed.
That in-betweeny space is apparently impossible to moderate.
If a post of mine gets a boosted to a broader audience, I am subject to harassment. I'm not going to sugarcoat that, it's harassment.
Sure, of the various kinds of harassment I have not been subject to anything serious. But it is exhausting and personally insulting, with one person telling me in no uncertain terms that they don't believe my job should be a job.
This. Fucking. Sucks.
And who's accountable for taming that? Nobody! Because it's between instances.
So, I have been trying really hard to live within the space where nobody can reconcile whether they want Mastodon to be more popular or whether they wanted it to remain a bunch of small corners in personal sandboxes. But it's getting really hard some days, and because the stakeholders of this idea are so spread out and so disparate in their opinions, I'm not hopeful anything will get better in this regard.
Mastodon's whole existence feels tortured.
And as much as I would love to be a cheerleader for this idea, well firstly, I'm not sure people even want me to be a cheerleader! This feels like a place full of hipsters that don't want people to find their fun coffee shop.
But even if people wanted me to help spread the idea of mastodon, or Fedi more broadly, to be honest there are just far too many caveats for me to suggest my friends and colleagues come here.
I would hope you'd be concerned by that.
But at this point, it feels like that's what people want. There is no desire to make this platform more usable for people with larger audiences.
Christ, just the fact that notifications aren't stacked makes using this really hard as someone with a sizable following.
If the culture is that anti-growth, if it's to remain that fractured and rudderless, I don't see a fun future here.
Fin
@brunoph here's the thing I really don't get. I never, ever, used Twitter with the recommended feed or whatever. I only looked at the people I was following. That feed was chronological, and they never took it away.
The extent to which an algorithm shaped what I was seeing was basically the occasional ad and whatever the heck was on trending. I really don't get why so many people fixate on the algorithm
@brunoph I only used Twitter by looking at people I followed, and I would find new people to follow by whatever they retweeted.
So like, the most toxic and weird things I dealt with on Twitter were when my tweets would get retweeted and become viral. But they had really good systems to make sure I didn't have to see most of the drivel that was directed at me.
That's what's missing here
@TechConnectify I think that one of the useful things here is that it should still be possible for someone to create instance and/or client software which does do filtering of low quality responses for people with that problem.
No one has written such software yet, and my guess is that such an instance would have to be commercial software or services, but nothing prevents it from fitting into the network.
Such an instance would have to be careful about how it handles such commercial behavior to not end up shitlisted, but my guess is that most people worth listening to won't have a problem.
Or am I misunderstanding the problem still?
@brunoph @TechConnectify In Friendica you have chronological feeds and I, for one, I chose to ONLY see the posts that MY FRIENDS make. Period. Not even the posts my friends interact with. This is how I keep it clean. If you want, give it a try via our instance at social.trom.tf - maybe out of curiosity.
In Friendica you can block or ignore anyone, make your posts only visible to your Friends, and so forth. Maybe a lot more control over your content. Take a few minutes to setup your account and maybe you do not have to worry ever again.
@TechConnectify yes, that's how I used it too, however, the people you follow might be using the recommended feed, which would be feeding into your chronological feed through retweets.
This is similar to how ad networks build profiles based on proximity rather than direct tracking (someone in your wifi network searched for something, thus they show you an ad for a similar thing, etc)
Technology Connections
Bruno Philipe
Bersl
Tio