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

@TechConnectify
Our best efforts right now are essentially just trying to reserve hashtags for admins to try and collaborate in identifying bad actors and mass harassment. It's a slow process and even when we identify good processes it takes a while for it to enter common use.

I'm kinda used to things being this way, I grew up before professional moderation of internet spaces was a thing. I think you are right to want these sort of features. (cont)