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
@VATVSLPR I found this issue ages ago. I want people to sit with it. Because if we want this idea to succeed, like it or not it needs cheerleaders like myself. In fact, it needs many more cheerleaders than just myself.
And I am not going to cheerlead for it in its current state.
And if people tell me I'm not welcome here, (which some have!)... all I can say is have a nice day.
@TechConnectify Honestly, I don't think it's true that it needs big users like yourself to "succeed". The fediverse has been around for over a decade now; it's already successful (in that it has a consistent userbase of people who find it useful) and it's not going away any time soon.
I'd say the biggest thing the fediverse needs to make progress on now is tackling issues with racism and other problems faced by minorities (focusing on diversity). Adding large numbers of users or "cheerleaders" isn't going to help with that in and of itself. And no offense to you, but as far as I'm aware, you're not one of those affected minority groups and don't appear to be particularly outspoken on those issues, either.
🦇
@diligentcircle It's all about what you mean by success. I got flak for saying LaserDisc was a flop - but compared to the goals its inventors had for it, it absolutely was.
My main hangup has been "what is success?" and the simple fact that everybody seems to have different answers goes a long way to explaining why this place feels so disjointed to me.
To your second paragraph: yes! I agree. But hostility towards popular people is also pretty icky, no?
@diligentcircle Like, I prefaced this thread by saying you're welcome to tell me to pound sand - I've "made it" as it were and I don't strictly /need/ anything form the Fediverse.
But when (and apologies if you saw this already) people tell me to my face that my job shouldn't be a job or that I'm evil for using YouTube to make a living, I absolutely won't call that equivalent to racism or queerphobia but it's still abjectly shitty behavior we should not want.
@diligentcircle I hope we can agree at least on that point. My central critique right now is that assholery has little to no consequences on this platform - and the common refrain of "use blocklists!" or "Move instances!" is pretty close to victim blaming. Or at least "you're doing it wrong/works on my machine"
That culture is pervasive here and, imo, needs to die regardless of whether I stay here or not.
@TechConnectify As you say, it's not equivalent, and the the thing is, the troubles you experience are because of your privilege in success which makes people interested in you. So while I sympathize with your predicament, I think it's a very, very small issue in comparison to more systemic issues connected to marginalized status.
The point I'm trying to make is, regardless of how successful you are as a celebrity, you're just one user, and you don't contribute to keeping the fediverse alive any more than any other one user.
As for the refrain to use blocklists and move instances, I wholeheartedly agree on the former point (blocklists should never be relied on, and this is actually one of the reasons I dislike Twitter). As for the latter point, while I agree that the user experience is not good, that's not solely a cultural issue per se; it's also a technical issue. You, for example, are not on a singular platform called "Mastodon", you're specifically on mas.to, which is accountable only to the person who runs mas.to. There are things that can be done to minimize the damage; I've said before, for example, that the official source used by the Mastodon developers to recommend instances to people should have much stricter requirements as far as what it will list. But if, for example, you join the fascist instance Gab, you will encounter rampant fascist and otherwise rhetoric everywhere, and the only way to deal with that is to move instances, because Gab is literally hosted by fascists.
This, of course, runs on a continuum. Your instance, for example, is not a fascist instance, but it's known to be overly lax in its moderation approach (which is why it's restricted on the instance I'm on). There's no systemic solution where, for example, the Mastodon project can fix mas.to; the best that can be done is for mas.to to no longer be recommend it to new people, but regardless, if you want to get away from it, you will likely have to leave it for another instance (unless mas.to's admins specifically decide to improve things on that instance).
Technology Connections
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