I don't want to have a fight on the internet.
I know that's rich, coming from me, if you have even a little backstory—
such backstory being I parlayed a strange hobby beefing with rich guys into a job at a unicorn as the last cycle heated up
—but I'm almost 40 years old, man.
I don't have the energy to carry all this beef in my heart. I survived the absolute rollercoaster terror of 2020.
I want a nice time talking to reasonable people about interesting things. That is my social desire.
And Mastodon has a serious social illness that cannot be ignored.
Just a terrible apathy for collaboration. A penchant for sealioning at best, straight up default hostility at worst
So I'm going on record right now: I believe this problem will be Mastodon's dead end.
It suffocates culture. You know my deepest conviction is that technology is not enough.
It's a crime because Mastodon is a beautiful thing.
A miracle, some ways, BOTH technological and social. The successful federation, the macro-moderation it enables, the thriving volume of instances.
The fact that as a truly evil plutocrat bought a commons and then began deplatforming its journalists, Mastodon could provide a truly workable alternative.
Extraordinary.
BUT: Mastodon is its own worst enemy.
Its querulous, joyless norms will set a ceiling on its impact.
Maybe they can fix it?
A) Mastodon is okay for a certain kind of person as-is, and these confessions about not wanting to change it are always so telling
B) This strain of magical thinking, that unlike every other communication network, Mastodon or Fediverse technology is somehow immune to Metcalfe's law, is weirdly super common
Actually, yes, it does matter if people adopt this stuff, because people will go where their friends and most valued sources of information actually post
@[email protected] "will set a ceiling on its impact."? Mastodon is OK as it is. No need to grow, why should it? #DegrowthEverything
@danilo I don’t think you can fix a network’s culture, sadly. The interesting question is whether you can extend the protocol (and/or fix the UX) to improve the social affordances and then boot up a new community/network, using the news affordances to *help* avoid the worst behaviors as the network grows+matures.
(That said, I worry that a lot of the problems aren’t Masto-specific; Bluesky also has a lot of similar, terrible behavior, as did Twitter. May be an artifact of text-first culture.)
@luis_in_brief I shall look forward to that, and meanwhile, I’ll just add that I think your scenario is the most likely one for the optimistic case
There's just enough power in the successful federation to make it plausible to me
Attached: 1 image inspired by recent events i'm finally reading Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures by André Brock Jr. and it is exposing me to a vast number of ways to consider relations to technology and in particular how Black life has always been vivid throughout recent technologies. i found chapter 2's case study of the Blackbird web browser incredibly evocative for me personally and particularly relevant to discussions of free software
@danilo I feel you... It's a vibe.
Maybe mastodon should disinvest from front-end decisions, moving it to a collection of instances and focusing on platform stuff?
It's kinda anodyne that we have platform that claims to be for instances, but build for a platonic instance instead of the actual ones that have needs.
@danilo not to be super weird with family comparisons
But somehow I feel like mastodon is the couple that wanted to have kids, just not *these* kids.
And we are the kids.
@danilo well that was freaky.
But instances don't have any agency. None of the updates are passed thru instances. They're just defined on closed doors and provided, methinks.
It's a little bit of neglect.
@nonlinear I think that metaphor is pretty much it, yeah
Very much a dog who caught the car and doesn't know what to do with it
@danilo it would be nice an instance coop, prioritizing demands and finding help.
But I'm *shedding* projects, not finding new ones.
@jenniferplusplus I think that's right idea, and the only real future for the underlying technology
The challenge of course is that ‘Mastodon' by its scale exerts enormous gravity on the larger ecosystem, if only because it's the simplest way for most people to access it
So realizing the ideal you describe means seriously potent alternative onramps. Maybe we'll see those!
@danilo I find it fascinating to read about other peoples experiences about a suffocating culture on Mastodon, because my experience is the opposite. So far at least 😏
Since there are no algorithm's that make choices for you here, our experience is really a product of who we follow and interact with. In other words, the fediverse is not one network or culture, but thousands of loosely connected ones.
Our experiences here are much more dependent on which part of the world you come from and the existing culture of your social graph, and much less dependent on the software you use.
I think this is kind of beautiful, because it gives us more agency to adjust what we see in our feed and who to follow, mute or block.
There is no algorithm that know whats pushing your buttons, and constantly tries to put the most enraging content in front of you.
On the fediverse, we have to do that ourselfs 😝
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