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?

@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.)