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?
@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 😝
bsky: @daniloc.xyz
Ruben