Is #mastodon becoming an echo chamber? This post from @carnage4life has me questioning our community. The Mastodon team is finally getting some traction, the product improvements are increasing, The #UX is improving, yet people posting on multiple platforms are making comments like this. It's confusing.

I *know* people here don't want this to be a classic social media-clone but we'd *like* journalists to be here right? They aren't coming with examples like this!

@scottjenson so, I find this discussion disappointing for a few reasons.

The biggest one is this: all three platforms that @carnage4life calls out are connected via ActivityPub. They are on one inter-network.

In theory, he should not need three different accounts, with three different follower groups. He should have one account, and all 103k followers (minus duplicates!) could be part of the same conversation, on whatever server platform they use.

In practice, few people do this today.

@scottjenson

As technologists we need to do more to smooth those junctures and make them less of a barrier. I hope in a few years when @carnage4life looks at his network, it feels more integrated and less separated.

@scottjenson @carnage4life on the topic of AI, I find the abusive conversations on the Fediverse pretty dispiriting. People I like and respect have worked themselves into the position that use of AI is an inexcusable sin, and that anyone who uses AI merits harassment and abuse. Given that 85% of developers use or plan to use AI (Stack Overflow poll), that means a huge number of tech people getting brigaded by our anti-AI squad.

@scottjenson @carnage4life I've tried to mitigate that a bit by sharing my own experience with AI as a development tool. I know there are other people on the Fediverse who talk about how and when they use AI, with or without misgivings.

https://cosocial.ca/@evan/116206693774408287

Evan Prodromou (@[email protected])

I use Claude and Thaura for search in my daily life. I use Claude as a rubber duck for coding. I also let it review my code for errors or make recommendations. On occasion, I'll let CoPilot or Claude add a few lines of code directly. I don't "vibe code". I enjoy both uses. I don't feel guilty about either.

CoSocial

@scottjenson @carnage4life I've been privately sharing this link to a post by @MozillaAI , an Open Source non-profit announcing an Open Source AI project to make development with AI safer, more efficient, and less costly. They got brigaded in a pretty threatening way, and people I know and respect jumped in to join the dogpile.

https://mastodon.social/@MozillaAI/116279201448628866

@evan Fwiw, examples like that are one of the main reasons why I'm pretty quiet on this platform. I love the idea of ambiently sharing things with friends and peers, but I'm just not ready to deal with something like that.
@wlach I'm sorry to hear that.
@evan Thanks for being a voice of reason in these discussions all the same. I have some hope that we'll be able to talk about these things in a more reasonable way a few years out