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 @carnage4life threads and bluesky are single monolithic platforms. masto federated. so would likely depend on which masto server someone's posting on i'd guess as a starter...
also, purely anecdotally/for my own part, there's less of a culture of boosting/liking/trying to make things go viral for the algorithm. lack of apparent engagement may not signal lack of people actually reading posts/following links/etc.
@patrick_h_lauke So is the only alternative "number go DOWN" metrics? I'm not trying to be snarky, I'm trying to find a way to have both be possible: how can we keep our soul but still have a diverse community.
My concern is that your comment uses the "we don't want a number go up mentality" argument to hide the fact that our community is a mono culture.
"people are leaving mastodon, our daily actives are going down"
Same thing has been happening to Bluesky over the past year.
https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-user-growth
From some of the anecdotes I've seen, it sounds like at least part of this is the same reason people don't stick around here: not enough activity and/or diversity (you might know Bluesky is very US-centric).
@scottjenson But of course, the fediverse does have some unique challenges, such as the federated bits poking out too much, confusing people, and, well, random people enforcing unwritten, sometimes contradictory rules across different communities.
The only way I see out of that is to stop gatekeeping the fediverse, and focusing on communities. Anyone should be able to join the fediverse, just like anyone can go on the internet.
I don't care that Meta is part of the fediverse through Threads, we can all just block them and move on.
Or if Truth Social decided to turn federation back on. Them federating means nothing. We'll block them, and move on.
My two bits:
Calls for homogenity are pretty distasteful even on company platforms with detailed rules based on US legal and social agreements.
It's even more so in a multinational platform, where an impactful number of people are non-North Americans, or otherwise part of some "misunderstood minority".
Ofc there are some stuff that falls under "basic dignity", but in general it should be possible to live with different POVs without having to start flame wars.
Scott Jenson
Patrick H. Lauke
Stefan Bohacek
Juho Mäntysalo