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!

As this conversation is spiraling a bit I want to make a few things clear:
1. I'd like Mastodon to be MORE inclusive and bring in more voices
2. Some people don't seem to want that
3. This is core problem to solve: How do we let more in, but not "pollute" your feed?
4. The solution is NOT "gatekeeping", revelling in the fact that AI journalists aren't welcome
5. This is the same reason we lost "Black Twitter" when it came over in 2022

Yes, a lot of you don't want AI posts in your feed (or pick any other topic) but the solution isn't to keep "AI People" from joining Mastodon, any more than it is keeping marginalized communities off of Mastodon.

@scottjenson Which part of "federated" has your precious Apple-trained and AI-fawning mind not been able to wrap around? Go ahead and build a community of prompt fondlers. You can then all sit around and fondle prompts in your timelines. It'll be great. And the rest of this federated mess IS TOTALLY WITHIN THEIR RIGHTS to block your prompt fondling instance. Like we block nazi instances. And Trump instances. And whatever-the-fuck-else instances we don't want nothing to do with. It's FEDERATED. You not getting that in your head is your fault alone. 🤷
@phf @scottjenson EXACTLY THIS.