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 yeah I had a pretty kneejerk reaction when I saw that comparison because it read like it was borderline racist to me.
I think that the fediverse should absolutely be better to minorities, especially Black communities, because we have had a pretty terrible track record in that regard. at the same time, a lot of people on here (and bluesky too!) are very tech-skeptic so of course posts about AI would be met with a negative response. I think there's some merit in trying to balance out supporting different and unique cultures but also understanding which topics might be considered taboo on here.
and then again, a lot of people have become very militant about the things that they don't like and should be a lot more accepting instead of immediately bringing out the pitchforks! I'll admit that I'm guilty of that too. everything is a huge delicate balance that I feel might be a good conversation if AI wasn't involved.
I'm just rambling at this point though
@eblu thanks for that thoughtful response.
What makes this such a complex topic is that people can think whatever they want! Hate AI? Fine! I'm not against anyone having those opinions.
My point was more 'why do we have to chase them away?'. I'm not endorsing AI by the way, I'm just using them as an example.
If we feel justified chasing AI bros away, we can chase others away. That doesn't feel like a good long term plan.
@rey @scottjenson Scott just wants to gloss over why anyone has ethical issues with AI, and frame this as being mean to people.
I think AI is bad and people promoting it are willfully blind and causing real harm to society.
The reasons matter, stop trying to just tone-police your way through these very real concerns.
> Scott just wants to gloss over why anyone has ethical issues with AI
I have been reading all of this thread I can. I do not draw that conclusion.
@scottjenson I'll suggest that you reflect on what the implications of including (2) in the list are when you've made it very clear that you see "inclusiveness" as demanding that people are more tolerant of AI.
Especially by placing (2) above any actual apology for your earlier comparison this reads very strongly as your doubling down on the claim that Mastodon being "inclusive" should necessarily put exploitative and extractive tech products over the marginalized people hurt by those products.
@scottjenson Black people being harassed off of fedi was not caused by echo chambers. I'm really confused by the comparison.
You should also be aware that a lot of times, "echo chamber" is used as a criticism of *any moderation at all*, including the kind that would make the place safer for black people...
Thanks for this.
To engage with your original point: I'm struck by a contrast, and I have some curiosity about it.
When I look at @carnage4life's original post on its own, my reaction is something like
"oh, interesting to have the 3-way comparison from someone experiencing all 3 places firsthand", and then "yeah that makes sense".
I'm not surprised that "tech topics" were "getting the most replies and likes" here, because there are loads of techie people here. Many of @carnage4life's followers on Fedi probably clicked "follow" primarily for the tech commentary in the first place.
I was a little surprised to see the Fedi described as "lukewarm to politics", because I follow a fair number of people giving political analysis - but I realise the post was a kind of holistic impression, not a comment on every single person here.
I'm also not surprised that someone posting similarly on all three might have fewer followers here than on Bluesky or Threads, as an absolute number, because iirc Fedi has fewer people _overall_ than the other two. But 18k is still a chonky number!
So when you say "has me questioning our community" and that journalists "aren't coming with examples like this"... I'm like oh, that's very different from how I parsed the same info!
What is it about the original description that, for you, means journalists wouldn't come?
@unchartedworlds Thanks for that thoughtful reply. It was a bit of a knee jerk reaction to be honest. I've been talking to LOTS of folks, trying to figure out how to get more people to join the Fediverse and journalists are fairly reluctant to join. If you follow some of the replies to my post there is a healthy "yeah, and we don't WANT you!" feeling.
I'm all for people not wanting to have journalists here but there is a surprising vitriol to let them in at all. I keep hearing over (and over (AND OVER)) that anyone can spin up a server but that's completely missing the point. If people don't want you here, having your own server accomplishes nothing.
My point isn't that anyone should want anything. I'm just surprised people don't want to, you know, let journalists at least TRY to do something here?
My BIG mistake was picking someone in AI, that just set everyone off on the wrong path. I did not want to "push" AI on anyone.
RE: https://social.growyourown.services/@FediFollows/116274521264107379
Besides, there's no attitude against journalists here. There may be against PR shills, but some of my earliest follows from October 2022 are active and doing well. Fedi isn't their exclusive channel, but for many it is the insurance strategy. Hat tip to @molly0xfff on documenting that path and @mike and all of @Flipboard on holding the flag high. The journalists are too many to list here but @FediFollows has a "starter pack" for any niche.
@jdp23 @scottjenson @unchartedworlds
There are also lots, lots more news accounts listed on my website at https://fedi.directory/news-media/
For anyone unfamiliar with the site, you can follow a listed account by copy-pasting its Fediverse address into the search box in Mastodon etc. This will bring up its profile on your server, where you can click follow.
"there's no attitude against journalists here"
My gut reaction here is: But what about journalists (and others) telling us that they don't feel welcome?
I guess I'd maybe have to see specific cases that you have in mind when you talk about "shilling".
I do know about a few prominent journalist-type accounts that have left due to mansplaining and similar kind of harassment. (And let's also remember the racism and gaslighting towards Black people, but that's a whole another topic.)
I know I am relying on anecdotes, but my impression is that anyone who is seen as "too mainstream" and/or relies on social media for income is very much not welcome here.
1) anyone can feel not welcome, whether there's a widely adopted attitude or not
2) fedi HOA can be quite unwelcoming to anyone (as black people can attest), so journalists are not special
3) that's powered by very specific *Mastodon* features, such as lack of reply policies and followers-only replies
The claim was specific to culture and journalists.
@stefan @scottjenson
> I'm all for people not wanting to have journalists here
I do not get it. What is the problem with journalists?
Where is "here" in this context? Fediverse? Mastodon? Social.coop?
Confused, am I
@tael Respectfully, we're looking at very different feeds. I assume you've heard of the reply guys getting in peoples mentions telling people off for not doing alt text, or content warnings? THAT is why good people are bouncing and that is exactly why it *is* an echo chamber. If you don't conform to these rules, instead of, you know, just not following them, or blocking them, or hell, defederating their server (all of which I would be fine with) people feel so privileged that they get in these new comers face and tell them "you're doing it wrong".
We should be encouraging communities that we don't agree with. This isn't "the nazi bar" story. There ISNT a single bar! It's the "you can't come into MY bar" story. That's what federation was built for. Why is that so hard for people to live with?
@scottjenson I don't think you're going to be persuaded away from this view. However, the reply guys exposing you to a paradigm different from your own, holding you to expectations you're unfamiliar with, are exactly what makes it not an echo chamber. If nobody ever bothered you or came into your notifs to disagree with you, you'd be in an echo chamber. Which it seems is what you're used to.
In most social media, there might be Nazis and communists on the same website. The algorithm constructs separate "bars" for them by simply not showing them each others' posts, heavily auto-moderating what language you can use in your posts, and recommending you people to follow that you like to interact with because you agree with them.
That is what builds social media platform retention. Mastodon has none of that. Instead, you defederate the Nazi bar and only talk to the bars that don't allow Nazis. Most people don't "get" that because it's always been done for them. And that's OK.
@scottjenson You're looking at a tidal wave of criticism crashing into you and calling it an echo chamber. The echo chamber is when you are never exposed to exactly that. In an echo chamber, you don't realize you're in one; the only viewpoints you're hearing are your own.
The argument we're having isn't over whether people leave because they get criticized too much. That's obviously a real phenomenon. It's over whether that constitutes an "echo chamber." Those people leave because they are used to echo chambers.
> That isn't my priority,
Why is that? I would like you to be comfortable, that is what builds diverse communities: tolerance and respect.
@scottjenson
Not using AT's and CW's is “using it wrong”, if you know what those are for.
Newcomers don't have that knowledge and it's not always a part of the written rules, as if every newcomer had read them.
I'm kind of baffled that you, as an advisor on Mastodon's product strategy, are fazed by people correcting this, instead of advocating on how to alleviate that.
In fact, here's some free ideas that could decrease this friction:
1. Include explanation of *what signal missing alt text sends* in UI warning about missing alt text. "Many people can't access this post without alt text. Posting without alt text signals a lack of respect to those communities. Use #/alt4me to ask for help with alt text." This would decrease posts which lack alt text out of ignorance, and fit those who persist it explains ahead of time why they get people reminding them about the issue.
2. (More technically challenging) For posts without alt text, maintain a counter per-user and display (in the alt text slot) "this is this user's Nth post without alt text" capping out at 1000 or something. Make sure to subtract when alt text gets edited in. This helps those who would reply with a reminder understand whether it's someone new who just doesn't know/understand, or whether it's someone who doesn't care. For those who don't care, you'd see much less falloff.
Harder to do similar with CW as it's not possible to know automatically when one was warranted. Then again I've very rarely seen direct CW-nagging.
By the way, do you know who I *do* see on the fediverse? Blind users and people dealing with various traumas. If you had a button that would instantly silence CW and alt-text nagging, guess who would leave? I half-understand that @scottjenson is unconsciously trolling at this point, fixed in his opinions and unwilling to listen to any of the criticism here so he's trying to form arguments that defend his own ego, but every change-to-others'-social-behaviors that he's asking for here is one that would directly make some portion of fedi users less comfortable, and he hasn't been willing to face the racism issue head-on, which is almost certainly a *much* bigger reason for leaving than anything he's mentioned.
The counter-point about echo chambers is spot-on here.
@tiotasram @dzwiedziu @scottjenson @tael
An image analyzing LLM that provides alt-text would be imminently useful all across the internet.
Is #LLM still bad when its used for #disability and #assistivetechnology?
@crankylinuxuser
An LLM can't analyse an image by itself.
This is computer vision and neural networks.
LLM's might be then used then to rewrite the CV/NN output.
@dzwiedziu @tiotasram @scottjenson @tael
Yes, it can.
If you're using SafeTensors, the model can absolutely include the tensors required for image analysis. The output gets converted to visual tokens in the language space. Basically the image analyzer tensors are an 'expert' in a MoE like system.
If you're using gguf with llama, then the mmproj- files are the separated visual tensors. This allows using bf16 image with a heavily reduced LLM, like a int4 model.
I'm also still learning a ton of this on the fly, by running and administering LLM operations on my network. As a systems engineer, this is the state of the art, and I absolutely will learn to run it for myself and any company I end up at.
@crankylinuxuser @dzwiedziu @scottjenson @tael
First: such systems do exist. Many Blind users use them regularly. They are quite sophisticated, but current architectures have inherent limits including inescapable biases and predictable patterns of failure.
There's a fine line here: I'm not opposed to use by Blind users for their own purposes, even if I'll sometimes feel warranted to warn about the shortcomings that the boosters always minimize. They've got enough to deal with in this world and it's absolutely not my place to criticize their choices on any grounds (I've seen Blind users on here who do have ethical objections they raise with other Blind users, but that's not my conversation to jump into).
But I am opposed to their use by those who can write alt text themselves: you're effectively offloading the systemic risks into the disabled people you're ostensibly trying to serve, without giving them a say in the matter and often without any warning.
Some would say: isn't some alt text better than none even if it's poor quality?
The answer is: no it's not. Imagine the following scenario: user posts a picture of a group of Black people at a concert. Comments "Having fun at the club." They use AI captions and they were too tired to double-check this time. AI-generated caption reads "A group of gorillas dancing in a club." (Mis-labeling Black people as gorillas actually happened with an image-labeling system at one point already, so this is absolutely possible). Now a blind user who can only read the caption thinks this is a joke. They comment in reply "Haha how did they train those gorillas to dance?"
So your choice to offload your alt text work to an AI ends up creating a racist incident *and* it makes the Blind user seem like a completely aggressive and unapologetic racist, since sighted users mostly won't see the alt text. Because we know ahead of time that the AI will make exactly these lines of mistakes (and that we can't possibly be vigilant enough to catch them all), it's irresponsible to use it in this way, on top of all the orthogonal reasons that it's ethically wrong to use most modern LLM systems.
@crankylinuxuser @tiotasram @dzwiedziu @scottjenson @tael
Listing things not in an image https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/116373375986994242
Speculating about things not in an image https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/116373334109155559 in the context of a ridiculously verbose description.
Generated by a machine that one cannot have a discussion with about fidelity because there is no mind or embodied sense of reality there but nonetheless deploys the first person. Seems like a bad idea
@urlyman
That is a chainsaw of edge cases.
@dzwiedziu @crankylinuxuser @tiotasram @scottjenson @tael
A Texas Chainsaw Massacre, perhaps
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/openais-massive-stargate-data-center-canceled-as-firm-cant-reach-terms-with-oracle-operator-struggles-with-reliability-issues-meta-said-to-be-interested-in-snatching-excess-capacity
@dzwiedziu @crankylinuxuser @tiotasram @scottjenson @tael
In an ecosystem of delusion https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/115711753617925673
@urlyman
Otherwise known as “Occam's Razor” :P
@scottjenson JESUS "reply guys" doesn't mean "folks asking for alt text and content warnings" which are, you may not be aware, accessibility features that let disabled people interact with mastodon. Where's "inclusivity" in that?
Bro. Bro. Bro, quit your job, people below you must be losing their hair cleaning up after you here.
@scottjenson Inclusivity:
Include: people who like nazis or are okay with nazis so we can talk about it
Exclude: people who wanna interact with posts via accessibility features.
You're amazing.
Excellent set of points. Why am I reading anything by someone who is pro AI and against accessibility?
@scottjenson
Mastodon is more like democracy should be: Everyone is allowed to express ones opinion AND everyone will hear and needs to tolerate an opinion one does not like AND everyone has the right to speak out against others opinions. But even here it would be nice if people would react less aggressive against opinions etc they do not like. (But usually the discussions I witness here are mostly civilized.🤩)
@Paraendroid @tael @scottjenson
Yes, this.
Not telling people what they think, by reading a 200 character toot, is a start, methinks
Ask them for clarification - it is easy andcan be done respectfully
Scott Jenson
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